#171 Sun (12/11/22) - Alastor, The Spirit of Solitude, Mutability, Thalaba The Destroyer, Madoc, Alexander Scriabin
The following were all gleaned from two passing references in Damian Murphy's Flower Dream Sermon.
[1] I had a favorite pendant, for example, that I’d frequently place between the pages of an
illustrated volume of Shelley’s Alastor. Of course my parents, being terribly protective, would
never have allowed me to own such a book. I vaguely remember having stolen it from one of my
older brothers. There my little treasure would remain for several days, pressed like a plucked lily
against a carefully selected passage. I was convinced that it would inherit some of the qualities of
the piece and pass them on to me.
[2] We were sitting at the dinner table with a bottle of Syrah between us, its contents progressively diminishing as we discussed the relative merits of fidelity and betrayal. An inspired rendition of Scriabin’s Poem of Fire was on the phonograph. ... By that time, I’d finished what remained of the bottle and had placed the needle on the B-side of the record. ... I stood with both hands gently clasped
behind my back as the initial swell of Poem of Ecstasy wafted through the room like a cloud of
incense.
=============================
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from 10 September to 14 December in 1815 in Bishopsgate, near Windsor Great Park and first published in 1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend Thomas Love Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. It is considered to be one of the first of Shelley's major poems.
Peacock suggested the name Alastor, which comes from Roman mythology. Peacock has defined Alastor as "evil genius". The name does not refer to the hero or Poet of the poem, however, but instead to the spirit who divinely animates the Poet's imagination.
In Alastor the speaker recounts the life of a Poet who zealously pursues the most obscure part of nature in search of "strange truths in undiscovered lands", journeying to the Caucasus Mountains ("the ethereal cliffs of Caucasus"), Persia, "Arabie", Cashmire, and "the wild Carmanian waste". The Poet rejects an "Arab maiden" in his search for an idealized embodiment of a woman. As the Poet wanders one night, he dreams of a "veiled maid". This veiled vision brings with her an intimation of the supernatural world that lies beyond nature. This dream vision serves as a mediator between the natural and supernatural domains by being both spirit and an element of human love. As the Poet attempts to unite with the spirit, night's blackness swallows the vision and severs his dreamy link to the supernatural.
Once touched by the maddening hand of the supernatural, the Poet restlessly searches for a reconciliation with his lost vision. Though his imagination craves a reunion with the infinite, it too is ultimately anchored to the perceptions of the natural world.
Ruminating on thoughts of death as the possible next step beyond dream to the supernatural world he tasted, the Poet notices a small boat ("little shallop") floating down a nearby river. Passively, he sits in the boat furiously being driven down the river by a smooth wave. Deeper and deeper into the very source of the natural world he rushes. Like the water's surface supports the boat, the supernatural world "cradles" the mutability both of nature and of man.
As his senses are literally dulled, his imagination helps him sense the spirit's supernatural presence. Instead of perceiving the vision through the senses, the Poet imaginatively observes her in the dying images of the passing objects of nature. The boat flows onward to an "immeasurable void" and the Poet finds himself ready to sink into the supernatural world and break through the threshold into death.
When the Poet reaches the "obscurest chasm," his last sight is of the moon. As that image fades from the Poet's mind, he has finally attained transcendence to the supernatural world. The journey to the very source of nature led, finally, to an immanence within nature's very structure and to a world free of decay and change.
=========================
Eight lines from the poem "Mutability" are quoted in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) in the scene when Victor Frankenstein climbs Montanvert in the Swiss Alps:
We rest. A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same! For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
=========================
Southey is mentioned in the wikipedia page about Shelley's Alastor, and looking at Southey immediately lead me to Thalaba The Destroyer and Madoc.
Thalaba the Destroyer is an 1801 epic poem composed by Robert Southey. The origins of the poem can be traced to Southey's school boy days, but he did not begin to write the poem until he finished composing Madoc (It is based on the legend of Madoc, a supposed Welsh prince who fled internecine conflict and sailed to America in the 12th century) at the age of 25. Thalaba the Destroyer was completed while Southey travelled in Portugal. When the poem was finally published by the publisher Longman, it suffered from poor sales and only half of the copies were sold by 1804.
The poem is divided into twelve "books" with irregular stanza structures and unrhymed lines of poetry. The story describes how a group of sorcerers work to destroy the Hodeirah family in an attempt to prevent a prophecy of their future doom from coming true. However, a young child named Thalaba is able to escape from the slaughter. After one of the sorcerers hunts down Thalaba to kill him, the sorcerer is defeated by a great storm and his powerful magical ring comes into Thalaba's possession. With the ring, Thalaba travels across the Middle East to find a way to defeat the evil sorcerers. In the end, Thalaba is able to stay true to Allah and is guided by the prophet Mohammad in destroying the sorcerers.
Southey uses the poem to describe various superstitions and myths, with a heavy reliance on repetition of various themes that link the myths together. Critics gave the work mixed reviews, with some emphasising the strong morality within the work or the quality of the poetry. However, other critics felt that the lack of a strong lyrical structure and the use of Middle Eastern myths detracted from the poem.
Inspired by:
Lord Byron cited Vathek as a source for his poem The Giaour. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron also calls Vathek "England's wealthiest son". Other Romantic poets wrote works with a Middle Eastern setting inspired by Vathek, including Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh (1817).[8] John Keats's vision of the Underworld in Endymion (1818) is indebted to the novel.
=========================
Alexander Scriabin
[Alexander] Scriabin was interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch theory, and later became interested in theosophy. Both influenced his music and musical thought. During 1909–10 he lived in Brussels, becoming interested in Jean Delville's Theosophist philosophy and continuing his reading of Helena Blavatsky.[22]
Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician", and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group."[34] Scriabin developed his own very personal and abstract mysticism based on the role of the artist in relation to perception and life affirmation. His ideas on reality seem similar to Platonic and Aristotelian theory, though much less coherent. The main sources of his philosophy can be found in his numerous unpublished notebooks, in one of which he wrote "I am God". The notebooks contain complex and technical diagrams explaining his metaphysics. Scriabin also used poetry to express his philosophical notions, though arguably much of his philosophical thought was translated into music, the most recognizable example being the Ninth Sonata ("the Black Mass").
Though Scriabin's late works are often considered to be influenced by synesthesia, an involuntary condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Scriabin actually experienced this.[35][36] His colour system, unlike most synesthetic experience, accords with the circle of fifths, which tends to prove it was mostly a conceptual system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks.[citation needed]
Indeed, influenced by theosophy, he developed his system of synesthesia toward what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a weeklong performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was somehow to bring about the world's dissolution in bliss.
Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, but they are among his most famous, and some are performed frequently. They include a piano concerto (1896), and five symphonic works: three numbered symphonies, The Poem of Ecstasy (1908), and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a machine known as a "clavier à lumières", also known as a Luce (Italian for "light"), a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's tone poem. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. =========================
Comments
Post a Comment