Sehnsucht and Homecoming

I once saw a simple fish pond in a Japanese village which was perhaps eternal. A farmer made it for his farm. The pond was a simple rectangle, about 6 feet wide, and 8 feet long; opening off a little irrigation stream. At one end, a bush of flowers hung over the water. At the other end, under the water, was a circle of wood, its top perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water. In the pond there were eight great ancient carp, each maybe 18 inches long, orange, gold, purple, and black: the oldest one had been there eighty years. The eight fish swam, slowly, slowly in circles---often within the wooden circle. The whole world was in that pond. Every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes. I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon. Even now, I cannot think of it without years. Those ancient fish had been swimming, slowly, in that pond for eighty years. It was so true to the nature of the fish, and flowers, and the water, and the farmers, that it had sustained itself for all that time, endlessly repeating, always different. There is no degree of wholeness or reality which can be reached beyond that simple pond.

 Christopher Alexander: The Timeless Way of Building, page 38

Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew... It made me aware of nature---not, indeed as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden. And every day there were what we called "the Green Hills"; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They taught me longing-Sehnsucht...

C.S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy

I was deep in reading Alexander's book last night when I stumbled on the characteristically lyrical passage quoted above: Alexander employs the passage as an illustration of his "quality without a name," a qualify impossible, according to Alexander, to define with a single word, partaking as it does of several words' meanings: alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, and eternal. In Alexander's opinion, this "quality without a name" is present in individuals, buildings, rooms, towns, art, music: "It is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named." If I were to attempt to define it, my definition would run thus: Alexander's "quality without a name" is the the dawning recognition, achieved momentarily or otherwise, that the present set of circumstances, events, characteristics, is exactly as it should be, all around me suggests harmony and above all, a feeling that man can, perhaps only fleetingly, feel at home and at rest in this world. I realize, of course, that both my definition and Alexander's definition are deeply unsatisfying as philosophical dialectic. There is no exactness, no precision in the language, and in this instance, I'm willing to concede that in argument, very likely, these statements, as they stand, would be very difficult to defend.  

Nevertheless, I believe that what Alexander is trying to get at is at the heart of human experience: how do I come to feel at home in this world, when so often I feel a stranger? C.S. Lewis, in the quote above, describes a recurring experience both in his life and in his lifework, the feeling of sehnsucht: a word he rifled from German romanticism and that essentially means an insatiable desire (not a carnal desire, I must emphatically add). Sehnsucht is that "unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves? (Preface to The Pilgrim's Regress)." Lewis also describes the experience as a longing for a far-off country, a profound sense of nostalgia for a place unvisited but also strikingly reminscient of home. And of course, for Lewis as seemingly for Alexander (for I think Alexander's experience by the fish pond is akin to the experience that Lewis describes), the experiences are only intuitions of a higher experience, incapable of being defined satisfactorily. This desire testifies to two highly charged polarities in man's experience: his sense of belonging in the present and his suspicion or intuition that some more glorious future or situation awaits him. The former could be described as the biological or cultural sense: the desire to perpetuate the species and to make something of the world, so that it is more our home than when we arrived, and the latter could be described as the religious or philosophical sense: the desire to unfold the origin and mystery of the cosmos, discover its Creator, and ultimately, find peace in the purpose and destination of the individual soul. Of course, the two senses bleed into one another: religion not only has a transcendent quality, but it also has cultural and biological aspect, it is one of the ways in which man attempts to feel at home in the cosmos. 

Good music, art, ceremony, architecture, friendship, poetry all partake of Alexander's "quality without a name," and according to Alexander, we need only awaken our knowledge (a kind of Platonic anamnesis) of this quality, to recognize what constitutes goodness and badness. Even if one rejects Alexander's epistemology, Alexander's point should not be summarily dismissed. At root, it proposes the thesis that it is possible for man to make himself at home in the world, to live in a place that is beautiful. It takes Lewis' quest for sehnsucht and says, Yes, trust those intuitions and make of yourself and your home and your inner life something resembling those intuitions. At heart, it's a call to establish order in the soul, in the home, in the city, in the cosmos. Alexander writes:

Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe. Those of us who have been trained as architects have this desire perhas at the very center of our lives: that one day, somewhere, somehow, we shall build one building which is wonderful, beautiful, breathtaking, a place where people can walk and dream for centuries.

In some form, every person has some version of this dream: whoever you are, you may have the dream of one day building a most beautiful house for your family, a garden, a fountain, a fishpond, a big room with soft light, flowers outside and the small of new grass.  

One may distrust the lyricism, but the message is clear. The world is pliant in our hands, and we can choose two variant paths: one that induces anxiety, fearfulness, and dread, or one that suggests harmony and contentment. The latter is not an attempt to 'immanentize the eschaton,' it's not a burning rage to see the present world go up in flames only to see a newer, more hygenic order arise in its place. Such a view recognizes the limits and possibilities of human existence: its glories as well as its drudgeries, but it suggests that the drudgeries can be ennobled and raised to a higher plane. C.S. Lewis intuited this from an early age: like Alexander's Japanese pond, he saw in the little tin of leaves and twigs the piercing beauty of nature but no less the vocation to order nature, synthesisize it in our art, architecture, poetry, and music. And even if we never truly find restfulness in our present circumstances (as the Christian must believe, since true rest rests only in God, the effort will have meant the creation and perpetuation of beautiful things in our midst. Lewis writes:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. (The Weight of Glory)

To incardinate these desires in art seems to be one of the highest vocations, and if Lewis' achievements rest secure, one can only hope that the future is as assured for Alexander. Poetry, music, friendship can find their way into any home, but how successful will Alexander be in his crusade? Will the mass of men return to or reinvigorate a form of building and designing that partakes of these simultaneously earthy and transcendent qualities? Or will it continue to build monuments to despair and disharmony?* Will the symbol of our age be 100 stories of steel and glass? Or will it be something more humane, more divine? Will it have "the quality without a name?"

*In the debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, Eisenmen defends the notion that architecture should be disharmonious (since disharmony is more representative of our "cosmology" than harmony)  and should actually mirror the despair and anxiety of modernity: "I think you should just feel this harmony is something that the majority of the people need and want. But equally there must be people out there like myself who feel the need for incongruity, disharmony, etc." "What I'm suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything's all right, Jack, which it isn't. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn't all right. And I'm not convinced, by the way, that it is all right." And Alexander ends the debate:  

I can't, as a maker of things, I just can't understand it. I do not have a concept of things in which I can even talk about making something in the frame of mind you are describing. I mean, to take a simple example, when I make a table I say to myself: "All right, I'm going to make a table, and I'm going to try to make a good table". And of course, then from there on I go to the ultimate resources I have and what I know, how well I can make it. But for me to then introduce some kind of little edge, which starts trying to be a literary comment, and then somehow the table is supposed to be at the same time a good table, but it also is supposed to be I don't know what; a comment on nuclear warfare, making a little joke, doing various other things ... I'm practically naive; it doesn't make sense to me."

Jane Jacobs

'Constraints on materials, styles, heights, and sizes, rather than on functions; recognition of the street as the primary public space, and of pedestrians as the primary users of it; preservation of façades and street frontages, while facilitating change of use behind them: all such remedies, which are slowly emerging (for example in the renewal of Baltimore and other damaged American cities) and which have been powerfully advocated and illustrated by Leon Krier at Poundbury and by the New Urbanists in Italy and America – all owe an incalculable debt to Jane Jacobs.

But they also illustrate the way in which her own preference for "spontaneity" over "planning" cannot, in the end, be sustained. It is not planning that has destroyed the American city, but the wrong kind of planning directed towards the wrong kind of things.'

Roger Scruton
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006): cities for life

 

Why I Hate Modernism: The Tragedy of St. Stephen Walbrook

Three years ago, I vacationed in London for two weeks: I traveled solo, and so was able to indulge my own interests and eccentricities. One such interest was a desire to see as many of Christopher Wren's City Churches as possible. On my first visit to London, I had been in awe of the sublime beauty of St. Paul's Cathedral, and so returning years later, I wanted to see whether Wren had sustained that vision in less exalted circumstances, the design of several parish churches. 

I was not disappointed: Wren's English Baroque style is impressive on both small and grand scales. Of the many Wren churches I visited, my favorite was St. Lawrence Jewry, (the previous church had stood near the London Jewish Ghetto). Incidentally, the Church was playing host to a fine group of classical musicians when I visited, an encouraging sign. Many of the London Anglican churches hosted lunchtime or afternoon concerts.

When I visted St. Mary Abchurch, a very kind, elderly gentleman escorted me throughout the church, leading me up to the organ loft and allowing me to mount the exquisitely carved high pulpit. He was extremely knowledgeable, and had a great deal of historical and architectural lore to share. He told me that he 'motored' in from the suburbs every week, so that the church could be opened on weekdays for the visiting tourists. (During my own visit, a half-hour at least, not another tourist was to be seen. St. Mary Abchurch is one of the lesser lights in the Wren repertoire.) He'd gotten friendly with the parson a few years ago, and he had a key, and he thought it very important that such a significant building should be open. When I prepared to leave, I asked him if this was his parish church, did he come in on Sundays for service? 'No,' the old man said, 'I'm an atheist. I don't attend church.' 

The very same day I met my kindly atheist-guide, I visited several other Wren churches, including St. Stephen Walbrook.  I will not attempt to describe the revulsion I felt when confronted with the monstrosity depicted below. That very day, I became the implacable enemy of modernism and of all men who would, by subterfuge and in the teeth of a horrified opposition,  intrude their own inferior talents into a masterpiece.

That detestable object in the center of the Church is rumored to be an altar.

Christopher Alexander and the Timeless Way of Building

I'm currently reading Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way  of Building and acquainting myself with the remarkable ideas of this very interesting thinker.

His magnum opus is his recently completed, four-volume Nature of Order, where he attempts to craft a synthesis of the various strains of knowledge that inform his own thinking: philosophical, scientific, religious, and of course, architectural. As soon as I finish Timeless Way, I'll write up my own thoughts, but for the present, here are some links to whet your appetite:

Christopher Alexander: A Biography

Christopher Alexander's website, A Pattern Language

The text of a debate between modernist Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander

James Kalb on Alexander 

Interview with Alexander's friend and collaborator Nikos Salingaros  

(Inner garden of the Julian Street Inn, Shelter for the Homeless,
San Jose, California)

The Art of Loafing

"From the Chinese point of view, the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic contradiction between being busy and being wise. Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise. The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully."

--- Lin Yutang "The Importance of Living" 

The Beauty of Order

"To live within a just order is to live within a pattern that has beauty. The individual finds purpose within an order, and security - whether it is the order of the soul or the order of the community. Without order, indeed the life of man is poor, nasty, brutish, and short." 

--- Russell Kirk

Highlights of the Metropolitan Opera's 2009-2010 Season

The 2009-10 season at the Metropolitan Opera promises great things.

After a hiatus, the Met is again performing a German-language version of The Magic Flute, re-using Julie Taymor's production. I've only seen the production on the computer screen, but what I saw impressed me. The Magic Flute, with its improbably fantastic plot and its ethereal music, offers the gifted producer an opportunity to explore new scenic possibilities and remain faithful to the letter and spirit of Emanuel Schikaneder's libretto.

In a similarly whimsical but eminently musical vein, the Met offers again its English-language production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. 


Last year's production was my first time hearing and seeing Humperdinck's minor masterpiece, and I was pleasantly surprised by the real musical virtues of this fairy tale opera. I was, however, non-plussed by the production; it certainly compares unfavorably with Taymor's Magic Flute. 

Exaggeratedly grotesque, the production lacks the essential faerie quality that inspires Humperdinck's lyrical music. All in all, it seemed a missed opportunity to create a production as stunning and faithfully original as Taymor's Magic Flute. The Met also intends to reprise what I deemed a serious artistic mistake: the use of a tenor, rather than a soprano, for the role of the Witch. Philip Langridge, an otherwise talented singer, seemed uncomfortable in the role. And if the Met intended the production as child- and family-friendly, the mistake seems all the more unfortunate.

Despite these reservations, I cannot recommend the opera itself highly enough. It's too easy to assume a haughty attitude to works as whimsical as Humperdinck's fairy tale, but it would be a serious mistake to do so. 

The Met is also staging Richard Wagner's Der Fliegende Hollander, with Deborah Voigt singing the role of Senta. The first of Wagner's operas to lodge itself in the canon, Der Fliegende Hollander is famously difficult to stage, so I look forward to seeing how the Met's creative team resolves the difficulties. With Voigt at the helm, we can confidently expect a stunning musical performance.

The last production I'd like to highlight is the Met staging of Leos Janacek's From the House of the Dead. I've never heard the opera, but in preparation for hearing it at the Met, I've ordered a copy from the New York Public Library. I am cautiously pessimistic about the production itself, if only because it is the work of the iconoclast Patrice Chereau, designer of the infamous Bayreuth Ring cycle of 1976. 

Janacek is a favorite of my favorite contemporary philosopher, Roger Scruton, and so I anticipate hearing something quite marvelous.

Dvorak and the Stabat Mater

The next two weeks in the liturgical calendar contain feasts common both to East and West: the Nativity of the Virgin Mary on the 8th and the Exaltation of the Cross on the 14th, but the day following Holy Cross Day, the 15th, commemorates the Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, a feast peculiar to the Catholic Church. 

The Tridentine rite of the Catholic Church, now commonly known as the Extraordinary form of the Roman Mass, contains a variable part known as the Sequence: largely disused and abandoned in the modern rite, the Sequence was a poetic hymn inserted between the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Perhaps the most famous Sequence is the Dies Irae, one of the signature elements of the Requiem Mass: Mozart and Verdi, inter alia, composed justly famous versions.


The Sequence for the the feast of the Seven Sorrows (Sept. 15th) is Jacopone da Todi's Stabat Mater. Like the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater is a fine example of medieval Latin poetry. The Sequence, as a portion of the Mass, had both a didactic and devotional purpose: its ejection (or attempted ejection) from the modern rite is one of only many flaws in the contemporary Roman liturgy. 


As a devotional hymn, the Stabat Mater is surely meant to evoke an attitude of contrition in the listener: the poetry itself pictures the distressed Mother of God witnessing the agonies of her son's death. This kind of dramatic imagery' was doubtless intended to summon similar feelings 

The Flemish Josquin des Prez and the Italian Palestrina both wrote polyphonic versions of the Stabat Mater, but my personal favorite is Antonin Dvorak's, the Czech composer of the late 19th century. Composed after the unsettling deaths of two of his children, the work is suffused with an intense feeling of fellow suffering, the subject matter by no means remote to the grief-stricken father and family man. 


The extract below, Quando Corpus Morietur, is the last stanza of the Stabat Mater:

Quando corpus morietur,
Fac, ut animæ donetur
Paradisi Gloria.
Amen

When my body dies
Grant that to my soul is given
The glory of paradise.
Amen

I'd urge the would-be listener to acquire another version, if possible, of this fine piece: the above example is insufficient to the task. And if Dvorak's Stabat Mater piques your interest, do listen to his unfortunately little known Requiem.

The Way We Live: The Architecture of Community

Newman on the Gentleman

"It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blunder."

--- The Idea of a University