Reading the Aeneid this week I came across the wonderful passage in which Aeneas, landing in Carthage, comes across murals of the Trojan War:
'[..]Here, for the first time,
Aeneas dared to hope he had found some haven,
for all his hard straits, to trust in better days.
For awaiting the queen, beneath the great temple now,
exploring its features one by one, amazed at it all,
the city’s splendor, the work of rival workers’ hands
and the vast scale of their labors—all at once he sees,
spread out from first to last, the battles fought at Troy,
the fame of the Trojan War now known throughout the world,
Atreus’ sons and Priam—Achilles, savage to both at once.
Aeneas came to a halt and wept, and “Oh, Achates,”
he cried, “is there anywhere, any place on earth
not filled with our ordeals? There’s Priam, look!
Even here, merit will have its true reward . . .
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.
Dismiss your fears. Trust me, this fame of ours
will offer us some haven.'
(The Aeneid, 1.543-561, tr. Fagles)
There is almost too much brilliant composition on display here to fully explain. On the barest, functional level, Virgil needed a way for Aeneas to know he was in safe territory- but in a moment of inspiration picked a mode which makes a vivid and psychologically complex tableau. A veteran of a terrible decade-long war, who has been roaming the seas for six years, suddenly happens upon an intricate artistic depiction of that past, which includes depictions of himself. A rush of emotions battle within him. He weeps, naturally, for the loved ones whose end he sees so graphically depicted (the humiliation of Hector's corpse elicits an almighty 'groan'); he relives the horrors of war. Yet he also marvels at the beauty of the art, which Virgil ingeniously uses to show him- how odd it must feel- how many years have slipped by, and that he is become a living legend, engraved in stone like ancient heroes even in the flush of youth. This fame wins him safety, hence why the sight allows him to hope, at last. Yet it was built on such grief and bloodshed- grief and bloodshed he has been trying to flee. Hence that brilliantly bittersweet cry '“is there anywhere, any place on earth/ not filled with our ordeals?' Note that he reads this mural as a symbol of Carthage's respect, admiration and compassion:
'Even here, merit will have its true reward . . .
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart. '
(ibid)
Interestingly, Virgil's great fan Dante, in his Purgatorio, echoes this scene, but flips the reaction of the viewer right on its head (except for the admiration of the art). In Purgatory, Dante walks (accompanied by Virgil, no less) up a path filled with marble carvings cautioning against pride (in earthly fame, among others), and the carvings include Troy:
'Mark this, I saw Troy's ash and hollowed stone.
Ah, Ilion! How humbled and how vile,
Now picked out in those signs, you seemed to be! What master of the pencil or the brush
could reproduce those shadows and those strokes
which, there, would make the sharpest mind admire?'
(Purgatorio 11.61-66, tr. Robin Kirkpatrick)
What was for Aeneas a joyful proof of his renown, becomes, in Dante's tale, a cautionary tale.
Aeneas's reaction to the murals also, naturally, invites comparison with Homer's depiction of Odysseus in Phaeacia. There, Odysseus, already welcomed as a disguised visitor at court, actually asks the royal bard to sing the tale of the Trojan horse ('the cunning trap that good Odysseus brought one day to the heights of Troy' (tr. Fagles)), before dissolving into tears which eventually lead to the revelation of his identity. The emotions Odysseus processes during the song are doubtless the same as Aeneas's. But what was the purpose of requesting the tale? Again, complex emotions: curiosity about the extent of his fame, vanity, longing for lost friends, and, more functionally (and in typical Odyssean fashion) a ruse to reveal his identity while tales of his glory are fresh in his hosts' mind, so he could be most favourably welcomed. The strategy is elegant, for sure, but I prefer the element of shock and surprise in Virgil's tableau.
Odysseus's tale, in turn, recalls a fine episode from the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, from its last book. The hero, Rama, king of Ayodhya, has been estranged from his wife Sita for many years now; it was rumoured that she was unfaithful to him while kidnapped by the demon-king Ravana, and so he banished her for the sake of his reputation. The twins she gave birth to shortly after their separation have grown up in the hermitage of the epic's author, Valmiki, and learnt from him the whole Ramayana, as yet unperformed to the rest of the world. There comes a day when Rama performs a lavish religious sacrifice, and Valmiki commands the twins to go sing the epic in public, 'especially.. at the gate of Rama’s pavilion, where the sacrifice is taking place.'
'...[Rama] listened to that poem, composed by the aged Valmiki, unheard till then, set to music in multiple cadences, accompanied by stringed instruments, in measured rhythm, and, hearing those youthful musicians, [he] was greatly mystified.'
[Ramayana, Book 7, Chapter 94, tr. Shastri (1952)]
Stunned by the brilliance of composition, the king enquires after the identity of the author, and the pupils reply:
'“The blessed Valmiki, who is attending the sacrifice, is the author of the poem [...] Your conduct, your circumstances, thine entire life is unrolled with its vicissitudes. If you desirest it, O King, you mayest hear it from us in the intervals of the sacrifice, in your moments of leisure.'
(ibid)
A surreal moment for Rama, no doubt, just as it was for Aeneas. Further complexity of emotion arises as the epic stirs the memories of the wife he has wronged, and when he begins to suspect the identity of his sons,
'Surrounded by the ascetics, kings and monkeys, Rama listened during many days to the sublime and wonderf[ul] epic, and while the two sons of Sita, Kusha and Lava, were singing, he recognized them. Having reflected deeply, he summoned messengers of virtuous conduct and in the assembly spoke to them of that princess, saying:—
“Go and repeat my words to that Blessed One and say:—
“‘If she be irreproachable in her conduct and without sin, then, should she so desire it and has the approval of the Rishi, let her prove her good faith!’
(ibid, Ch. 95)
An amusing detail is that the twins tell him the Ramayana includes its six main books and the Uttarakanda, the book in which this story is contained. Should their recitation not lead, then, to Rama hearing the story of himself hearing the tale? As in One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the miraculous manuscript Aureliano reads at the end, which encompasses the whole story of his family:
'he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.'
(tr. Rabassa)
*
I had never cared much for Wordsworth's poetry before today, when I decided to dip back into his Prelude to see if I'd missed anything. I skimmed through until I happened upon this passage:
'I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;'
On any day, it would have been a wonderful verse, but at that moment, I was listening, after a long time, to the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, played with aching tenderness by Louis Lortie. The two Romantics collided with incredible force. (Yes yes Beethoven straddled the eras blah).
There was something very strange, I thought, about how this poem allowed me to learn, in minute detail, from a man dead hundreds of years, his most intimate impressions of philosophy, his land, and, indeed, his entire life. I found myself thinking of the poem that WH Auden wrote for the tragically short-lived poet Edward Thomas. The last stanza is deeply moving.
'To E. T.
Those thick walls never shake beneath the rumbling wheel
No scratch of mole nor lisping worm you feel
So surely do those windows seal.
But here and there your music and your words are read
And someone learns what elm and badger said
To you who loved them and are dead.
So when the blackbird tries his cadences anew
There kindles still in eyes you never knew
The light that would have shone in you.'
Trawling further through Wordsworth's pantheistic verse, I naturally revisited Coleridge, and noted a nice parallel in the use of musical imagery to describe sensitivity to invisible forces. To the latter, I 'was obedient as a lute/That waits upon the touches of the wind,' writes Wordsworth in the Prelude. And in Eolian Harp Coleridge writes:
'And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?'
And, taking a somewhat bigger jump through space and time, Rabindranath Tagore, in the first poem from his Gitanjali (Song-Offerings):
'Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable .
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.'
*
Speaking of Wordsworth, I came across these sarcastic words by Thomas Carlyle, written almost 200 years ago, which reminded me both of Wordsworth's deep relationship with his land, and how far we have moved from it:
'For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.'
(from Signs of the Times, by Thomas Carlyle (1829))
*
I discovered the marvel that is the baptistery of Parma Cathedral this week, with its stunning Byzantine dome and sheer abundance of intricate, lavishly coloured frescoes. I found it thanks to this beautiful video from Floriani Sacred Music:
I discovered the work of the criminally underrated Surrealist artist Remedios Varo this week. The works filled me with nostalgia for childhood stories and Saint-Saëns's Aquarium. Take a masterpiece such as Papilla Estrellar (below). There's a kind of human characterisation and consciousness of childhood wonder to Varo's work which makes it more appealing than melting timepieces or desolate landscapes I'd seen in other Surrealist painters.
And to finish the week, a pleasingly vigorous performance of Chopin's Op 6 no 1 by Isaac Mikhnovsky (so many people play the mazurkas like they're afraid of, or slightly uncomfortable playing, them).
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