Bach us!

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by Richard Nilsen

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Sometimes you are in the mood for Chopin, sometimes you want the energy of Beethoven, yet again, you occasionally feel the need for the sonic jalapeño bite of Stravinsky. Music appeals to our moods. Many moods, many musics. But one composer seems to be just right for any mood: Johann Sebastian Bach. It doesn’t matter: depressed, joyous, expectant, busy, stressed — Bach helps cope with all these feelings. He is truly universal.

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So, it is surprising that he is so roundly misunderstood. One hears that his music is “mathematical,” as if it were worked out not from inspiration, but by algebraic formulae. Sometimes, it is expressed as if this very supposed regularity is what makes his music so satisfying.

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Yet, like so much conventional wisdom, it is wrong. The image of Bach as a staid old periwigged frown, writing his fugues and canons by strict adherence to rationality is almost the opposite of the truth. Bach is really nuts. I mean, really out there. But you have to listen rather than pay attention to the cliches.

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He makes the case, almost as a joke, in his Prelude and Fugue in C-minor from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude begins like a machine, chunking out a repeated pattern of notes outlining a progression of chords. Even in the score, it looks mechanical:

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But don’t be fooled. Three-quarters of the way through the piece, he breaks out into exuberant goofiness, flying this way and that, bringing the prelude to a seeming conclusion, then changing gears once again and careening off in a new direction before doing it one more time, bringing this craziness to a cascading conclusion with a naked Picardy Third (ending in major rather than minor).

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This unpredictability and irrationality is the norm, not the exception. Bach is, after all, a Baroque composer and all things Baroque are wild and crazy. It is what the Baroque is all about.

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Think of a Baroque painter, such as Peter Paul Rubens. Take his painting of Abraham meeting Melchizedek, which hangs in the National Gallery in Washington. It seems to be a painting of a tapestry held up by putti. The tapestry shows the prophet and priest in a scene from Genesis 14: Melchizedek offers bread and wine. But there appear to be two servants carting jugs of wine up from the cellar — are they “real” or are they part of the tapestry? The painting is richly ambiguous. And typically Baroque. Real toads in imaginary gardens.

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The Baroque loves energy, swirling action, and emotion over clarity.

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Take John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Its sentences long and stanzas indeterminate outlining in meter to us the import of its myth and truth can uncertain us in transcendent confusion its meaning simple.

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Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos:

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That’s six lines before we get to the verb, and the thing goes on for another seven lines before we even get the first period. Now, that’sBaroque.

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The list of weirdnesses and excesses in Bach’s music is long — too long to feature here. But let’s take just one of them, in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D-major. It features solo flute, violin and keyboard, with the keyboard as primus inter pares. Seven minutes into the 10-minute first movement everyone else shuts up while the keyboard continues maniacally for the next three minutes, piling arpeggios on arpeggios, scales on scales, and bopping us over the head with new keys totally unanticipated — a pedal A, which should resolve to the tonic D instead wanders off into the key of B, via an excursion through the dominant-of-a-dominant F-sharp. He scrapes a dissonant B-flat against an A in the bass. I could go on, but unless you are a musician, you might be bored by the technical talk. Leave it said that this extended cadenza has no precursor in music history, no simple explanation for its existence even here, and must at first performance have befuddled both its audience and the rest of the musicians in the orchestra, sitting there, twiddling their thumbs while the keyboardist works up a good sweat.

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A more restrained composer would have kept the music from derailing, kept it within bounds. But Bach isn’t so restrained. He is off to the races.

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Looking at a Bach score is an eye-opener as well as an ear-opener. We think of his music as gloriously harmonious, yet you look at the ink-dots on the music staves and see them colliding constantly like neutrons in a reactor, heating up the music: Bach is the single most dissonant composer before Arnold Schoenberg. Of course, all that grinding and grating is smoothed out by the resolution of those dissonances, making the whole appear safe. They are anything but.

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Bach harmonized some 400 Lutheran chorales, many redone several times, each freshly rethought and re-harmonized. They can be impressively complex, with appoggiaturas, passing tones and suspensions in all four voices (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) constantly adding dissonance. If you were to play only the off beats, you could mistake the music for atonal — yet it is always caught, sometimes at the last moment, and saved for consonance.

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The term “Baroque” comes from the Portuguese “barroco,” which is what they called a misshapen pearl. It was applied to the art of the 17th and early 18th century by critics who did not mean it as a compliment. They looked back at the art of those centuries and saw a lack of form and proportion. The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) wrote influential books describing the differences between the classic art of the Renaissance and the darker, sweeping art he called Baroque.

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Friedrich Nietzsche styled these two impulses in art as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” They are also called Classic and Romantic. All of art history is a pendulum swinging back and forth between the two. Bach’s idiosyncrasies were all tidied up and tucked in by the time Haydn and Mozart wrote. The sanity and proportion of these two was smashed by the Romanticism of Liszt and Wagner, whose excesses were pummeled again by Debussy and Stravinsky. Do we value order and mind, or do we seek emotion and energy?

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As William Blake wrote: “The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.”

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The sober Apollonian Modernism of the 20th century is now replaced by the Dionysiac Postmodern of the 21st. Back and forth.

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So, when we listen to Bach’s music, we should be alert to its headstrong waywardness. Who but Bach would crazy enough to write fugues for a solo violin? Trail out the conclusion of his famous Toccata and Fugue in D-minor well past the end of the fugue, in contrails of afterthought? Write an hour-and-half of 12 fugues on a single tune, turned upside-down, inside-out, backwards, slowed, sped — but all on that single tune, originally of only 12 notes in a span of only a minor sixth? Open his St. Matthew Passion with two orchestras and three choruses playing different music at the same time?

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So, never say to me that Bach’s music is mathematical. Or dry. Or rational. The man was nuts. Beautifully nuts.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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Questions, Preguntas, Fragen

 

 

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by Richard Nilsen

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I’m just not in a lectual,” she said, in a rich eastern North Carolina drawl.

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Yet, as a militant atheist, she has many a theological question, which may contradict her self-assessment as not being intellectual.

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“I don’t read literature,” she says, “I just read books, you know, fiction.”

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She reads constantly and widely, including books about religion.

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She is smart as a whip. I’ve known her since taking classes with her in college 50 years ago. She may not count herself as an intellectual, but I think she underestimates herself.

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More to the point, it should be noted that being intelligent is not the same thing as being intellectual. There are many ways of being smart, and not all of them incline toward the academic.

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Further, there is many a Ph.D. of impenetrable obtuseness. You get a doctorate not only through brilliance, but sometimes just by dogged shoveling — that’s why they call it “piled higher and deeper.” And, in reverse, I could name scholars who have made significant contributions to their field who began as school dropouts. (This is not to denigrate most graduate degrees. Most who hold them weigh in on the high end of the quotient of intelligence. Just that there are exceptions.)

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The fact is, being an intellectual is a turn of mind, not simply a quality of intelligence. We tend to think of an intellectual as someone who knows a lot, especially in terms of science, math, history, literature, law, or philosophy, but facts don’t make an intellectual; questions do.

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We all have questions, but intellectuals have questions about the questions. If I were to create a definition of “intellectual,” that would be it: questions about the questions.

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I will fess up to being an intellectual, but I will also admit that I’m not especially intelligent. I’m smart enough, I guess, but when I hear a Steven Pinker or a Ta-Nehisi Coates, I shrivel in humility. Those guys are smart. I’m just above average.

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Yet, most of my little gray cells are focused on questions about the questions. Those that pique my curiosity are about language, about perception, about the relevance of history — things that are often taken for granted, but are far more complicated, far muddier than the general run of people — even smart people — are likely to credit. Many of my blog entries have been about these questions, or questions about these questions.

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People far more acute than me have tackled them also. I don’t claim to have found any answers — or answers about answers — but that has never been able to quell my eyebrow furrowing. What is the relation of language to experience? Why do so many people believe that thinking requires words? And why do we think what we see is a direct cerebral process? Can we trust eyewitness accounts? Why do we?

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I see the same process in my betters. I’m at the bottom of a mountain, on the summit of which stands Albert Einstein, but what led to his breakthroughs are exactly the same kind of questions about the questions that I have. Or that you can have.

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 The fact that I read Milton or Livy and my friend reads best-sellers is of no import. We are both reading what we enjoy, which is more to the point. She is by most measures smarter than I am. She is alive, awake and interesting. I am a drudge by comparison. Yet, I could not change if I wanted to — the turn of mind I have been condemned to is almost genetic. I did not choose it; it captured me.

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One should never be intimidated by intellectuals. One should rather pity them. My wife used to call me “the man who couldn’t have fun.” By that she meant that I don’t enjoy parties; I listen to classical music and am bored by most pop music; I have no talent for being silly, which she always enjoyed, playing phone games with her daughter, taking on new personae — Meemaw and Peepaw.

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I always argued back that I have lots of fun. Really. I have fun reading Paradise Lost or listening Wozzeck or watching C-Span’s Book TV. Really. Really I do. I can’t help it.

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The intellectual can get so balled up in a knotty problem that the world falls away — like when you are caught up in a really good book and when you stop reading you are surprised to find yourself in a chair with your feet up on the ottoman wondering where did Ivanhoe run off to.

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And, so balled up, that you forget to pay the gas bill, forget to meet your daughter at the taqueria, fail to notice the gas gauge on empty. So balled up, a curl of smoke escapes your ears as your forehead furrows and you consider whether the fibonacci series really does describe the swirl of a whelk shell. (It doesn’t. Really. Google my name and “Fibonacci fib,” a blog I posted in 2013.)

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I wish I were smarter and the questions I question were more tractable, but even if the normal world looks at me like I’m an antisocial weirdo, I never ever wish I were not intellectual. It’s too much fun.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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The joy of text

 

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by Richard Nilsen

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What’s the most beautiful sentence in the English language?

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In his epic TV series, The Singing Detective, author Dennis Potter has his hero ask a similar question: “What’s the loveliest word in the English language?” An answer is offered: “Love.” But no, you’re responding to the sentiment behind the word. What is the loveliest word “in the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page?”

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His answer: “E-L-B-O-W.”

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You may have your own candidate. Mine might be “anaflaxis,” or perhaps “curmudgeon.” Both pleasant to say, “in the sound it makes in the mouth.”

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My nomination for the most beautiful sentence?

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“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

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It is the opening sentence of the second chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is followed by a tasty list of those comestibles that Mr. Leopold Bloom especially savored. “He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes.” And then he brings you up short with the consummation of the paragraph: “Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

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If you get past the last bit without a distinct sensory, gustatory and olfactory assault, you aren’t paying attention.

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But it’s that first sentence I want to examine. It has a cadence to it: You can scan its metrics two ways. First, you can break it down into four brief bursts: His name, as if it were the first line of a song; then comes the two-beat “ate with relish;” another two-beat “the inner organs,” and the peroration in another two beats — “of beasts and fowls.”

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You can, however, scan it as two lines, a pentameter followed by a tetrameter. And if you do it that way, you can feel behind the rhythm the ghost of Anglo-Saxon poetry, each line interrupted by a caesura.

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Mr. Leopold Bloom // ate with relish

The inner organs // of beasts and fowls.

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Either way, it is a graceful mix of iambs and dactyls. All that is fine, and worth noting. But the real treasure is paying attention to where in your mouth you articulate the various consonants and vowels: You shift the sounds around in your mouth, front to back, roof to base, like you were savoring a morsel of tasty food. These are words that as you say them out loud, you practically chew on. Try it: Mister Leopold Bloom ate with relish, etc. Your tongue flies around, your lips purse, your teeth come together and separate, your jaw moves forward and back, in a fine simulacrum of mastication.

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This is one tasty sentence.

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You should also note how heterogeneous the sounds are. Few consonants or vowels are repeated. There are five “L” sounds, which move your tongue up to the palate; four sibilant “S” sounds; four “O” sounds, making your lips project, as if you were smacking them; four short “I” sounds drawing the tongue back in the mouth; four rhotic “R” sounds, which scrunches your mouth up in a contortion (admittedly, a different sound if you speak them with the Irish accent that Joyce would have used); three “T” sounds, moving that tongue to hide just at the back of the teeth; three “E” sounds, stretching your cheeks out wide to pronounce; two “M” sounds, making you go, “mmm,” like you really enjoyed that mouthful; two “N” sounds, drawing the aroma up into your nasal cavities; two “B” bumps, rhyming with the single “P” to keep your lips plosive. There are two different “TH” sounds, an eth and a thorn — voiceless and voiced dental fricatives.

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All the rest of the sounds occur only once. Which means, to read the sentence out loud, your tongue, lips and jaw get a workout worthy of Jane Fonda.

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So much for the gnathometry of the sentence.

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 I also want to point out that the sentence is not difficult to comprehend. It is, in fact, a fairly ordinary sentence, outside its poetry. And I mention that because I want to make the case for the book as a whole. It has a reputation. People who haven’t yet essayed it are apt to fear it like ebola. But, these days, now nearly a hundred years after its conception, we have grown used to many of its more idiosyncratic habits. Stream of consciousness has made its way to paperback bodice rippers and Tom Clancy munitionology. And after MTV, how simple seems the rapid cutting and multiple points of view. Joyce should not present any unclimbable obstacles these days.

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Which makes it all the more important to read the book. It is some of the best prose ever put to paper. Joyce’s writing is elegant, precise, musical and redolent.

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The entire final chapter of the book is one of the greatest monologues in literature, when Molly Bloom lies in bed next to her husband and recalls her love affairs, her life, her body, her mind and heart. It alone raises Ulysses to the level of classic. Everyone should read it and weep.

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But to enjoy the prose, you have to break yourself of the habit of reading solely for content. Speed reading Ulysses is flying over country where the driving would reveal cities, rivers, regional foods, national parks, and people worth meeting. The prose is meant to noticed. It is unsurpassed. The plot of the book is hardly more than an excuse for the writing.

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Joyce wrote the book over many years, writing and rewriting like a demon. It takes reworking on an obsessive scale to get just the right mot juste in every case. You can see that in the manuscript, worked over so thoroughly, it is barely legible.

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Ulysses was written at the end of the First World War and published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach and the Paris bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. Joyce was 40 years old and an exile from his native Ireland. It chronicles a single day — June 16, 1904 — in Dublin, Ireland as lived by three primary characters, Stephen Daedalus, and Leopold and Molly Bloom. It’s a simple plot. Not much happens of consequence, but we follow the events in the minds of the characters as much as through the words of a narrator. And we aren’t often told which.

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But what is of consequence is the language. You can pretty much read any page and nearly swoon at the beauty of the words, the rhythm, pitch and melody.

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Of course, that’s not what caught public attention first. The book has been banned in many countries, including the U.S. It was considered obscene. It had to be printed in Paris, and at least 500 copies were seized and burned by the U.S. Postal Service as they were confiscated in shipment. Another 2000 to 3000 copies were seized and destroyed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1929.

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When Random House decided to take up the American publication, The publisher sued and in The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene. Random House published the authorized American edition in 1934.

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We say “authorized,” because Ulysses has been much pirated. Even printed as an underground book by publishers of pornography, wishing to capitalize on its notoriety. I have an edition by Collectors Publications of Industry, Calif., which features pages and pages of ads at the back for such other literary gems as True Love Stories of a Wayward Teenager, The Incestual Triangle, Four Way Swappers, and The Debauched Hospodar. (Along with Henry Miller’s The World of Sex and Lawrence Durrell’s Black Book and The Story of O. They seemed to make little distinction between actual literature and smut, i.e., they knew their audience).

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My wife’s father-in-law was a poet who had studied with Robert Frost, and after a trip to Europe, he smuggled in a copy of Ulysses in the 1920s concealed by binding it in a cover for a Nancy Drew mystery.

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To read it now, after Fifty Shades of Grey and countless Jackie Collins tomes, it one puzzles over the ruckus. You can search the pages ofUlysses looking for the “good bits” and be disappointed. Judge Woolsey in his judicious judicial opinion famously wrote, “whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” (Remember the mutton kidneys).

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 Woolsey’s opinion opened the door for Lady Chatterly’s Lover (or is it “Lady Loverly’s Chatter?”), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer., and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. It may be hard to define great literature, but you know it when you see it.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

In Praise of Ignorance

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by Richard Nilsen

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I am writing in praise of ignorance. I believe it is too often underappreciated, and I wish to underline its beauties and benefits.

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No, I am not being ironic. Erasmus was being ironic when he praised “Folly,” but here, I am dead serious. In his book, the Dutch humanist has the personification of Folly as a goddess who praises herself profusely, in ways that only underline her unworthiness. In my treatise, I am one who is profoundly ignorant who praises his own ignorance. And I am quite sincere.

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Of course, like many of us, when I was young, I knew everything. I certainly knew more than my parents, who were surprisingly clueless, considering they had been through the Great Depression and World War II. You would think they might have picked up a clue here or there, but no, when I was young, they were so far out of the loop, I had to make sure my friends were not too often exposed to them, for fear of horrible and miserable mortification.

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But as I have gotten older, I have come to know less and less. Or rather, the mathematical equation has changed. Yes, I have learned a great deal, both through book learning and through common experience, but while I have learned arithmetically, my ignorance has grown exponentially. The more I learn, the greater the percentage left to unknowing.

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Once, I might have believed that I had a handle on 80 percent of what was important to know (including which kind of shoes were cool), now the ratio has been reversed — and beyond — so that I would express it as one over infinity.

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The benefits of this are at least twofold.

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First, the recognition of my own ignorance has forced me into a state of humility. Being less sure of myself means I am less prescriptive to those around me. I have no business telling them what to do or think, when I am so clearly in the murk myself.

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My wife would chide me for this in later years. She asked me questions; when we were younger, I answered them lickety-split; in recent years, I often admitted, after a brief moment of pondering, “I don’t know.” This bothered her. “You used to know,” she would say, petulantly.

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Well, I used to think I knew. Now I’m not so sure. It seems as if all those factoids I rehearsed have been undercut as further research has made complicated what once seemed simple.

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It is certainty that causes most of the ills of the world, whether it is religious certainty or political certainty. It is certainty that put human beings through the gas chambers of Treblinka. It is certainty that hanged witches and that emptied the French city of Béziers in 1209 during the Albigensian Crusade when the leader of the attacking forces, unable to tell the heretic Cathars from orthodox Catholics declared, “Kill them all, God will sort them out.”

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In his report to the Pope, Arnaud Amalric, the abbot of Citeaux who ordered the massacre, wrote, “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance miraculously raged against it.”

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That’s what you do when you know for certain, when you believe you have a corner on knowledge. A little humble ignorance would have saved many lives.

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But ignorance has another important benefit.

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Before that, I should explain that I classify at least two types of ignorance. The first I call “pig ignorance.” This is ignorance that has no inkling of its nescience, but plows ahead in confident obliviousness. It is an ignorance of bluster and bullying — I think we all know who I’m talking about here.

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Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

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The pig ignorant do not know that they don’t know. Social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a famous study in 1999 that gave name to the Dunning-Kruger effect, i.e., that the ignorant do not recognize their lack of knowledge, but overestimate their abilities. (Conversely, the intelligent frequently underestimate their own abilities).

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This, of course, has been known for as long as there were people who scratched their heads over the confidence of the dumb. Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Or, as Charles Darwin has it, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

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The most famous formulation is probably that of Socrates, who concluded, according to Plato’s Apologia, “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to

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know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”

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This is the Socratic Paradox, more simply stated: “The only thing I know is that I do not know.”

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And that brings us to the second great benefit of ignorance — the Socratic ignorance, not the Trumpian ignorance. And that is, in this form, ignorance is synonymous with curiosity. Our ignorance prods us on to learning. We want to find out what we do not yet understand.The world is a great inviting and seductive quest.

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This is ignorance with open ears and open eyes — in fact, wide ears and wide eyes. It is a voracious ignorance that sucks up everything it can, knowing it can never quench its thirst or satisfy its hunger. There is always more, and the more it takes in the greater its capacity.

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This is the ignorance I praise. It keeps life perpetually entertaining, keeps its bearer engaged, and in discovery, not only of what others already know, but of what is entirely new to our species. It is a horizon constantly expanding outward to fresh lands and fresh seas. Pig ignorance is smug; curious ignorance is open and eager.

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This second, curious, ignorance is a prime vivifying benefit to the individual; the recognition of our ignorance, and its consequent humility is a prime benefit to the world at large. Fewer people die.

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And so, I praise ignorance, my personal goddess, after whom I quest in the darkness..

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

A slice of the Paideia

 

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by Richard Nilsen

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I want to talk about education. Specifically: Mine.

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It is really only my own that I can speak about. As Henry Thoreau wrote in Walden, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

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I don’t know if I can recommend my own course to others; all I can say is that it has worked for me.

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From my earliest years, I wanted to learn; indeed, I wanted to know everything. Literally: everything. (The older I’ve become the more I’ve faced the fact that the more you learn, the greater is the vastness of what you have yet to learn. Knowledge grows arithmetically; ignorance grows exponentially.)

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There is a story repeated in my family that when I entered second grade, I asked my parents, “Does this mean I get to go to college next year?” School has always been my briar patch.

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I cannot fix whatever is wrong with American schools — or American students (although I am pretty sure that whatever Besty DuVos has in mind is disastrously wrong), but I can recount my own transit through the grades from kindergarten through standing in front of a crowd in a silly robe and stupid hat to get my diploma handed to me. And really, beyond, because education for me has never stopped. There is little I get more pleasure from than tickling my little grey cells and expanding what is stuffed into my melon.

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Mine has been an entire life in a single direction: learning. Others wanted to play baseball, or drive fast cars, perhaps get married and have a houseful of wee bairns; I wanted to get my hands on another book, pore through it and achieve the greatest pleasure from it. Every book — or every class I took — stood not by itself, but as an addition to that I had absorbed before, until all that I had learned became a single great web of interrelated experience.

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In effect, this isn’t simply education, but paideia, the whole of it all rolled into a ball: education, history, culture, philosophy, literature, music, the arts, psychology, economics, law, physics, botany, politics — the whole undifferentiated, all of a piece.

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This has given me the permission — or the chutzpah — to write not only about art, but about music, architecture, dance, politics, history — even about typography. My assignment at The Arizona Republic, where I worked for 25 years, was critic “without portfolio.”

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To quote William Blake, “Less than all cannot satisfy.”

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It has all given me a rather peculiar attitude toward education: that it should make me more complete (and that it should be fun).

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But I’m afraid what I consider education is being left behind by a newer, narrower version: to provide skills to enter the job market. That is not education; that is training. Never have I considered how a class might help me get a job or make a career.

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Is there something subversive about my version? Perhaps.

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Back in the Pleistocene, when I taught photography and art at a two-year college, I told my class on the first day that I considered it my duty as a teacher to make them unemployable. They were to learn in my class the utter ambiguity and equivocality of everything, to learn to question every assumption, to scratch every itch of curiosity, no matter where it lead.

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Current education seems narrowly focused on the “how,” but I was intent on asking the “why.”

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If there is any central argument to my education it is that there has never been a goal, or at least, its only goal was itself. As a matter of fact, I have considered education — my own at least — to be a prophylactic against career, against the limitations of a single direction in my life. I wanted it all.

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I am not advocating that everyone learn the way I did, but that way fit me perfectly. While I have a modest college degree, most of what I have learned, I have come by on my own. My late wife maintained that all learning is self-taught. We are all autodidacts, although we may have been helped by a teacher here and there along the way.

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Even if you had a good teacher, you learned for yourself; if you didn’t internalize the lesson, it wasn’t really learned. How many memorized enough to pass the exam and then promptly forgot it all?

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I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. At the age of 70, this gives me unlimited opportunity for the years ahead. Who knows?

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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Odds bodkins

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by Richard Nilsen

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We are losing Shakespeare. He is standing on the dock and our boat is drifting off into a fog; we look back and it becomes harder and harder to make out his figure standing there.

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What is happening to the Bard is what has already happened to Chaucer and what has now completely obscured the author of Beowulf. Our drifting boat is

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language, and language drifts over time.

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So, what are fardels? A bare bodkin?

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And when Juliet asks, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”, why do so many want to answer: “Here! Here I am.” Many an actress speaks the words “Wherefore ART thou, Romeo?” when it needs to be “Wherefore art thou ROMEO?” “Why are you Romeo, when any other name would be better?”

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“Now is the winter of our discontent” gets pulled out of context to mean, “We have arrived at the winter of our discontent,” when it is really just a noun-phrase and implies exactly the opposite: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.”

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Words disappear and change meaning. When Hamlet says, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” the word “conscience” did not mean Jiminy Cricket. “Conscience” meant “consciousness,” and specifically “self awareness.” It wasn’t his scruples that prevented the Dane from killing Claudius, but his awareness of unintended consequences — in other words, what the whole soliloquy is about.

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By the way, fardels are burdens, something you might carry around, like a hobo’s bindle or an Aussie swagman’s  matilda.

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As for a bodkin, nowadays it is a type of sewing needle, but in Shakespeare’s time and before, it was a dagger. Chaucer says that “with bodkins was Julius Caesar murdered.” And in John Stow’s Chronicles (1565), it says “The chief worker of this murder was Brutus Cassius, with two hundred and sixty of the Senate all having bodkins in their sleeves.”

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A quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore tracks the etymology. In A Glossary of Obscure Words and Phrases in the Writings of Shakspeare and his Contemporaries Traced Etymologically to the Ancient Language of the British People as Spoken Before the Irruption of the Danes and Saxons, by Charles Mackay, printed in London in 1887, tells us that “bodkin” can be traced to the Gaelic biodag, a dagger, “But the anterior root is the Keltic and Gaelic bod, a sharp point that pricks, whencebodachean, a sharp-pointed instrument.”

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I can’t help quoting the rest of the entry, for a good laugh at Victorian squeamishness: “On this radical [root] word, that exists in many Asiatic as well as European languages, might be founded an instructive examination into the occult and deeply comprehensive meaning of the root words of all languages, starting from the fact thatbod signifies not only a point that pricks, but the divinely ordered instrument of human propagation, which none but physicians speak of without rendering themselves liable to the imputation of indecency and impropriety.

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As in, “Look at the bod on that lifeguard!”

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The first Shakespeare play I ever saw live was Julius Caesar at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., when I was in seventh or eighth grade. It made quite an impression, but I was confused at several points, not the least wondering what kind of sect might be called “sleep-o-nights.” Was it like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks? I suppose my confusion counts as a minor mondegreen. “Let me have men about me such as sleep o’ nights,” says Caesar. I tried for years to figure out who these people were.

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We also studied in class the Merchant. I was spared the horror of Romeo and Juliet, the play that misguided educators believe is the best way to engage teenagers with Elizabethan drama. Then they have to explain what the underage protagonists were doing all night long together in Juliet’s  bedroom. Remember, when I was that age, it was at an era when the Rolling Stones had to bowdlerize the lyrics of “spend the night together” on Ed Sullivan, turning them into “spend some time together.” Mrs. Grundy, indeed.

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Shakespeare’s plays are not so far gone that a great performance cannot strike home. When excellent actors speak the lines, they can still make the dialog sound like conversation instead of declamation. But much verbiage will have to be glossed over by the audience, asked to parse out the meaning by context.

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Certainly it is more than just language that distances us from Shakespeare. Culture has moved, too. It is difficult to hear the implicit anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice, and it takes a wrenching deconstruction to make Taming of the Shrew bearable in a time of failing patriarchy.

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And then there are all those kings and dukes. When the exploits of the feckless Windsors fill tabloids, it is hard to sympathize with authoritarian monarchs offing each other and demanding succession for their kin.

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But more than anything, it is the language that makes the problem. Not just vocabulary, but speech patterns have changed, and continue to change over time. Just to beat a dead horse, compare Harry and St. Crispin’s Day with the incoherent ramblings of a certain orange president.

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Even ordinary people used to speak and write with more formality than we encounter today. Listen to those Civil War letters recited in the Ken Burns documentary and marvel at the elaborate sentence structures and the casually assumed cultural references. Or listen to one of those scratchy Edison recordings of politicians in the late 19th century or early 20th century and hear in them the rhetoric of Cicero translated to English. To speak like that nowadays is to court derision and perhaps a skit onSaturday Night Live.

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The French have an answer to all this impermanence in language: The Académie Française, which has the official power to define and preserve the French tongue. Or try. The conservatism of the Academie has been a losing battle in the internet age.

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Language always changes, sometimes quickly, sometimes over centuries. We have a faulty idea that Latin was the same in the days of Brutus as it was in the time of Nero or later, as written by Augustine. All of these Latins were different. And, of course, regional Latins morphed into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. They continue to morph (despite the Académie Française).

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So, is there anything we can do about it? Not really. Consider the speech of your teenage children, which sometimes seems like a foreign language. Their children will subsequently mystify them. And so it goes.

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Even the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt shifted over the centuries, despite the astonishing conservatism of that culture.

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So, when I hear complaints about the singular “their” or the use of “hopefully,” or “less” instead of “fewer,” I cannot get all pedantic. These are evolutions in our language. After all, there used to be a distinction made between “will” and “shall.” No one pays any attention to that anymore, nor should they. “Thou” and “thee” are still there to be used if wanted, but you would sound like a Shakespeare, and he lived 400 years ago. Tempus fugit.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

Feet of clay

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by Richard Nilsen

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Sometimes, it seems we are entering a new period of Victorianism — an era of increasing censoriousness and a demand for superhuman rectitude. We have not yet got to the point of calling furniture legs “limbs,” but there is an increasing silliness to language proscription.

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I don’t want to call it “political correctness,” because much of our new-found sensitivity to language is certainly a good thing. Not calling people by ethnic slurs cannot be considered thought control. It is merely civility.

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But, on the other hand, some forms of this hand-fanning of our outraged cheeks is, like Victorian prudery, simply a denial of the facts of human existence.

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Can we expect our heroes to be spotless virgins? Our artists to be paragons of morality? If we check the record, we will discover that if we make such demands, we will soon have to empty our museums, shut down our theaters and movie houses, clear our bookshelves, and pretty well have to impeach all of Congress — to say nothing of most of the 45 white men who have taken up temporary residence on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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We would be in danger of emulating the Taliban vandals who blew up the Buddha statues of Bamiyan in 2001, or the ISIS bulldozing of Syrian Palmyra in 2015. The certainty of self-righteousness is perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world.

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Just consider the Iconoclasts of the Beeldenstorm in 16th Century Netherlands, when Calvinists tore through Catholic churches and busted statues and destroyed paintings; or the great Gothic cathedral statues with their heads knocked off by French revolutionaries in the late 18th century; or the book burnings of Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” in 1497; or the destruction of the library in Baghdad in 1258; or that by the Qin Dynasty (including book burning and the burying of Confucian scholars) in the Third Century BCE; or the Nazi book burnings of 1933; or the destruction of Aztec and Mayan codices in the 1560s.

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Of the burning of books there is no end.

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In Chile in 1973; in Sri Lanka in 1981; in Croatia in the 1990s; in Egypt in 2001; in Florida in 2011. Thousands of rare Islamic texts were destroyed by al-Qaeda in Timbuktu in 2013. This short list is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Moral outrage mixed with absolute certainty has done more harm than all the supposed damage contained in the books burned or the art smashed.

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There is a great deal of beauty and wisdom created or written by those whose lives were never exemplary. It is a rare human being with no skeletons in the closet. Let’s consider some of those artists and historical figures who have been praised, read, and listened to over the centuries.

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My personal favorite is George Gordon, Lord Byron, who sodomized his wife, slept with his sister, got a serving girl pregnant, and then impregnated and abandoned his underage mistress, Claire Clairmont, separating her from her daughter, Allegra, who died under Byron’s care. By the way, he also liked to diddle young boys.

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So, should we stop reading Childe Harold or Don Juan? Or “She sleeps in beauty, like the night”?

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Roman Polanski is a reprehensible human being, but a very good filmmaker. Should we stop showing his Macbeth to high school students because of his crimes? Not if we want to convince those teens that Shakespeare is actually an exciting playwright.

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Separating the artist from his work is essential. Otherwise, we will need to get rid of our copies of Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll, after all, enjoyed taking photographs of naked little girls.

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And if we are religious, we will have to stop singing that Ave Maria, because Franz Schubert liked sex with underage boys.

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Artists are as venal, evil, self-centered, confused and destructive as the rest of us. The history of art is a landfill of disturbing biography.

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Robert Frost sounds wise and paternal in his poems, but he was such an S.O.B. off the page that he drove his son to suicide.

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William Burroughs and Norman Mailer have been hell on wives.

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Benvenuto Cellini was a murderer. Ezra Pound was an anti-Semitic apologist for Fascism. Herbert von Karajan was a card-carrying Nazi. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hector Berlioz were drug fiends.

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And we cannot begin to count the number of drunken novelists.

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Percy Shelley married a 16-year-old girl and then told her that he was in love with another teen-ager and that maybe all three could live together.

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Or that Richard Wagner wrote Tristan und Isolde while enjoying a love affair with a woman he borrowed from her husband, who was housing and feeding the freeloading composer at the time. Wagner’s wife wasn’t happy about the arrangement, either.

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This rogue’s gallery of adulterers, criminals, perverts and wackos made some of the greatest art of all time.

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Our heroes just can’t seem to keep their noses clean.

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One after the other they self-destruct, turning from demigods into blackguards before our very eyes.

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Pick one, let his luster shine for a few moments and then notice the worm.

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And I mean some of the most accomplished and meaningful personalities of the American century: Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer. Elvis was a drug addict.

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The list is long and luxurious, and the heroes in question come from politics, sports and the arts. We admire their accomplishments, even aspire to be like them, and then come to find out, as with O.J. Simpson, that they beat their wives and worse.

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It isn’t just a recent phenomenon.

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For every Woody Allen there is a Charlie Chaplin; for every Roman Polanski there is a Fatty Arbuckle. And let’s not forget Ingrid Bergman.

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Let us not forget the charm of Ty Cobb, the graciousness of Babe Ruth and the temperance of Pete Rose.

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Madonna raised eyebrows with her reputed NBA exploits, but what of  Clara Bow, who had a thing for the 1927 University of Southern California football team. Yes, the whole team.

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Just think of some of their stories, moving backward in time. Errol Flynn, the patriotic hero on screen, was a Nazi sympathizer who died in a hotel room with an underage girl.

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Horatio Alger, before he became the author of those inspirational rags-to-riches stories that Republicans like to recommend to those on welfare, was a minister who lost his job because he liked to seduce young boys.

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It seems as if no one can escape: Who was the most saintly man of this century? Mahatma Gandhi liked to sleep naked with young girls, and he regularly weighed his excrement in the morning, keeping track of ingoing and outgoing, both.

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So beside that, a governor with his pants down in a motel room may seem kind of tame. Even if he later became president.

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I do not mean to debunk all our heroes, but to better understand what they are and what role they play in public life.

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But when we hold our heroes up to higher standards than humans can sustain, we are like little children who cannot tell the actor from the part.

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An adult doesn’t condemn Hamlet because Richard Burton was a lush.

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Our heroes are capable of doing all the things ordinary people can do, including lying, cheating and stealing. Murder and rape are not beyond them, nor is mere vanity or meanness.

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Like humans, our heroes are bundles of contradictions; they are large and contain multitudes.

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For their crimes, we prosecute them as we do anyone else. For their simpler sins, we develop short memories. For their art, we need to be grateful.

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What we forget is that an artist is an artist for what he makes, not for who he is.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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