Image by Nancy Hightower
The title refers to a quote from W. H. Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B Yeats" and it's hard not to see irony here--a disclaimer of the power of poetry by one of the last century's most brilliant poets in a piece memorializing another poet, one who breathed vision and beauty into the world. And particularly in a poem so expressive and powerful that it quickens my breath every time I read it. Can poetry make nothing happen? Yeats had strong (and disputable) political leanings and his writing influenced Irish culture and the work of many writers who followed him. As for Auden, how many of us have been turning to his "September, 1939" in this time of political upheaval and danger?
Art affects us deeply if we choose to pay attention. There's the incredible power of music, which can soothe troubled senses and make us weep, laugh, or stand up and dance. At one point in his life novelist William Styron descended into a depression so deep that he contemplated suicide. He was rescued by the sound of Brahms' Alto Rhapsody emanating from the television as he watched a film. The music pierced his heart, Styron wrote in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. A flood of memories followed, his thinking began to clear, and now he could see a way out of the terrible darkness enveloping him.
Brilliant neurologist-physician-scientist-naturalist Oliver Sacks (yes, there was nothing this multi-faceted genius couldn't do, including 500-pound back squats in his twenties) devoted a book to the topic: Musicophilia, which explores the interaction between music and the brain. In a memoir called A Leg to Stand On Sacks describes one of his own intense musical experiences. He was in a hospital recovering from an accident: Hiking an apparently peaceful mountain in Norway he encountered a huge white bull and turned to flee. Floundering in a blind panic, he fell and severely damaged a leg. An intense will to live and Sacks' knowledge as a doctor allowed him to fashion his very English brolly into a splint and with it he sat, squirmed, and slid his way down the mountain and--with the help of a father and son who saw his predicament--reached safety. But the damage was intense, and even when the leg had healed Dr. Sacks found himself unable to walk. There was a swirl of confusion when he put weight on that foot, and even as confusion subsided it felt as if the entire appendage, though entirely visible, simply wasn't there, let alone attached, his, and utilizable. And then suddenly Mendelsohn's Fortissimo came into his mind and, equally suddenly, he was walking "easily, joyfully" to the music.
One of my most ridiculously happy memories of the power of music occurred when I was eleven. I had invaded my mother's quiet bedroom and was listening to a disc of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. It was a discovery, the somewhat restrained beginning and then those huge, crashing chords. Suddenly, I was twirling one of my mother's blouses and leaping on and off her bed to those imperative rhythms. And then there was my young, zizzy, and beloved Airedale Petzo who had joined in and was leaping beside me, both of us in perfect unison. Up. Down. Up. Pause. Down again. It was glorious, the pure excitement of experiencing Beethoven for the very first time, the unaffected joy of the sound and the way the composer--so long dead--was filling the room while also creating a crazy joining of me and Petzo, whom I loved, and who I knew lived in an entirely different sensory world.
Not all music is divine. And tastes differ. But all music speaks the creator's mind, and all arts creation should be applauded, from the page full of blurred red crayon hearts created by a five-year-old as a present for her mother to the soaring voices of the world's great singers.
Seeing as an artist and letting awareness into your life enriches. You see the power in an ocean-smoothed stone on the beach, hear the ever-changing sound of wind soughing through tree branches, observe the dance in the extended arm of a mother touching her child's face. How often have you been thinking about something you can't quite pinpoint and found a phrase from a book, play, or poem sliding into your mind and putting this thing you're struggling with into words? Looked up at a vividly dramatic sky and wondered about the thoughts of Van Gogh, who saw such a sky long before you? Do you sometimes find a poem shared by a friend on Facebook that brings pleasure to your morning? Or a silly one that makes you laugh? Has a friend posted an artwork of his or her own--a poem, a song, a sketch or--like my friend Nancy Hightower--a photograph of New York City streets and buildings seen as reflections in puddles? These images can change the way we see the built-up city streets. And also puddles, about which Virginia Woolf had mused frequently in her writing.
As a one-time theatre reviewer for Westword, I attended dozens of local productions, some brilliant, some boring (sorry!), some both or neither, and every visit brought a new insight. I tend to like productions in small or middle-sized venues with artistic directors willing to experiment and take risks more than big, glossy traveling shows geared to wealthy donors and audience members. These donors do keep some good theatre alive, but they often have appalling taste and their power helps send ticket prices soaring to heights few of us can scale.
I grieve the loss of the building that for years hosted Curious Theatre, the company whose catchphrase is "No guts. No story" though I understand Curious' work will continue in rented spaces under the direction of talented artistic director Jada Suzanne Dixon.
I wish I had room here to describe all the luminous performances and productions I experienced over the years: Bill Hahn in Martin Shermans Bent, a horrifying exploration of the plight of gay men in Hitler's Germany; Mare Trevathan in Caryl Churchill's The Skriker, playing an ancient malevolent shape-changing fairy; Amanda Berg Wilson in There is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher. (Note to The Catamounts, the company Amanda so vibrantly heads: Please get her on the stage more often.)
Has anyone who saw Jamie Anne Romero as Juliet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival ever forgotten her transcendent performance? And if you were present for that production, how about Geoffrey Kent's mesmerizing Mercutio?
There are so many names that create a frisson of excitement when I see them on a program: Wayne Kennedy, Ed Baierlein, Emma Messenger. I'd never seen a worthwhile performance of Anne Frank in the play that bears her name until I watched Darrow Klein--so strong, moving, complex, and unsentimental. And then there were the talents in Buntport's Wake--Erin Rollman, Brian Colonna, Erik Edborg, and Adam Stone--actors whose originality and presence always amazed. I could fill pages with all this praise--and over time, I did, as anyone who cares to check out those myriad Westword reviews can see. I know Denver theatre has changed since I last reviewed; there are head-turning talents working now and I miss it. For me theatre made a thousand things happen.
I do think Auden's vision went beyond the effect of art on individual lives--though obviously individual lives intertwine with culture and history in patterns so numerous and complex I've no idea how you'd unravel them. His vision was broader and for him art and history weren't separable. There's been a kind of current in this country that says politics and art don't marry well, that politics make art narrow, preachy, and didactic. That was different in the 1960s, when audiences flocked to The Living Theatre, Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre and the San Francisco Mime Troupe's shows. There were powerful films about Vietnam and also--by artists like Milos Forman who, coming from Czechoslovakia, was fascinated and delighted by the hippie movement here in the United States and came up with the movie Taking Off about a suburban couple horrified by their daughter's affair with a rock musician and the beautiful film version of Hair. On a far more serious note, Gillo Pontecorvo directed Burn with Marlon Brando as a British agent deliberately helping create a slave rebellion against Portugese overlords in a Caribbean island. That island is fictive but the film has a lot to say about colonial intervention in the Philippines and Latin America.
Musicians in the sixties came up with powerful, passionate songs challenging the Vietnam War. Check out Country Joe and the Fish singing "Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die" at Woodstock, "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nina Simone's "Backlash Blues," Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and so many more. I was a part of New York's theatre scene then and I seriously imagined that our experimentation (rats released in the playing area, nakedness and copulation onstage, wordless plays in which only sounds and onstage writhing counted) would somehow change the world. Yes, it was pretty daft. But it was also full of life and exploration and in some wild, wonderful, and circular ways it did.
So does art have power? Repressive governments always seem to think so. Contemporary art was considered degenerate in Nazi Germany and removed from museums; artists in Mao's China were imprisoned; and Stalin rigidly controlled the art of the Soviet Union. Today the Israeli government is destroying the universities, archives, libraries, museums, and mosques containing precious ancient artefacts in Gaza. And wherever in this country Republicans take power they tend to set about banning books and de-funding arts organizations.
But belief in art persists. During the severely repressive years between Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring of 1968 and the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Czech artists secretly circulated samizdat--written work, images and concert footage--and met secretly to share.
And like those wildflower sometimes emerging from cracks in a sidewalk, Palestinian artists continue to write, sketch, paint and sculpt. Does their creativity bring comfort to a population suffering unimaginable pain and hardship? Does it catch the attention of a world that could and should intervene to stop the carnage? I don't know--though I do know the brilliant and secretive Banksy has influence.
Amid fun plays, music and dance, mysteries to be solved, and soul-explorations, politics always played some role in the Denver theatre scene. Curious Theatre opened in 1997 and has been mounting challenging works about race, sex, and immigration, including the brilliant plays of socialist Tony Kushner, ever since. A play called My Name is Rachel Corrie about a young woman killed by an Israeli tank as she attempted to protect a Palestinian home from demolition aroused a fair amount of controversy when it was scheduled for New York's Theatre Workshop in 2006, though it did receive a New York production later that year. In Denver, the play was beautifully presented as part of Brian Freeland's farewell project to Denver, Countdown to Zero, with Julie Rada bringing Rachel Corrie to powerful and quietly radiant life.
Much more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement inspired a strong focus on issues of race, equality, and justice by the theatre community, and some terrific playwrights of color had their work recognized and performed by equally terrific Black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ actors.
A little while ago I was watching coverage of student protests at Columbia University and saw that protesters had dubbed Hamilton Hall--in previous years the site of protests against the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, protests that did have some effect on history--Hind's Hall. Hind Rajab was a six-year-old child shot by Israeli troops. Unexpectedly, an insistent thudding rhythm emanated from my television--a song by rapper Maclemore, also called Hind’s Hall and filled with passion, yearning, power, and rage. This song, an announcer said, had been heard by millions of viewers.
Is Maclemore's song art? What does it accomplish? It alienates some people and brings thousands of others together. It reveals the power and passion of a movement for peace and justice. And it creates an odd stirring in this tired and disillusioned old heart of mine. Somewhere Buffalo Springfield is singing about something new happening, something indefinable but hugely powerful, and Bob Dylan is attempting to goad Mr. Jones into understanding, and with all my being I'm hoping they’re right and clinging to the importance of art.
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You can find Nancy Hightower on Instagram and Facebook and there's a fine interview with her here: https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-festering-mirror/
I’m rarely swept away these days by music or poetry. I can still drift off to Schubert’s Trout Quintet, or Jackson Browne might lay me out with “Fountain of Sorrow.” But I have to say it’s rare. It’s much the same with poetry. I read, years ago, every poem by Gary Snyder. I once loved and memorized, and often quoted, “I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds. Yes, I’ve been moved by poems, but I rarely come across one now that grips me. So I was somewhat stunned by Juliet Wittman’s accounts of people, including her, whose days, whose years, whose lives have been buoyed or transformed by some piece of music or a poem.
Not that I don’t live to be transformed. It’s just that for me, it’s almost always a novel that has the power and glory. The two I usually cite are James Salter’s Light Years, and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. I read them again and again. But after I finished this Substack post, something drew me to my bookcase and James Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family.
I’d love to quote the entire introductory chapter. It’s too long, of course, so here’s a small piece of it. The chapter opens, “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”
And farther down the page: “...it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on iron speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone; forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.”
Pretty close to poetry, I’d say. Does it change me? Does it change the world? In some way, yes. It soothes me and lifts me and makes me whole. Now is the night one blue dew.
--John Thorndike