Hope and Change

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,

darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber

sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,

in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug

der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen

der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen

zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz

unter der Schultern durchsichtigen Sturz

und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brächt nicht aus allen seine Rändern

aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,

die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

When I first encountered Rilke's poem (English translation below) at about the age of 18, its meaning, particularly the last sentence, was totally lost on me. Poetry is hard; it takes work to understand it. Changing your life, as the poem admonishes, requires real work, too.

At 18 I wanted to change my life, break out of the provincial background in which I had grown up. I went to college and studied German, never having heard of Rilke or Goethe or even knowing a thing about Germany. I think it was the funny letters in the textbooks that intrigued me, what we used to call "Gothic" script. My life certainly changed because of that decision, though not in any way I could have imagined. And it has been work, all along the way. One works to make some change, and the achievement -- sometimes good, sometimes not -- is often unexpected. It is a risk one takes. 

There is of course the kind of change that one experiences simply by living. We are born, we immediately begin to change. We move from infant to toddler to pre-schooler and so on. In traditional society the change in one's outward condition may have been more a function of outside forces: parents, caste, class, and so on. One didn't even have the opportunity to be different from the situation into which one was born. Something like fate operated.

In modern secular society it is easy enough to go along with what are more or less traditional expectations, but should you wish something out of the ordinary -- should you wish to change yourself and your condition -- you will discover yourself on a long, hard road. Others may travel on it with you, but you are the one who will have to do the hard work of change.

Doug Van Benthuysen, to whom I owe the above image of Apollo, has many translations of Rilke's poem at his website. My favorite is this one by Stephen Mitchell:

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, or could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur;

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Picture: MySpace Impact

V.S. Naipaul on Elections

"Democracy had come to Elvira four years before, in 1946; but it had taken nearly everybody by surprise and it wasn't until 1950, a few months before the second general election under universal adult franchise, that people began to see the possibilities."

So begins V.S. Naipaul's 1958 novel, The Suffrage of Elvira, Elvira in this case being a small town in Trinidad that Naipaul situates in the far northeastern corner of the island. The Trinidadian economist and politician Lloyd Best recommended the novel to his students, calling it the most important of Naipaul's novels in that "he saw how the society worked, as distinct from how people thought it ought to work. ... he was absolutely lucid as to how the political system really worked, and how people actually behaved" (from an interview in Patrick French's Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is).

I reread The Suffrage of Elvira a few weeks ago, just as the political scandals in Chicago and the Minnesota senatorial recount were entering their most ludicrous stage. If you want to understand the kinds of political shenanigans going on in those Midwestern states, read Naipaul's novel. It concerns a Mr Surujpat Harbans, who wishes to run in the general election to represent Elvira. He is not your typical Jaycee. The roads of Elvira are in terrible shape, full of potholes, but he is not running in order to improve the roads. Indeed, for years he had been able to persuade the chief engineer of the county to keep his hands off the roads, so that big repairs were never made. In this way, Harbans Transport Service made lots of money year after year transporting gravel and stone from his quarry to fill in the holes.

At first Harbans' path to victory looks like a done deal, as he recruits the leading men of Elvira to form a committee to run his campaign. These include the goldsmith Chittaranjan, who controls 3,000 Hindu votes and 1,000 Spanish votes, and the Muslim tailor Baksh, who "found himself the leader of the Muslims in Elvira and thus in control of 1,000 Muslim votes in a county of 8,000." A very heady position for Baksh to be in, one that eventually goes to his head. As someone says: "Everyone else in Elvira just asking for one little piece of help before they vote for any particular body. Baksh is the only man who wants three." Yes, as Harbans hears over and over when soliciting votes: "It go take some money." At every turn, he is donating to sick Hindus or pulling out his checkbook to rebuild a goal post so that the "boys from Pueblo Road" can play football this season. And if there is going to be sport, it would be nice to give out prizes. In the end the man who runs the campaign for Harbans' opponent offers to turn over 800 votes for a dollar a vote.

And there are less predictable events, over which money may have no influence. For instance, the Jehovah's Witnesses have convinced the Spanish to sit out the election since politics is not a divine thing. Then, there is the matter of a scrawny dog named Tiger, who, so people believe, is a bringer of bad magic, or obeah. When things get contentious, every statement is twisted out of recognition. Rumors fly. Poll takers are bribed. Chittaranjan hopes for rain (mud will keep people from getting out to vote). Each side has its own person to oversee fair voting. The process gets Harbans down, and "with his moods and exaltations, depressions and rages," he became an embarrassment to his committee, who wished him out of the way so that they could run things for themselves. The process takes over. Harbans is told by Pundit Dhaniram that he could stay in Port of Spain and win the election in Elvira. "'Just leave everything to your party machine,' he added, savouring the words. 'Party machine.'" He would have a future in Chicago.

The high point of the novel is the death and funeral of Mr. Cuffy, a respectable elderly Negro, which Chittaranjan stage manages as an election event, with Harbans paying for the Chinese undertaker, the expensive coffin, quantities of rum, coffee, and biscuits for those who gathered when the news got out. "Harbans mingled with the mourners as though they were his guests; and everyone knew, and was grateful, that Harbans had taken all the expenses of the wake upon himself."

Countess Auguste Louise Stolberg

On this day in 1775 Goethe began a correspondence with a woman whose identity, initially, remained unknown to him. She had written to him of her enthusiasm for his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and her letter had been sent to Goethe by her brothers, who were studying in Göttingen. None of the letters she wrote to Goethe have survived, but the first one impressed him enough that he immediately replied. The small correspondence between the two in the following year (Goethe's responses survive), forms a small footnote in Goethe studies. The letters he wrote to her from Frankfurt, however, reveal much about his state of mind during the period when he was courting Lili Schönemann.

The lady in question was Auguste Louise Gräfin zu Stolberg (1753-1835), and she seems to have been urged to the bold step of writing to Goethe by Metta von Oberg, a German baronness, with whom she lived in a cloister for noble ladies in a place called Uetersen, in Schleswig-Holstein, which was then part of Denmark.

Her brothers were Friedrich Leopold and Christian. They too were Werther enthusiasts, and, on their way to Switzerland, in May 1775,  the young nobles stopped in Frankfurt and convinced Goethe to join them on their journey. Desiring to escape his entanglement with Lili, he did so. For the trip to Switzerland the brothers had clothes made to match the dress made famous by Werther: a blue frock coat, yellow leather knee breeches, and boots. Not only in their dress did the brothers cause a stir. 

They were adherents of what was called the cult of nature and, near Darmstadt, took the opportunity to swim naked in a pond. 

As Goethe wrote later of this episode in his autobiography: the sight of naked youths in the sunshine was no doubt a novelty but also caused a scandal. Well, we live in more enlightened times now. (Irony meter registering.)

Auguste fades out of Goethe's story in 1776, when he was becoming entrenched in Weimar and found in Frau von Stein a recipient for his outpourings. Auguste moved to Copenhagen in 1783 and married Andreas Peter von Bernstorff, an important government minister. The German-Danish writer Friederike Brun has many complimentary things to say about Bernstorff in her autobiography Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen. Brun's father, Balthasar Münter, was the Evangelical pastor at the court in Copenhagen, and it was he, along with Bernstorff, who accompanied Johann Friedrich Struensee on his ascent to the scaffold in 1772. Goethe, by the way, was one of the prominent European intellectuals of the time who wrote letters protesting Struensee's death sentence. An interesting portrait of this period in Denmark can be found in the novel The Royal Physician's Visit by Per Olov Enquist. Bruce Bawer, in his review of the novel, has a full account of what he calls "one of the strangest chapters in all of Scandinavian history."

The portrait of Auguste (now in the Goethe Nationalmuseum in Weimar) is by the contemporary Danish painter Jens Juelle, whose portrait of Klopstock is one of the most celebrated of that poet.

More Elective Affinities

The painting of a girl reading, by Joseph Wright of Derby, is reproduced on the cover of Lee Morrissey's recent book The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism. Lee spoke last evening at the Columbia University Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture (of which I am chair) on various topics, including the adequacy of Jürgen Habermas' concept of "public sphere" to describe the emancipatory potential of literacy during the Enlightenment. An alternative model for talking about the Enlightenment and democracy, according to Lee, was that of Slavoj Žižek, a "post-Marxist" sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. (The last is tautological: everyone in academia is a cultural critic.) Žižek represents a clever (one might say "disingenuous") move on the part of the Left to counter conservatives on the hot political and cultural issues of the day. Though living in Slovenia, he has managed to make a fine career for himself  as a visiting professor at major U.S. universities. The more obscure a European intellectual, the more Americans go for it. Still, one should attempt to get through his prose -- and Lee is to be commended for doing so -- if only in order to understand his hatred for the liberal-democratic order. As Žižek writes in a recent work, Violence, "Everything [in resistance to this order] is to be endorsed here, up to an including 'religious fanaticism.'" Got that, Al Qaeda?

But let me get back to the cover of Lee's book (which has to do with reading and literacy and their relationship to the "constitution" of democracy in the West). I was reminded of a scene in Goethe's Elective Affinities, right before Charlotte, Eduard, and the Captain begin to discuss the mysterious subject of "affinities." It is an 18th-century evening, and one of the things people did back then was read aloud. Eduard, indeed, liked to do so, for, as Goethe wrote, he had an agreeable deep voice and had once been very much in demand for such readings, especially of poetry. Of late, however, he had preferred to read from works on physics, chemistry, and technology.

Joseph Wright Derby (1734-1797) is the painter par excellence of this interest in the natural sciences during the Enlightenment. In his scenes of scientific experiment, Wright combines experimenter with the ordinary people whose world would be transformed by science and technology. The candlelit scene of An Experiment on a Bird with an Air Pump is one of his most famous. Through the spread of literacy (the subject of Lee's book) and knowledge of science the world was being led from darkness. (I'm being slightly ironic.)

So, imagine the candlelit scene in Charlotte and Eduard's drawing room. One of Eduard's idiosyncrasies, however, was a dislike of people reading over his shoulder, which ruins the dramatic effect of reading aloud. Thus, he usually made it a point to sit where no one could peer over his shoulder. On this occasion he noticed that Charlotte was staring at the pages of the book. He expressed his irritation in a "rather unfriendly tone" (in the translation by Judith Ryan):

If I read to someone, isn't it just the same as if I were explaining something orally? The written or printed words take the place of my own feelings and intentions, and do you think I would take the trouble to talk intelligibly if there were a window in my forehead or my breast so that the person to whom I wish to relate my thoughts and feelings one by one would know in advance what I'm aiming at? When someone reads over my shoulder I always feel as if I were split in two.

In the picture on Lee's book, the young reader is so absorbed in what is probably a letter that she doesn't notice the old gent peering over her shoulder. (One of Goethe's idiosyncrasies was his dislike for spectacles, such as the man is wearing.) She seems utterly absorbed in her reading, and she might indeed be engaged in private study. In contrast is another painting by Wright; in this case it is the young man peering over the girl's shoulder who is irritated. From the dreamy smile on her face, we can assume she is beyond irritation.

Elective Affinities

It is 2009, so that means it is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Goethe's novel Wahlverwandschaften. Expect plenty of events to commemorate the anniversary. Klassik Stiftung Weimar will hold readings of the novel in October, in the Festsaal of the Stadtschloss in Weimar, by actors Jutta Lampe and Hanns Zischler and theater director Peter Stein. How cool is that? For those who can't make the trip to Germany (and that will probably include me), there are some good movie versions. I was in Germany in 1999 (on the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth!) and was able to see many films based on Goethe novels.

One of the best versions of Elective Affinities is Italian, by the team of Paolo and Victor Taviani. It stars Isabelle Huppert as Charlotte. Huppert has been my least favored actress of all time, but she is excellent at conveying Charlotte's coldness. She was also excellent as the horrible woman at the center of Elfriede Jelinek's Piano Teacher: that role fit Huppert to a "T." Come to think of it, Huppert even looks like Jelinek. That's an affinity for you.

Best of all, however, is the novel itself. I plan to read deeply in Elective Affinities this year. More on that later.

The wonderful painting at the top of this post, Elective Affinities (click to enlarge) is by a Colombian artist, Nohra Barros.

Goethe and Colors

"Can you lend me the Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid." So, Ludwig van Beethoven, in 1820 (Converation Book), on Die Farbenlehre by Goethe, published in 1810. Like many Goethe scholars, I know basically two things about Goethe's work on color and optics generally: that he got the physics wrong and that he considered his work on the subject more important than his literary work. Or so he told Eckermann.

As a young man, even after the success of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe thought he might become an artist. It was in Rome (in 1786-88), after working very hard to improve his craft skills, that he gave up that idea, but he became intrigued by the aesthetic effect produced by colors in art. Neither painters nor, later, physicists could give him a satisfactory explanation. About 1790, with limited knowledge of Newton's work on optics, he looked through the prism the way one might look through a magnifying glass (instead of projecting an image of the spectrum on a wall or screen). Obviously he did not see what Newton had seen with his experiments and decided Newton was wrong. In his autobiography Goethe mentions the revulsion he had felt in his youth toward the mechanistic philosophy of Holbach; later he spent time with Romantic writers and philosophers in Jena, who also had an an extreme bias against mechanical science. Thus, his animus against Newton and solely material explanations of phenomena was of long standing. The measurement of physical phenomena by instruments could tell us nothing about the aesthetic and moral (sittlich) effect of colors. Goethe's concern was how we perceive color in various situations.

If the scientists declared Goethe wrong, artists were drawn to his work on color. Early on it was studied by the English painter J.M.W. Turner, who even made reference to it in his paintings. Clearly, Wassily Kandinsky was influenced by it. 

Because of Goethe I tend now to see his influence on painters who may or may not have known of his work, as in this painting by Emil Nolde (1867-1956). As in so many ways, Goethe anticipated everything!

The supposed moral effect of colors is something I have not thought much about. What can one say, for instance, about the fact that black is the New York "color"? Black has never had much charm for me, which may be why I have never felt like a New Yorker, even after living here 25 years. Again, Kandinsky, in a small treatise called On the Spiritual in Art, did discourse on this subject. While waiting in a doctor's office recently, I found among the 1000-year-old magazines an article discussing the subject of "emergenetics." It is a tool by which a profile of a person's behavioral and thinking characteristics can be drawn.

 

The "theory" behind emergenetics is that these characteristics are innate, but can be modified by environment and society. (This reminds me of what I learned in high school psychology: nature and nurture, all over again.) In case you are interested, the emergenetics self-assessment questionnaire will give you a picture of your thinking and behavioral traits. The result looks a bit like Goethe's color wheel. Goethe could have improved on this rather rudimentary scheme. I think he might have been delighted by the colors of the ice sculptures (click to enlarge) this winter in Harbin, China.

Carl Friedrich Zelter

The current exhibition at the Goethe-Museum in Düsseldorf (until January 18) honors Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832), well known in his lifetime as composer and musical impresario in Berlin but since his death primarily as Goethe's friend and correspondent.

Zelter was born in Berlin during what was called the "Seven Years' War" (which plays a role in Lessing's drama Minna von Barnhelm), went to school (the Gymasium) for a while until financial circumstances forced him to take up his father's trade as a mason and builder. The industriousness that characterized Zelter's later musical career is evident in his early years. While apprenticing as a mason, working his way to becoming a master in the trade, and finally taking over the family business on his father's death in 1787, he also traveled once a week from Berlin to Potsdam to receive instruction in composition from Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great. Not an easy journey in 1784. (Remember those stories about people walking 5 miles to school. Well, it really happened!)

In his "idle hours" he began composing music to contemporary poetry, and seven of these "Vertonungen" (musical settings) were published by Schiller in Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797. Zelter began making his way in the musical world, becoming director of the Berlin Sing-Akademie after the death of Fasch. In his autobiography Zelter described the origins of the Sing-Akademie as a gathering of people, both men and women, for drinking tea and singing contemporary music. (Yes, people actually created their own entertainment before the advent of the electrical age!) Fasch, however, who had been a pupil of C.P.E. Bach, was also devoted to reviving music of the past. Thus, the Akademie often performed works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Baroque-era composers. The most famous of its public concerts was the performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829, directed by Moses Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Zelter's pupil. All the many aspects of Zelter's many-sided musical career can be seen in the exhibition at the Goethe-Museum.

But it was his relationship with Goethe for which Zelter is best known today. The relationship began with letters from Zelter in 1799 and 1800 that included musical arrangements of Goethe's poems. During the next 30 years Zelter composed settings for almost 100 poems. Goethe was not at all impressed with those arrangements with which most of us are familiar today (and, indeed, fond of), those by Beethoven and Schubert. Too Romantic! It was Zelter's " radical reproduction of poetic intentions" (eine radicale Reproduction der poetischen Intentionen) that Goethe approved of. Goethe reciprocated with songs for Zelter's "Liedertafel" (male chorus): "Ergo bibamus," "Gewohnt, gethan," and "Frisch! Der Wein soll reichlich fließen."

Annus mirabilis for Zelter was 1802, when he met Goethe for the first time. Besides almost 900 letters between them, there were many meetings in the following three decades, in Weimar and in Bohemian spas. Goethe never visited Berlin. By the early 19th century he was too famous for a trip to the Prussian capital, which would have involved him in endless ceremonial activities. He sent his son August and daughter-in-law Ottilie in his stead in 1819. Zelter was their host, and August's diary of that journey mentions the many personalities he met as well as hearing on May 19 Cherubini's "great Credo" at the Sing-Akademie. The diary, recently edited by Gabriele Radecke, is a rather prosaic account, recording, as Wilhelm Bode put it (Der Sohn Goethes, 1918), "the purely factual, so that with these notes in hand 'der Papa,' later in conversation [bei mündlicher Unterhaltung], could follow the journey step by step and experience it in his powerful imagination."

On learning of Goethe's death, Zelter supposedly said: "His Excellency naturally has precedence, but I will soon follow" (Exzellenz hatten natürlich den Vortritt; aber ich folge bald nach). Indeed, Zelter died a few weeks later.

Picture credit: OTA-Berlin Constituency