I am coming off what was a highly satisfying cultural weekend. Years ago there were two movie theaters in our no longer so little town. One of them gave up the ghost so many years ago that I can barely remember it, but the other, the Garden, hung on and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of “art” cinema every college town should have and usually does. It has to a degree prospered and seems recently to have had a qualified interior spruce up. It is no longer in obvious need of roof repair. From the frequency with which we receive its begging letters it appears to remain appropriately marginal from the business point of view. But of course it is wonderful to have an “art” cinema in town. We find ourselves in fairly frequent attendance.
So near the end of last week we went to view “The Tree of Life.” I had never seen this film; in fact, I don’t think I had ever even heard of it. The setting of “The Tree of Life” is a little difficult to describe, as it includes both highly imaginative cosmic topography and (mainly) that of a modest middle class section of a sizeable Texas town or small city, which I think “is” Waco, in the 1950s. East Texas is apparently an especially apt geography for “coming-of-age” movies. I remember another great one from fifty ago: “The Last Picture Show.” Waco is not an unknown place on the national scene, and it is certainly known to me as a professor of English literature It is the home of Baylor University, an important cultural institution in the state, and a center for the study of Victorian poetry, especially that of the Brownings. There is a certain eccentricity to academic libraries. There are some outstanding specific topical collections on individual writers to be found scattered throughout the world. In the middle of the 1950s I was living in a little town in East Texas, Mount Pleasant, where I graduated from its high school in 1954. Mount Pleasant is maybe a couple of hundred miles northeast of Waco. This must have been about the time of the imagined setting for “The Tree of Life.” The makers of the film had spent a lot of time on authenticity of the film’s setting. So I experienced a certain vague sense of dejà vu arising from my own late adolescent experience in East Texas.
I am by no means a cinema buff, and I knew nothing of this particular movie in advance, except that it was supposed to be good—a judgment that I regard as an understatement. The film is in my view superb. Not that I could tell you exactly what it is “about,” beyond what is accurately if elliptically suggested by its title. I would have to see it again even to be sure I could summarize all the elements of the plot accurately. But the acting—including that performed by several very young actors—is superb. It is not always easy to predict those sections of the population likely to be moved by a work of art, but this one has broad ambitions. If you are a mother or a father—or are closely related to anyone who is, such as your own parents—you will almost certainly be moved, pensive, curious and reflective after seeing this film. One of the things you will be pensive about, even if you have never heard the word before, is what Aristotle called mimesis—the fascinating and mysterious ways in which art is made to “imitate” life.
Well, that was (I think) Friday night. We now move on to Saturday night and something, as they say, completely different: Mozart’s Requiem performed by dedicated and talented singers from the chancel steps of a mini-cathedral, the Princeton University Chapel. Except that it isn’t “completely different,” of course. The energies of art, though highly differentiated, are quite often surprisingly convergent. Anybody who watches “The Tree of Life” is likely to be set to thinking about the meaning of life. Anyone who listens intently to the Mozart Requiem is guaranteed to be set to thinking about both life and death. The huge chapel was nearly full for this superb performance, which was offered to the Princeton community as a free gift. Amazing! It was an event we would both want to attend under any circumstances, but there was in this instance a particular reason that guaranteed our presence. The soprano soloist was Jennifer Borghi, who has been our friend since she was an undergraduate here twenty-some years ago. Jen’s singing on this occasion was particularly strong and beautiful, I thought, as indeed was that of the other soloists. It was a stunning performance.
I suppose it is possible to react to a religious liturgy in purely aesthetic terms; then again it is possible to take a shower with your socks on. I do not recommend it. Mozart himself was deeply religious, however conventional his actual religiosity may seem to us. I remember seeing a letter of his, written when he was twenty or twenty-one, in which he practically gloats over the death of Voltaire. But people’s meditations upon eternity tend to sharpen and mature as they approach its portals. Given the fact that he was working away at his Requiem on his own death-bed, I can hardly doubt that the Last Things were on his mind. The word requiem has become a bit dark and scary, but it actually means neither death nor a death dirge. It means rest, as in relaxation, freedom from physical or mental effort. The first two words of the Mozart requiem Mass petition for an eternal rest bathed in perpetual light. That is solemn, sober, exalted; but it is far from tragic.
The simple medieval hymn Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) appears early in the work. Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla/Teste David cum Sibylla…(Day of wrath, that day/Will dissolve the earth in ashes/As David and the Sibyl bear witness…) This little poem—it has a second strophe of three lines—is a nearly perfect example of medieval literary humanism. It hard wires together the archetypes of the biblical and the classical-gentile prophetic traditions, the latter of which is so often explicated and illuminated by the former. I spent a good deal of my scholarly career trying to understand and demonstrate this theme in early European poetry and the visual arts. The Sibyl (who guides Aeneas between the worlds of the living and the dead) is the gentile “type” of the Hebrew king and prophet. The word sibyl came to denote various versions of the female prophet. Mozart attempts in music what so many Renaissance poets attempted in their verses. He produced a work which, imitating the spiritual scheme from which it rises, defies mortality.
No comments:
Post a Comment