Cassandra Voices

Tag: Giambattista Vico

  • SUVs: A Symbol of Our Demise

    This article has been gestating for some time. I must admit to a long-standing loathing for cars. Far from mellowing, this hatred has only escalated with the passage of time.

    Into my mid-fifties, I still recall over thirty years ago when I was working as a kitchen porter in a family-run restaurant in one of the suburbs west of Paris, awaiting a lift from my then father-in-law. and actually hurling insults at the espace des boites en métal sur quatre roue!

    So, where is this anger coming from? What’s up? Well, as the title of this piece suggests, the SUV has become symbolic, for me anyway, of many of the fundamental ills of the Western world.

    In the relatively wealthy enclave in north county Dublin I have lived for the last decade or more, the SUV is the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence.

    I grew up with them. Indeed I remember their origins. The Range Rover dates from the 1970s when British Leyland unrolled them and they were pretty utilitarian in design and generally, as four-by-four vehicles, designed for multi-terrain or cross-terrain purposes.

    So, farmers and builders and other rustic types would have been the first customers, but as the vehicles grew in popularity, second generation models began appearing from the 1990s, targeting high-end users such as the Sloan Rangers in London, named after Sloan Square, an affluent part of London where the horsey types in jodhpurs and boots became a social phenomenon.

    Going from agrarian utility to gender and empowerment, you see how these vehicles are symbolically so charged as to be of interest to anyone who wishes to cast a critical eye on contemporary society!

    Of course, the military element is also there, as the SUV stems from the jeep, which had such iconic status in both World War II and the Vietnam War. And here we come to the crux of the matter: might is right! When you are sitting up in an SUV, you command the road. Particularly the fifth-generation types that you see on the roads today, and which are so vulgar in their display of wealth.

    I am thinking especially of the polar white coloured models with so much chrome and bling that you generally associate them with red-carpet type celebrities. Every wannabe designer or football wife now seems to be sitting inside one, suitably suited and jack booted, with god- knows what lying in her trunk(s)?

    So, it’s a metaphor for ostentatious living, opulence and success. So much so that if you wish to appear to be successful you need to have one of these sleekly curved, designer beasts if you really wish to assert your societal success.

    This is how shallow life has become in the West, and it has been that way since the 1980s. Of course, we haven’t even brought in the themes of the energy crisis and the environment yet! All evoked by the same means of transport…

    As a writer, and poet particularly, metaphors are what I need to traffic in. And when I think of today, and the era that we are living through, going back the last thirty or so years, I am also reminded of how literal we have become in our expressions.

    Take the world of poetry. In a realm where you would imagine metaphor to be found in abundance, you literally could not be further from the truth, as it is mostly Spoken Word these days. What the hell does that even mean?

    We have become literally so literal, in other words, so lacking in metaphorical thinking, that we literally can’t even think in metaphorical terms any longer. Hence the appalling state of poetry at the moment, particularly in this c(o)untry where Spoken Word poets are more dominant than any other kind of beast!

    When I think of a master of metaphor, I have to go back to Beckett which, again, like the Range Rover, was still around during the 1980s. His whole world of tramps, hats, dustbins and solitary trees; in that constellation of metaphors, I can see the whole post World War II years. Beckett could only have come out of the total ruins of a global conflict that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people.

    It’s all there contained in his metaphors. As Hugh Kenner was to point out, Waiting for Godot was both directly and indirectly inspired by Beckett’s only flight with Susanne from Paris, when the Gestapo were quite literally looking for the two of them and they both had to, quite literally, hide by sleeping rough or finding lodgings.

    The play, which became synonymous with post-war Europe, having been born from very real vagrancy and all of the anguish that might come from such a tenuous life; the couple hid out for the remainder of the war in Roussillon.

    Two other poets, masters of metaphor, were of course Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. The former employed bog bodies, while the latter adopted the crow, but when compared to the bleak visions of Beckett, in sheer terms of metaphoric power, any one can see that the Sage of Foxrock far out-does them.

    Perhaps one of the greatest examples of the stupidity of our current predicament, a predicament which now sees us in direct conflict with the great powers of the East, who see how weak we have become, is perhaps the famous ‘End of History’ phrase used by Francis Fukuyama in 1992.

    Here we can identify, at the end of the Cold War, the collective West’s deluded belief in its omnipotence. This we should remember was a period of unparalleled wealth, which finally gave way in 2008 to a global downturn that was really the culmination of corporate greed, of which the SUV is now the best metaphor for.

    In the figure of Fukuyama, we can see, again quite literally, how literal people were thinking. Even historians. Whatever happened to the philosopher historians, a dead breed that included Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Hegel and Giambattista Vico? These were metaphorical thinkers who could imagine history as another idiom and thereby create metaphoric space in which to speculate on the nature of history and origins.

    Vico, with his three ages of man theory, would have declared, no doubt, that the period we are now living through in the West is in the third age, when society, as we know it has peaked.

    In architectural terms, think of the Corinthian columns, which resemble great flowering heads spilling out in opulent abundance, which is a natural phenomenon. Compare them then to the spartan simplicity of the Ionic and Dorian column.

    The Corinthians were a civilisation in excess. Apparently, their columns heralded a demise. Only the metaphor remains, and, of course, the ruined columns!

    To return now to the SUV. The sports utility vehicle. I only have to look out my apartment window here to see one. There it is, parked glistening in the sun, awaiting its bold glamazon.

    My wife (she drives a Fiat Panda, so a mini one) has often remarked on how the very worst drivers tend to be the women who drive SUVs, as they are generally so contemptuous of everyone.

    Might is Right, remember! Fuck You! They seem to say just by merely being; both driver now and vehicle. And, this is a sign for us to emulate, as a society! These are the values that we have now been brought up to revere! The Fuck You arrogance of absolute veneer.

    It’s funny, when I was last rereading Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin I was struck immediately by the brash vulgarity of the local Irish princes and princesses. Merely substitute the SUVs for their chariots, and you find the same vulgar trappings of power and wealth.

    The Táin is an old work apparently first originating in the first century AD, yet the manuscript dates from the twelfth century. We need, it seems to me, fresher chronicles. Fresher metaphors, more room to breath. What a culture; Spoken Word and SUVs, my arse!

  • Love and Literature in Numbers

    Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.

    And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.

    It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.

    Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

    It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.

    With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!

    Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.

    Rogelio de Egusquiza‘s Tristan and Isolt (Death) (1910).

    Life Moves On

    I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.

    She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.

    And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!

    Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.

    You move on.

    It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.

    The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.

    Nemesis and Trinity

    So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.

    Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.

    There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.

    What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.

    But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.

    Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!

    You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.

    And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.

    This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.

    How It Is

    Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is (1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.

    When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.

    This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.

    But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.

    Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.

    In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.

    The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.

    The Four Ages

    What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.

    Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.

    As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.

    Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.

    Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.

    Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.

    It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.

    Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.

    Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.

    The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination (1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

    Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.

    Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.

    Female Domination

    Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.

    Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.

    Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.

    There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.

    Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.

    Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.

    Set Theory

    As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.

    I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.

    Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.

    Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?

    This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.

    Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.

    What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.

    In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.

    In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

    Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme

  • The Hero’s Journey

    Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, Dublin.

    Twelve years ago I was asked to sing a selection of traditional Irish love songs in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, for the launch of an anthology of Irish love poems. This collection had poems which were written over a period of 1,200 years, between 800 AD and the present era.

    Whitefriar Street of course contains relics of the even older tragic hero of many a love story, St. Valentine, who was executed for marrying young couples at a time of prohibited love. However, as I read through the love poems in the collection, the earliest ones struck me for their vivid rawness. The first poem, The Lament of Créide starts with the striking words,

    “The arrows that murder sleep
    At every hour of the cold night
    are love lamenting”

    In 8th century Gaelic these words have a sibilant, chilling cadence that invoke a dark and desperate trauma. Créide had just come on her lover Dínertach’s body on the battle field and grief menaced her mind.

    The emotions depicted create a surge in me. This was something worth expressing with music I though. It has all the essence of human feeling that great and tragic drama is made of.

    It sucked me into a renewed appreciation of early Irish mythology, and I started looking at other examples from the canon of early Irish literature, such as The Táin, for this exquisite portrayal of drama and character archetype. As a singer and a composer I found that these stories had an emotional and dramatic template that interested me.

    These were stories that lasted throughout the centuries; that contained great dramatic archetypes. They described patterns of being that seemed timeless and epic. They were crying out for melody and musical interpretation.

    In my journeys through these myths and historical perspectives I started to notice that character portrayal frequently represented archetypes within meta-narratives. Some of these archetypes could be found in similar thematic stories throughout the world. Cúchullain had his echo in Achilles, and Ferdia might be compared to the Trojan Hector.

    These archetypes manifest values of what the 17th century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico called The Age of Gods. Nietzche calls this the age of heroes

    I was using the modality of sean nós to interpret these stories through music, but it took me a long time to notice that perhaps I was doing so because folk music and folklore was a parable-ist way of interpreting these thematic issues and explanations of life, to the people who shared them. Traditional songs did indeed trade in the wisdom of fable and parable to enable an understanding of the world. It is a metaphorical world full of tropes and archetypes.

    I needed to look deep into the psychology of folklore and folk songs to understand why the anthology of sean nós exists. This was my reason for an enlightening return to the roots of my tradition; to try and explain how this song tradition navigates a psychological portrayal of human nature.

    Band Photography | Musicians | | Holst Photography Ireland

    The following extract is the introduction to An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life, a book and CD collection of contemplative songs and essays. It is a hard-backed 112 page edition, based on the philosophical themes of the accompanying CD. The CD and book are complementary elements of a contemplative philosophical experience:

    A song, like a story, speaks from a time and a place. Time passes, and its voice diminishes. But sometimes a story speaks to the essence of human nature and its power lasts through time regardless of space; regardless of place.

    An Bhuatais [The Boot – the album’s title track] has a context related to a changing social dynamic between the late 18th and early 19th century in Ireland. The native Catholic population of Ireland in the 17th century were suppressed by a series of penal laws designed to disenfranchise them and leave them firmly outside the protection of public and legal institutions of state. These penal codes were defined along sectarian divides which delineated the native Irish from the coloniser.

    The native population had at least a religious institution which offered solace and sanctuary. The Catholic clergy who tended to this disenfranchised population were outlawed, and for a time had a bounty on their head. Sharing in the fate of their flock, they had spiritual and moral credibility.

    The penal code relaxed over the 18th Century and in 1795 Catholicism was officially permitted into the fold, most visibly with the establishment of the Catholic University of Maynooth.

    This is all interesting to our story because it makes the animosity of the author of An Bhuatais towards the local Priest all the more comprehensible. As opposed to the hunted priest of the recently repealed Penal period, the priest in this song clearly doesn’t suffer along with his parishioners. He doesn’t share the suffering of the songs author; he is not one of the people.  He is castigated for abandoning spirituality for profane wealth. Betrayal and hypocrisy; they are powerful themes, and they incite gut felt creativity.

    There is something basic and fundamental in the representation of the hero in the tragic mythological perspective. Friedrich Nietzsche, the harbinger of resurgent nihilism, recognised this in his analysis of the heroic archetype. This helped him form theories on the pre-eminence of the dominant will – the natural state of an amoral being – and the end of belief. While it is a helpful filter on the mythological perspective of death, it is a perspective which creates a lot more problems than it solves.

    Illusions of “the end of history” and the implication that we have no more to learn from the past are, it seems, endemic with humanity. It’s an arrogance which seems to consistently blind our species. The American playwright, Arthur Miller, enacts this folly in the character of Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible, where he says: “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”

    Danforth’s error, and burning certainty, illuminate something that has been observed by historians of civilisation throughout the ages. Ibn Khaldun and others have told us that civilisations and empires flourish and wither in cycles. Giambattista Vico, argued that the cycle of civilisations went through three stages which he called: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men.  Although he is ruled by superstition, Danforth’s speech is paradoxically of the “Age of Men”. His certainty that the institution of his court is the nexus of reason is an arrogance of every age. The “precise time” he talks of is his certainty in the error of past ages and the enlightenment of his own.

    Vico’s theory tells us that the age of reason is an epoch, not a culmination. That man-kind keeps cycling through the spiral of civilisational rise and fall, and that we keep refining our myths and reinventing our stories.

    Stories and songs can carry more than eternal narratives. I recall a drive on a narrow rural road, playing a recording of An Captain Ó Máille sung by Stiofán Ó Cualáin, and feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging; of returning home. O Cualáin’s unaccompanied phrasing, which emanates a familiarity with landscape, living, and language, has a close familial sense.

    His performance – though I think performance is the wrong word for something that sounded so spontaneous and lived in – is unique, and I was surprised by how much I felt I knew intimately the essence of what this voice carried. This singing has its own inscape. It’s one that is as much shaped by cultural phenotype as by the rugged landscape of Connemara.  I felt my soul could make its home there.

    An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life is available through:

    Website:
    www.lorcanmacmathuna.com

    Bandcamp:
    https://lorcanmacmathuna.bandcamp.com/album/an-bhuatais-the-meaning-of-life

    Spotify:
    https://open.spotify.com/album/4ughUTW4jIawqVLiY8D5am?si=p6hJeIqsS0yr_3HgPBv2Kw

    Featured Image (of Connemara) by Daniele Idini.