Art 10

This is Art ten, and we're struggling with the material and with the education. And our struggle is to bring about form, but not a form in the mind. The difficulty with our background, our whole culture, our entire educational system. The history within which it is embedded, and the projected beliefs that we have psychologically Is that mental forms are the arbiters of the real, and this is not true. There are many kinds of forms, and there are at least three times as many forms in reality as there are in the mind, and the mind's forms are quite enormous in their array, but are dwarfed by the actuality that is available. It's as if someone who has only listened to Western music of the last 500 years and enjoys the enormous variety, tradition and range and says, we are so proud of the fact that from the dances of Praetorius, we can emerge to the dances of Stravinsky. And what a tremendous development of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and all of it in between. And this is all true. But that entire tradition is the development of just two arrangements, two scales of music, and 99% of it is the octave, the eight note scale of classical tradition, and about 1% the 12 note serial scale of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And yet we know consciously that there are available in reality an infinite number of musical scales. You could not only have 500 years of musical development of scales without end, but you could have development within scales without end, without end, so that the potential cosmic jewel of expressiveness contains an unlimited number of scales, each one of which is filled with whole great traditions of music. And so to be overwhelmingly arrogant, about 500 years of one scale plus is the condition that we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century in terms of human understanding, in terms of a conscious development of ourselves. Everything that has gone before us is largely Neolithic. It's largely village stuff, and the scale of our eventual geography is so huge that even the word geography will be forgotten. When you're on the moon, it's called Selenography, and there are star systems where one can't even refer to things that have Latin names or Greek names, so that we have before us from here on out, an increasing sense of conscious development. And one of the most difficult things is to remember our past in a way which is real. To remember how we came to this tremendous transform and to carry with us always that embryonic umbilical of the phases that made us real in a humane way, so that that carries forward as a common denominator everywhere that we differentially go and become. In 1939, a very difficult year for Stravinsky. He lectured at Harvard University, and we're using his six lectures, The Poetics of Music in the form of six lessons. And lesson three, the composition of music begins. And you have to understand that in 1939, Stravinsky was diagnosed as having active tuberculosis. He lost his oldest daughter to death by tuberculosis. He lost his wife to death by tuberculosis. His mother died. He was put in a sanitarium for six months, and the tubercular phantom that had haunted his family seemed that it was coming exactly at the same time as the world was crumbling into the Second World War. So when he says, we are living at a time when the status of man is undergoing profound upheavals, he means it. He means to say, I know what I'm saying to you, and I need to say this to you. A Russian who had fled to France, who is now about to flee to the United States, was speaking to an American audience who were not interested in participating in the European war, but were interested in participating in the European scene. And this curious charade struck someone like Stravinsky as being absolutely crazy. You're interested in being cultured in a European mode, and you don't understand that our culture has come to an apocalyptic hurricane of violence through processes which we understand and can do nothing about, and you can do something about, but will not take a moment to understand. And so his Harvard audience of 1939 was a very peculiar audience for him. He went on to say, almost as he was in his late 50s. Almost as if speaking to children, the naive, non-participatory children who like. The deserts and didn't want to understand the travail of the chefs who turned this out. He said to them, modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values. And his sense of proportions. Now a valuation is always a calibration. Without a calibration, one cannot have an ability to have valuation. And without an ability to have a calibration which is amendable, you cannot recalibrate, and the sense of proportions is not to see things as they are simply, but to understand that they are composite. And in fact, that that compositional structure of everything is universal. Everything is a proportion. Water is H2O. If it's h two, two zero, then you have deuterium. You can't make a hydrogen bomb with H2O, but you can with deuterium. There's even a heavier hydrogen tritium, which will mix in such precarious ways that it wasn't until late in the 20th century that it was mastered. The handling. So something as simple as water becomes enormously complex in its proportion, conscious understanding, and its re-evalute ability to be used not just in nature but in a conscious, new, natural way. In the early 19th century, when Stravinsky was born. The century began with a great enthusiasm for what was then practiced as natural history, the enjoyment of nature, of going out into nature and finding out about like a Thoreau. How the acorns become the oak. And the oak leaves have the signature of the different varieties of the oak. And natural history had its roots in the 18th century, in the 1700s, and in the 1700s, the discovery of a natural history was the foundation of an enlightenment science. That man could go back to nature in such a way that he could calibrate nature. Before there was a Thoreau, there was a Buffon. And in the French Enlightenment, count de Buffon spent enormous sums of money and time an entire lifetime to make a huge Tomed catalogue of all the varieties of botanical and living things, and this kind of natural history of the 18th century became the pride of the personal natural history of the 19th century, from Buffon to Thoreau. But in the 20th century, there was a radical penetration through the dimensional screen, upon which the 18th and 19th century had projected its mentality, and that screen tore in the 20th century. Just to follow through Buffon in the Enlightenment and Thoreau in the romantic era. In the 20th century, the Dada surrealist natural historian was Max Ernst, who in 1925. Kept inside by torrential rains in southern France, looked at the floorboards of his Marseilles hotel room and saw in the wood grains of the floorboards incredible fantasies and beings, and took a sheet of paper, placed it on the floorboards, and began making rubbings, and then from the rubbings began making creatures come out. And out of this came the whole development of a technique called frottage, not collage, but Frottage and Ernst said, I date from August 1925, the emergence of a new kind of natural history, the opening of the atomic structure of what we considered real into To its differentially infinite possible parts. Stravinsky goes on to say the failure to understand essential realities is extremely serious. It leads us infallibly to the violation of the fundamental laws of human equilibrium. And then he goes on to speak about music. One hearing Stravinsky in a cultivated European way from these 1939 words, you hear very clearly the kind of quality of intellectual, truthful, popular envisioning that came from Schiller. Some 200 years before, 150 years before Schiller, who had been born in 1759. He died in 1805. He was just in his early 40s. Schiller in 1795, about 145 years before the remarks by Stravinsky that I gave you began remarks that have been world famous ever since, in a publication called Naive and Sentimental Poetry. He wrote in a little publication called The Hours de Hernan that he and Goethe were working on together. There are moments in our lives. When we dedicate a kind of love and tender respect to nature. In plants, animals, minerals and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children. In the customs of country folk and in the primitive world. Not because it gratifies our senses. Not because it satisfies our understanding of taste. The very opposite can occur in both instances. Rather simply because it is nature. Every person of a finer caste who is not totally lacking in feeling. Experiences this when he wanders into the open air and. When he stays in the country or lingers before monuments of ancient times. In short, whenever he is surprised in the midst of artificial circumstances and situations by the sight of simple nature. Out of this, within a few pages, Schiller sobers radically to say that nature considered in this wise, is for us nothing but the voluntary presence, the subsistence of things on their own, their existence, and according to their immutable laws. And a page later goes even deeper. Turns. This Archimedean screw of insight 1795 is one of the world's great documents. Revolutionary documents. Those natural things the plants, the animals, the minerals, the children, the landscapes, they are what we were. They are what we should be again become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature. They are therefore not only the representation of our lost childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us, but they fill us with a certain melancholy. But they are also representations of our highest fulfillment in the ideal. Thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness. And a page or two later. Turning the screw of insight, finally to a competitive level. This is a. 206 years ago. We are touched not because we look down upon the child from the height. Of our strength and perfection, but rather because we look upward from the limitation of our condition, which is inseparable from the Termination, which we have attained to the unlimited determinacy. And he goes on to say that we face a crisis in civilization, for we have become very good at refining the valuation and calibration of mental ideas so powerful and so refined that we don't see that we are caged, and we feel a great nostalgia for the open freedom of the child, for the simple quality of the animals, for the truthful voracity of the minerals. And we don't know why. Our ideas keep trying more and more to refine Themselves in their mesh to strengthen their structure, and we do not understand that we only weave tighter and make stronger the prison within which we have placed ourselves. This volume was a forerunner to the aesthetic letters on the on the aesthetic education of man and in them. Finally, in the third letter, Scheler writing his heart out, realizing that this would be the one of the few times left to him to express what he needed to have said. Says nature deals no better with man than with the rest of her works. She acts for him as long as he is yet incapable of acting for himself as a free intelligence. But what makes him man is precisely this. That he does not stop short at what nature herself made of him, but has the power of retracing by means of reason, the steps she took on his behalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of elevating physical necessity into moral necessity. So far, so good. Revolutionary. And yet. A poignant quality emerges in the fourth letter about a page in where he's talking about how man taking charge of himself has to now go back and retrace nature, recalibrate nature to include his new capacities that have come into play. And yet something haunting, something daunting, emerges suddenly, like a storm on the horizon. The storm is that it doesn't have just to do with himself. It has to do with a massive, enormous aggregate of people called the state. He writes. But just because the state is to be an organization formed by itself and for itself, it can only become a reality, inasmuch as its parts have been tuned up to the idea of the whole. Because the state which serves to represent that ideal and objective humanity which exists in the heart of each of its citizens, it will have to observe towards those citizens the same relationship as each has to himself, and will be able to honour their subjective humanity, only to the extent that this has been ennobled in the direction of objective humanity. Once man is inwardly at one with himself, he will be able to preserve his individuality, however much he may universalize his conduct, and the state will be merely the interpreter of his own finer instinct, a clearer formulation of his own sense of what is right. If, on the other hand, in the character of a whole people subjective man sets his face against objective man with such vehemence of contradiction that the victory of the latter can only be ensured by the suppression of the former. Then the state, too, will have to adopt towards its citizens the solemn rigour of the law, and ruthlessly trample under foot such powerfully seditious individualism in order not to fall victim to do it. And so a great problem was enunciated with enormous clear patience at a time when this particular understanding entered into music in such a powerful way as and so little recognized and so forgotten as to almost beggar the imagination to ask why, for 200 years, intellectual curricula have not brought such a basic, fundamental lesson out. Even on ABC level. You can go to university for decades and never hear of it. The musical composer of the time of Schiller and Goethe, who really understood this was Beethoven. And even as a young man, even in his early 30s, age 3031, Beethoven was already Beethoven, enormously capable but not yet exfoliated to the fullness of the tragic Beethoven that we have come to know the heroic Titanic Beethoven. And yet the seed had already budded and blossomed. And it was, instead of the beautiful, luscious late hybrid roses, it was the first cultivated rose, quite different from the wild rose with just five petals. Already this early Beethoven rose had many petals and it is a composition called The Creatures of Prometheus. This is the only complete recording and it was made five years ago. The creatures of Prometheus. Done about this time. Done in 1801. And in it, Prometheus makes two creatures. He makes a man and he makes a woman. But the man and woman that Prometheus has made are completely mechanical. They are unfeeling. They are indifferent. And though they are beautiful, they have a blank expression. They are a tabula rasa. They have no ability to remember they have no experience. Cushion and Prometheus is astounded that his creation has no ability to be lovely, to be beautiful, to be, to have depth. And so the first eight parts of a 16 part ballet is Beethoven's only ballet. Not really just a ballet. It was a combination of the 18th century oratorio as developed by Bach and Handel, and brought to fruition in Haydn. It was the oratorio and the ballet, and also elements that came later into development in Wagner. The creatures of Prometheus by Beethoven, is the first cultivated plant that becomes the Wagnerian garden of a massive new art form that combines all the aspects of poetry singing, dance, music, everything together. And yet in the hands of Beethoven, it is a radically different thing. It is not Wagnerian, it is Beethoven. It has a Schiller basis of understanding. It has a precision. Whereas Wagner goes into a mythological jungle, Beethoven goes into the clear paths that Schiller is making through the welter of chaos, and you find in the creatures of Prometheus. After the first eight parts of The Man and the woman, and Prometheus, daunted by their mechanical ritual limitation, takes them to the top of Mount Parnassus for the second eight parts, and there, in front of Apollo, Apollo brings the muses, brings Orpheus, brings. Arion, brings all the great creators of musical cultivation, and teaches the man and woman to dance, to feel, to experience, to sing, to be able to move in such a way that they recognize each other and have a love Quality of interpenetration, and out of this art cultivates man to become real as man and not just an indifferent, natural occurring specimen. And this theme of Beethoven, this titanic theme of Apollo using art, especially music. Apollo is the god of music, as well as medicine as well as prophecy. Apollo's gift of the art of music to man cultivates him not just to have beautiful frosting, but to become the entire nutritious meal which a human nature has. Because these things, like art are not frostings put on the top of something. They're not gilding. They are a recalibration of his nature into a supernatural bouquet of possibilities. That man has become more real than the minerals, has become capable of more veracity than the animals that such human beings, such men and women, are anesthetized by a state which is based upon a ritual understanding of mechanical action that would keep him from discovering these capacities. Stravinsky's last ballet for Diaghilev. He died the following year of typhoid in Venice was entitled Apollo, and Stravinsky's last ballet is deeply related to Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus, not just to take the protagonist, Apollo, but to bring in this ballet a reaching back into the classical mythological tapestry in a non Wagnerian way. Stravinsky was always abhorred by the fact that his great, lovely teacher Rimsky-Korsakov had given up beautiful orchestral Pioneering, like Scheherazade or the Easter Cantata or the Capriccio Espanol, and had gone for the last 20 years into trying to do Russian versions of Wagnerian opera. Stravinsky hated that kind of operatic tyranny of music, not just because of opera, but because the Wagnerian opera sought to co-opt all the arts into one super art, which would then transform man with one great super squirt of culture. And this, Stravinsky saw intuitively, deeply, was a major flaw. It was taking a super idea and imposing it and thinking that it was no longer just an idea, but because it was a super idea, it must be more conscious. A more powerful idea must be more conscious. And this is the taproot of all tyranny. It's the only feed line by which empires are built. It's the vagus nerve that man has to watch in himself not to let get away from his attention. And so Stravinsky is really a hero. And in his ballet Apollo, he reaches back and he brings the Apollo of Greek mythology forward, but not the ordinary Apollo as the head of the order of the Nine muses, so that they would make a perfect Pythagorean ten But he chooses three of the muses. He chooses Melpomene, who is the muse of tragedy. Thalia, who's the muse of comedy. And then he brings the third muse, Terpsichore, the muse of dance, into play. That was extraordinary. We've talked in here in the education for a number of years of the fact that when one takes a differential, conscious, analytic, deep into Greek mythology, not to see it mythologically, but to see it in terms of ratios of the real, of conscious, structured things, that the Greeks were never children And especially in the fifth century BC, when they developed Greek tragedy, when people like Plato and Thucydides lived as well as the great tragedians. The century of Socrates and so many others. They were never naive. They were never children. They understood that the problem is that the mind, as long as it stays within the nature bounded human assumptive ego form, that the mind will always rule that form with a sense of power and increased power will increase its ability to rule, and that this then aggregated among people will produce a tyranny by an aristocracy or an oligarchy of rulers, or even a democracy of people? Rule. Whether the people rule or a clique rules or a dictator rules does not change the structure of tyranny. It's still a tyranny, and that all political forms, all the time gravitate towards this structure. It is a universal structure. This is why someone as intelligent as James Madison in The Federalist Papers points out, again and again and again, you have to differentiate the sources of power and have them counter check each other all the time, because power rules and an absolutely perfectly integrated power will rule absolutely, integrally, perfectly with no competition. It's something that the understanding of which is so profound as to almost beggar the imagination once you have understood it, but to have never understood it, one cannot imagine it. When Stravinsky went back to Apollo, he chose three muses not to represent the nine, but three special muses to pull out the cube root of the power of the nine, the goddess of tragedy and the goddess of comedy. Melpomene and Thalia are two ways in which a human being can go outside of his bodily form, of his bounded liminality, out of the empire ruled by the mind. He can go out through terror, or he can go out through ecstatic ecstasies. Not just in sexuality, but in comedy. One can laugh oneself out of oneself or be terrified out of one's wits. And the third, the third traditional Apollonian resonance breaker was always high wisdom. Athena, so that Aphrodite and Ares and Athena were the three and the non-muse calibration. They were the three ways in which we go outside of ourselves and discover that there's more to the real than what we had thought. There's more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in all your philosophies. To not to know this is to be truly ignorant. Because it isn't just that you don't know. It's that you won't know that you're in a regressive mode where you will not hear it. You will not testify to it. You will not see it. The three monkeys that Gandhi used to keep with him in the 20s and 30s. Because anything that challenges the mind's supremacy over mastering the entirety of the natural order, and that projected and amplified into a state becomes secured because history is supposedly made living out on the basis of that, and it's confirmed because the rituals of keeping alive are all tuned to that. They're all calibrated to that. You make money, you keep power. You make your liaisons to have both these work and you pass that on intact. Is this not exactly the way to live? Schiller and Beethoven, 200 years ago challenged this enormously. And by the time that naive and sentimental poetry was being transformed into the aesthetic education of man, Beethoven was translating and transforming his creatures of Prometheus into his Third Symphony And the Third Symphony is called Bonaparte. The Napoleon Symphony. Symphony number three. And all of the themes in the creatures of Prometheus at its apex are reintroduced into the Eroica Symphony No. Three because Beethoven saw Napoleon is the archetypal state based tyrant hero. The mind will always prize a Napoleon, and the state will always cheer a Napoleon, because they can not only bring an empire through, but they do it in the grand style. And what Beethoven and his Third Symphony does. It's one of the greatest pieces of music in world history. He not only portrays it better than anyone has ever portrayed it up to that time, but he undermines it by showing that the themes are developable. The music is developable so far beyond that that it's not even a question of stopping there, even for a rest. And so the Third Symphony is developed and reshaped and recast again and again. The fifth Symphony of Beethoven does it. The sixth Symphony, the seventh. And his great Lollapalooza. The Ninth Symphony completely opens up the Third Symphony to a scale of like, 2 million to 1. Let's take a break. When Stravinsky composed his Apollo ballet, it was late 1927 and its first performance was given on the 28th of January, 1928 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., because it was his first American commission. He was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. The president of the United States was Calvin Coolidge, better known as Silent Cal, not because he didn't talk to his wife, but because he didn't talk to anybody. The window shades and the Oval Office were pulled down at two inches the afternoon, and everyone thought, Cal is taking a nap. Don't disturb him. It was the poker game. These were the American 1920s. The Apollo Ballet was commissioned specifically to be played in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Stravinsky wrote it for The Americans. He wrote it for the New World to understand, and he took something back all the way back to Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus style, to go back, not to do a Greek mythological piece, but to go back and recalibrate Greek mythology and thereby Roman mythology in such a way that art goes in and reshapes the structure of the image base that had been bastardized into tyrannical forms in history so many times that we are now tired of it. And here in the 21st century, we're not going to let it happen again. They don't have the power. We do. No one gets very far in the 21st century without being conscious. Beethoven used his own creatures of Prometheus to develop his third symphony, the Eroica. The Napoleon Symphony and Stravinsky used his Apollo ballet when he came back to the United States to stay to live. His first really great symphony was the Symphony in Three Movements. He wrote the symphony in three movements, all during the Second World War, and early in January 1946, it was performed in the United States to send out a notice from his American second homeland back to Europe that we have understood. And there is a population of people, of men and women here who are not just colonials of a European experience, but they are veterans of an American experience that has come to understand something that we used to know and haven't been able to do anything about. And they not only know, but have been able to do something about, because the United States, in January of 1946, was one of the most incredible beacons in world history. It was everything that the founders had hoped it would be. It was the ability of a population of men and women to withstand not only the vast resistances of pressures from without, but to be able to withstand the temptation towards tyranny within the American power base. In early 1946 was based in the people. It was there in the men and women who inhabited the United States. And Stravinsky was enormously proud to be here. One of one of his confreres at the time was Max Ernst. Max Ernst, a German who had fought in the First World War in the trenches. He was in an artillery unit for four years. Max Ernst once said the Max Ernst I was died in 1914, and he was resurrected in 1918, and the only thing he needed to do was to find the myth of our time. And what he found is that you cannot live on a mythological basis. You have to live on an artistic basis. If you're going to be a conscious human being, and that means you have to be able to transform your own nature into something real. You have to cease to be limited by what has been handed to you by circumstance, and learn to develop, to educate, to transform and become an increasing array of possibilities so that you are not defined by what someone says you are, and you're not defined by a delimited range of activity that you are undefinable. Ernst. Towards the end of his life, he was about 85 when he said it. He said, the artist who finds himself. Woe unto him to keep discovering that you cannot find the limits to yourself is what art is all about the continuing voyage, the continuing discovery. And it is this quality that comes into play in such a fundamental way with Stravinsky. Now you have to understand about Stravinsky. He was a little tiny man in a filmed interview one time he had his shirt off and you could see the tiny, wizened chest, almost that of a dwarf, hardly bigger than a snare drum, but a giant of an artist, an incredible man to be able to take himself for almost 90 years and to constantly be on the edge of his own development. It wasn't that Stravinsky would come to new levels, it was that he would surf the resonances of discovery continuously. He would never stay put, even in his own development. He one time said, I am patiently awaiting for my audiences to catch up with me. I have the patience of an insect. There's a quality to him. And just as an aside, as a man, you have to admire someone who ran off with a woman who was twice his size and stayed with her for 50 years and kept her happy. There are such things as life. What's interesting about Stravinsky is even after all of his early triumphs, his first two ballets were A12 punch that startled the world The Firebird in 1910, Petrushka in 1911. People were on the ropes. Stravinsky was king, and when he brought out in 1913 The Rite of Spring. It wasn't with an idea of a matisse dancing circle that this was a classic work. It was an affront to everyone. There was a riot, one of the most famous performances in world history. People literally were disgusted. They were spitting. They were vomiting. They were throwing. Why? Because Stravinsky reached back to something. They didn't want to approach. This cover from the Le Sacre du Printemps from the 1950s carries it. Stravinsky went back to Paleolithic times. He went back to the most primordial pair of circumstances, that of man needing to hunt to live, and that of woman needing to sacrifice herself so that life could continue her vulnerability. Near to the point of death that becomes a birth, and his determination to see it through with her regardless, are the two elements that make Paleolithic civilization the origins of art. Now, it's important to have a little bit of a digression here. Art is not a Neolithic occurrence. Art is not born when agriculture is born. It's not born when man tames the plants and tames the animals, and domestically tames himself to begin living in villages and early cities. That's the Neolithic. There's about 9000 BC, about 11,000 years ago, at its earliest. Places like Jericho. Places like the western coast of the Iranian mountain ranges. The Zagros. Places like Southeast Asia. You find the beginnings of agriculture there about 11,000 years ago. The beginnings of art are about 40,000 years ago, so art is 30,000 years older than agriculture. Art is Paleolithic in its achievement, and one has to understand here that that means the consciousness of the artist was full bloomed 30,000 years before we ever tamed the first plant. Art is older than the food you eat. It's primordial. Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring, reached back to the Paleolithic level and brought it current in the Paris of 1913. Not in a content so much, but in the way in which the dance rhythms, the sets of notes in their presentational sequence jumped completely outside the musical forms that were limiting the feelings of the audience. The audience were used to having all kinds of feelings stretched beautiful romantic feelings, even Wagnerian grand feelings. But all of them were kept within the forms of a music which was recognizable in terms of its time meter dimension. Stravinsky went below by about 40,000 years below the level that they thought was basic, and he embarrassed them in a sense of unspoken self ridicule, that they were petty beyond belief that the foundations of their appreciation for art forms was ancient, and they were using parlor pretend sentiments as if they were the feeling range of human beings, and it showed them up for the vacuous pasteboard crowd in which they were. And of course, they they threw things. They hated it. And even today, when you hear the Rite of Spring, you hear a curious driving. It's not the driving of a rock beat. It's not the stupid staccato of a rap music Recital, all that is very mechanically fittable into a kind of a romantic, Wagnerian classical music thing. Those are regressions, but you find the kind of complex, nuanced syncopation in Stravinsky that you find in American jazz. You find the complex time signatures that only a jazz musician would feel at home in, and would understand that this does not destroy the melody at all, but allows you to weave an infinite improv into that melodic line. That melody is expandable infinitely, as long as you have a differential sense of the musical time. One of the great examples later in American jazz was the Brubeck Quartet, that took a nine eighth rhythm and did a piece called Time Out and showed that with that you could explore. You opened a door that explored an infinite possibility of music that had not only a harmonic, but had also a serial music quality. The serial music quality is that all the notes within the set refer only to each other. They don't refer externally to something else. Serial music is serial 12. Tone music is atonal, not because it doesn't have a tone, but because it does not have a image In reality, it doesn't point to anything else. It presents itself only. It doesn't mean that you can't have an image association later, but that the composition and the appreciation is not dependent on that basis, which means that feeling is not locked into ritual action. In order to develop experience, which means that the human being, by not being ritually locked, discovers that they are free. Not just free from something or free for something, but they are totally free without any time constraint, without any space constraint whatsoever. And Stravinsky understood this was the deep message of the United States. What I call Hermetic America. It's a quality of understanding, deeper than the assumed tapestry of time and space, of ritual, of inculcation, even of cultural norms. Stravinsky loved the fact that the United States was just not a melting pot, but was a complex tapestry of a reshowing of every conceivable human type, every race, every background into new combinations. There are Americans living now who can list their pedigrees and include maybe 20 different nationalities and 5 or 6 different Races, and they're all embodied in someone who is quite intelligent and feeling and capable of of living and developing. You will never find that kind of variety anywhere else in history. The only place on the planet that ever approached that kind of quality was ancient Alexandria in its classical heyday. Now, this quality in the United States was developed specifically by the real founders of the United States to be there. It wasn't just accidental that it happened. It was developed over decades, over generations, so that it would be there in its Differential proliferation at the same time as the United States was being recalibrated all over again. The United States was recalibrated massively in the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson narrowly elected president, and he took office in 1801, and it marked the Second American Revolution. The United States in 1800 became, in just a quarter of a century, such an enormous development that the United States of 1825 is almost inconceivable in terms of the United States in terms of 1799. The difference is unbelievable. And at the same time as Jefferson taking office in 1801, you have Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus being presented in the Vienna of that day. And the Vienna of that day of 1801 was the center of what was the inheritors of the Roman Empire. It was called the Holy German Empire, and the German name for it all over Europe was the Reich, the Reich. So that when the National Socialist Party took power in 1933, they said, well, we've had a Reich and we've had a Second Reich. This is the Third Reich. And that's why the Nazi tyranny is called the Third Reich. All of those models from Hitler on back can be traced back to the Roman Empire. And the real fulcrum figure is that of Napoleon. And when you see the paintings of the time, Napoleon's cavalry, which was the great power arm along with his artillery. But Napoleon's cavalry all wore these capes and these plumed hats. They looked exactly like the generals of Alexander the Great of 2000 years before. Because the true founder of the idea of a world empire is not the Romans, but Alexander the Great. And as soon as Napoleon became confident that he was building a coalition, he let the temporary military power go to another man, and he took a part of the French army, and he made a beeline for Egypt. He went to Alexandria. He went to the pyramids because he knew that this was an archetypal power source for world empire. Forget Rome. When you go really deep, you find that it's there in that origin. Egyptology owes everything to Napoleon Bonaparte because he went like Alexander went not just with a huge army, but with an army of scholars, of savants, of people who knew how to find out how to read Denon, Champollion, the the list of people with Napoleon because he went not to ransack and take away. He went to incorporate and develop and resuscitate everything all over again. Hitler is what they used to call in the 30s. A piker compared to Napoleon is nothing. But Napoleon played it right. He understood that the taproot of power is not to be a dictator. That the original dictator for life, Julius Caesar, was killed by his own people. But the successful dictator was the one who didn't call himself a dictator. He called himself the prince, the princeps, the first citizen. And that was Augustus Caesar. That's why it's called the Roman Principate. The Roman Empire is a popular label for it, the Roman principate. It's the rule of the first man. And Napoleon took for himself the name First Consul. Always referred to him as a First consul. He didn't become the emperor until later, but his top route to power and to understanding were magnificent, and Beethoven appreciated Napoleon from an artistic standpoint that this was the major figure of the age. For Stravinsky, he saw through the Stalin. He saw through the position of Churchill. He saw through even Hitler. He saw that the major figure of the age was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the United States was the power center of the future. In the late 1930s, it was apparent. And so when Stravinsky came to the United States, he moved west and he moved to Los Angeles. And it was here in Los Angeles that over on Wetherly Drive, he lived at 1260 North Wetherly Drive in the Hollywood Hills. He lived there longer than any other place in his whole life. I had a chance to buy that house a number of years ago, and just didn't quite have enough money to purchase it. It wasn't a very big place. Three bedrooms The back sloped abruptly up to another wind in the street. Stravinsky used to keep chickens up there on those ledges till the neighbors complained. And in the front he had a fairly large garden area with lots of paths through it. And what he grew. There were flowers, because every morning, without fail, his discipline was to go out and cut fresh flowers and to take his bouquet of fresh flowers to his piano, where he composed. Robert Kraft once said the piano seemed always to be out of tune. And Stravinsky said, never mind, I know what it sounds like. Because Stravinsky composed in a way, was like a corrective lens in his mind of a completely differentiated consciousness. He didn't use his mind based on perception as an uncorrected way of composing. He recalibrated as he went along all the time, and one of his most arcane capacities was the ability to remember precisely and exactly the complexities of the developing sets of meter and rhythm which drove the time of his pieces. Because if those were not exact, you didn't hear the music. What you heard was somebody's sentimental idea of what that music should sound like, but not what the music itself was presenting. Now, this is very important. It means that if you have an idea of what the music should sound like. You hear the music in your mind. Whereas if the music presents itself, the music is heard in your person. And Stravinsky's music, like all great monumental art, is an art for the person. It's an art for the jeweled prism. It can never be exhausted, because the more that you become capable of appreciating, the more is there. And it's like the discovery that the cosmos is alive. The more that you find out about it, the more there is to find out about it, that it grows as you grow it sensitizes as you sensitize and you find that the cosmos is responsive to your development, to your growth, and that it is not just a parental parent, but it is an evolving parent that it's mothering. It's fathering becomes deeper and better as one goes on becoming mother or father in one's own way, becoming child again and again in new ways. And it is this quality Schiller is addressing in another work near the time of naive and sentimental poetry called On the Sublime. Now the notion of the sublime reached a philosophic level of statement in a short work, Almost Unknown in Our Time, a short work by Immanuel Kant on the sublime. The idea here was that as one matured, you could have ideas, and ideas could be refined, and you could come to such a refined purity of reason as to empty the content of ideas and have their pure structure. And if you did, that, pure mind structure would of its own nature cease to be just natural and begin to ooze ooze into a supernatural realm where not only was something pretty, but now it had gone over the threshold into the sublime. And so what was sublime was something transcendentally beautiful and that man's Person was a sublime form, never seen in nature. That natural man may be friendly. He may be unfriendly. He may be nice or not nice. He may be good to look at or not good to look at. But he can be transformed into something so far beyond that, into something sublime. And it is the sublime person that art nourishes. This is Schiller about 200 years ago. The feeling, the feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a composition of melancholy which at its utmost is manifested in a shudder And of joyousness which cannot mount to rapture and even if it's not actually pleasure, is far preferred by refined souls to all pleasure. This combination melancholy and joyousness, this combination of two contradictory perceptions in nature. They are polarities. Joy and melancholy are contradictory. Can you be sad and joyous at the same time? There is a style of music where you can, if you transform the sad to the blue. Because when you heartfully sing the blues, you are both joyous and sad. American jazz does this. It is sublime. This combination of two contradictory perceptions in a single feeling demonstrates our moral independence. That in the universe we are free. We are independent. We are not glued to ritual action and the feelings that come referentially and associatively out of that. We are freed from that. But we have to cut those ties. And as long as we keep basing ourselves on ritual action, we will only be natural. We will be naturally intellectual and An ideational, but we will never be sublime. That means you have to transform ritual action into dramatic action. You have to learn that this scenario is not a ritual, but is a play. This is not a tragedy, but a Greek tragedy. Not to suffer, but to transform. And it's this quality that Schiller is writing about here. It's this quality that Beethoven is discovering at that same time. It's this quality that later in Stravinsky's work, when he begins to understand that ritual is the key, that ritual action, in order to be truly transformed, needs to be simplified so that it is pristinely barebones there. Because only when it is pristinely and barebones there does the transform take effect. And so the news. About a wedding, 1923. He worked on it all during the First World War, and by the time of 1923, when it was performed, the nose was a revelation that was reviled again. Everyone was disgusted except Diaghilev, who wept. Stravinsky says in the score, it must be as impersonal as can be. There must be a distributed mechanical quality to all the movements. The three voices. The soprano, the tenor, the bass must be in the orchestra pit. It is not sung on the stage. And the singers, the soprano, the tenor and the bass are not to sing in syncopation with the three protagonists. The voices and the music are a background against which the ritual action simply happens. It is the preparation for a marriage, not according to the church or any church, but according to the most ancient primitive peasant customs. He had gone to the Paleolithic with the Rite of Spring, and in La Noce he goes to the Heal the sick. He goes to the agricultural village base of how one brings life into being again through a peasant wedding, a marriage. The children will come out of that. Whereas in The Rite of Spring he went back to the Paleolithic basis, and Linnaeus he goes to the Neolithic basis. It is a drama of village wisdom that knows nothing of refinement. It knows only that this is what we do and must do in order for there to be children to carry life on. It is not about sexuality in any romantic sense whatsoever. It's not individual. It is simply the reduction to the ritual bones which then will be transformed. Formed. And when he saw that the Neolithic level was not strong enough to take the transform of high art, he raised the level of Linnaeus one notch higher. He went to if we can find it here he went to Sophocles Oedipus Rex. 1928 1923 during the 20s, the rite of spring goes to the Paleolithic level. The nose goes to the Neolithic level. Oedipus Rex goes to the fundamental basis upon which civilization makes or breaks itself. Oedipus Rex in Sophocles is the Greek tragedy. What is tragic about it is not that Oedipus marries his mother, which biologically, if one followed that, is a short circuit in genetics. What is make or break about it is that Oedipus knows this is hanging over him, and has the arrogance to think he can circumvent it by a brilliant strategy of watching out for it, that he is exempt. The tragedy of Oedipus is not that he marries his mother, but that he does it despite all of his best intellectual plans not to do it. And one could say, well, he is deceived, and that's the whole point. Indeed, the tragedy of the mind is that it can be deceived. Whereas consciousness, when it is allied with the human heart, cannot stand deception. One of the hardest things in the world is to try to make a little child lie. Little children will not lie. They do not lie. This quality of Oedipus Rex links up with the Apollo Ballet because they both came out the same year, 1928. It is a time when the whole structure of European civilization was being shook. Stravinsky once replied to a critic who said, you didn't see much of the Nazis. All you saw were films. You were safe in America. What did you know? He said, well, I'll tell you. In 1932, I was in a restaurant in Munich and the Brownshirts came in. Before they took power in Germany, there were Nazi members who used to wear these brown shirts, ruffians. And they would search out Jews anywhere and publicly revile them and then beat them. And he was with Véra, his companion of many years, and with a Jewish friend who was reviled by these brownshirts in this restaurant. And finally, when they tried to leave, the man was beaten. Vera Stravinsky ran to a policeman, and a policeman on the corner said, well, what do you expect? These things happen. And only by hailing a taxicab did Stravinsky get his friend into the cab with his wife. They drove immediately to the police station, and the police station master said, what do you think? That this isn't Munich? This isn't Germany. These things happen all the time. There's nothing unusual about this. This kind of equality of poignancy in Stravinsky's way of telling is poignant for us. We live at the cusp of an era where not only the barbarians Variants of some political possible tyranny are loose, but all the demons in the wood are coming out and they will come out. Transforming the ritual glue into a dramatic activity of play is the only carrier wave energy that transformation can use in such a time. You cannot tell someone powerful ideas. They couldn't understand it even with 30 years of education. And you cannot show them works of art or historical examples or scientific achievements. All that is unseeable. Not only that, they don't see it, but they won't see it of refusal. Look around you. Other things are important. Not this. And yet, what is important if it isn't? The ability to become real, is winning in Las Vegas anything at all? What's important is that one can recalibrate the ritual glue so that it doesn't stick you to images of feeling toned experience that are corral able by powerful ideological forms, that it can be made in such a way facile, so that when they are integrated, when they are taken from the experience, they come so fertile and alive into the mind that the mind itself is charmed into exploring rather than into reducing. Because as only the alert mind that is the guardian of liberty, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. That's how Jefferson wrote it. He also wrote a letter to James Madison one time, about the time that Schiller was dying. Jefferson said, it is in the education of the people that we must place our trust for the guarantee of the Republic. The political forms are never trustworthy for that.