Meditations on the Fourth Advent

It is the fourth Advent Sunday, a very quiet, rainy and grey day, that we spent happily. A breakfast of buns fresh from the bakery: long pretzel sticks, a pumpkin seed bun, curled croissants, and the classic white Schrippen. Eggs, boiled until the egg yolk was barely set; hot cocoa heated in a pot. And a large platter with chocolate covered gingerbread in star shapes, Nürnberger gingerbread coated in chocolate or glaze or nothing at all, wreaths of chocolate with sprinkles, 'domino stones' with their jelly and cake and marzipan covered in chocolate, marzipan also covered in chocolate, and sugar-encrusted squares and stars and circles that are like pâte de fruit except much faker. Coffee and tea, with a lot of bergamot in it and really delightful to drink.

Yesterday evening Ge. had (with a little help) made an enormous lasagne, and we drank the bottle of Spanish red wine with it that I had received as a Christmas present from work. There was still lasagne and wine left today, although I ate the last of the lasagne.

I have been drawing pictures again lately, and after using different media have ended up using mostly coloured inks alongside coloured 'leads.' There is black india ink, but also blue, yellow, green and brown, and they have a more vibrant colour than the pencil crayons and aquarelle crayons I first used. I meant to use watercolour paint, too; and started a collage; but we shall see how that goes.

It has been cold and drafty, so we have needed the coal stove a lot. It was still warm enough that I could sit at the other side of the corner room from the stove, and draw without getting cold feet. I've tended not to watch crime shows and mysteries much in recent years, but yesterday there was an episode of Midsomer Murders that wasn't disagreeable, so I watched and listened to it with half an eye and ear as I was working on the pictures yesterday.

As far as music goes, I've played the violin lately because I felt that I needed a new challenge of sorts. The rudiments are going reasonably badly, which makes sense since I haven't had lessons since I was seven or eight. But after being able to play through the canzonetta movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concert — which is like flying before I can walk, of course —, I am quite pleased. The rest of my proper repertoire, for lack of a more modest word, is Bach's first violin sonata, which I've never played all the way through; and his concert in E major, which is the same situation. But they are intuitive to play and sound good even without a vibrato or many other subtleties of colour that one would need for other composers. (Just like I think that Mozart's easiest opera arias are good to sing in a non-operatic way because they work well if one sings them 'purely,' instead of adopting vocal mannerisms.)

I took the afternoon off of work on December 6th, to celebrate St. Nicholas Day, and played the violin then. I do play simplified versions of other familiar pieces like Dvorak's Humoresque. But yesterday I mostly played Christmas songs, and as far as possible a movement from Bach's Cello suites, from memory; and a Canadian folk song or two that was part of the routine when I was very little. The question is how much the neighbours suffer when I play, but I don't worry about it to a morbid degree, because a beginner's violin practice has certain objective qualities that require a little empathy for one's human environment.

On the piano, I have been trying the beginning of Albéniz's La Vega, but I feel like I'm trying poorly to play jazz. Grieg's piano version of his Dance in the Hall of the Mountain King? has baffled me for a while; it sounds far better when an orchestra plays it than when I try to play it. In fact I gave up on it for a while. I generally slaughter Brahms's first ten Hungarian Dances, too, or at least feel as if I were; but they are such great compositions, in their perhaps excessive, mid-19th-century-esque grandeur, that I've sometimes felt that other music is flat when I turn away from them. The Rachmaninoff C sharp minor prelude that I played yesterday felt, perhaps creepily, dark; but it's not necessarily out of keeping. Part of it is logistically a struggle to play; but it is so brief and compelling that I rarely feel remotely tempted to break it off in the middle. The g minor prelude that I played in 2008 around the time I travelled to New York went better than it did before; I finally have incipient ideas about the phrasing and atmosphere. Beethoven's last sonata, movements one and a bit of two, felt experimental but also better than before, too, when I tried it for the first time in months today.

Trying to play Chopin has not gone better than usual lately. But when I turned from his mazurkas (which I mostly love but can't always do much justice, because my technique is clumsy and besides it's very challenging to infuse intelligence and imagination into pieces which it is easy to play in an elegant but shallow way) to the Heroic Polonaise, it was a nice experience. The rumbling and repetitive octaves, which the left hand plays in a part of the polonaise, remind me of a steam-powered locomotive, which takes me out of the atmosphere. But perhaps ever since I watched the black and white film of young Martha Argerich flinging it off with a tongue-in-cheek air at the Chopin competition, I've felt that the piece calls for a degree of humour and parody. Chopin's 'militaristic' works make me uncomfortable in any case, if one were to take them seriously, especially because I played his pieces to try to work through my feelings about a war a few years ago. They are not abstract entertainment, but a piece of perhaps troubling social/cultural history — but maybe relevant more specifically perhaps to the wars over Poland and nationalist stirrings before the late 19th century, than to every other war or nationalist stirring in history before or since. We do have books of Christmas carols that I also played.

In the U-Bahn, I've finished reading Molière's Tartuffe, and have read instead a part of Alexander Pope's Essay On Man. Where does man stand in the order of animals, humanity, and God? Etc. It sounds very Leibnizian and deist so far to me. (Now I see that the Wikipedia article also mentions Leibniz, so that was obviously a new and far-fetched insight I had!)

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

is one of my favourite quotations. I believe that it is all right to disclaim belief in God, so long as one doesn't believe one is a secular God one's self while being so petty and disagreeable in one's ideas, perceptions and aims, that it's clear that one has no reason other than egotism to pretend greater insight or virtue than any other ordinary human being. (I believe quite strongly in my own religion, though, although uncomfortable questions do arise from time to time about how reasonable and good it really is, so this is hardly an impartial view.) But the problems with the reasoning of the poem, and in fact the ideas behind it altogether — when I last read the poem, it was in search for witticisms rather than in order to wade through Pope's ideas in any persistent fashion, so I didn't begin to think of them — seem numerous and striking.

It's cheeky for a thirty-one-year-old, like me, to say this. But his Leibnizian tendency reflects the kind of buoyancy that does not take into account physical and mental illness, the terrible vulnerabilities (inescapable poverty, defenselessness against cruelty, etc.), and a consciousness of one's own flaws and one's disappointing inability to translate theoretical principles into consistent real practice, that must lastingly wreck one's belief in the perfection of the universe's order at some point in one's life.  To be a little clearer about the consciousness of flaws, every now and then it becomes clear to me that I have genuinely terrible aspects to my personality; they can be papered over like cracks in a wall, and maybe I never enter them, but in certain circumstances they gape. And there have been things that I have done that will have seemed cold and cruel to outsiders, although they had an internal logic. It is not false modesty to say this; but just that as a child I didn't quite imagine what it is like to have a grown up personality, where one grows quite a bit in a lot of directions, some less nice than others. Not that I was a perfectly saintly child, but I guess the imperfections were less sophisticated. That said, Pope never seems to have had an easy life, so who knows how much subtlety there was — after all — in his early worldview?

And that did remind me of the progression that Voltaire went through in the novels of his that I read.  When one considers the bright optimism and belief in justice that shine through Zadig, Candide and his other works come as a shock. Then there comes the brooding and wavering between bog-standard political carping and just (but not as abstract and brilliant as it would have been earlier) social criticism that mark L'Homme aux quarante écus, which is his nadir, in my opinion. A few sentences of his Quarante Écus could have been written in an internet comment today, which perturbed me.

Moliere on the U Bahn

After starting The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, Gulliver's Travels in German, finishing Jan Morris's A Writer's World and a collection of Voltaire's fiction (Zadig, Candide, etc.), and putting a collected works of Alexander Pope as well as Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes into the bag I take to work, I am well into reading Molière's play Le Tartuffe.

Tartuffe has an aftertaste of homework for me. It was part of the reading for a literature course at UBC. But I have found it surprisingly pleasing. It's reassuring that the villain is shut up in the hemispherically sealed world of the play and not running free in reality. At the same time it has also become apposite to foreign affairs. Perhaps it is far-fetched, but as Molière's figure of Tartuffe faces the challenge of pretending to be what people think him to be in order to gain his own ends, and of expressing indignation at the deeds of others while not thereby condemning his own deeds, his challenge seems to me like that of Donald Trump. I don't mean that as an insult, although the implications of it are frankly unflattering. I don't think that Donald Trump is the only politician, by far, who uses hypocrisy to further his career and perhaps to obey the wishes of his supporters. The supporters need to justify their preference for their candidate by pointing to his outward display of virtue. But more than with most politicians, perhaps, it is less his political history and actions, less his qualifications and less his devotion to statecraft of any sort, than his façade, which is relevant to the public.

The play's plot is that a well-to-do father and his mother are both approached by an ostentatiously pious man, whom the father invites into his own home. The family, aside from the two admirers of Tartuffe, abhors the man. But the father of the household is so taken with Tartuffe that he evens disowns his own son in the ostensibly saintly guest's favour. The plot and the conflict are not out of date, I think, when sects (religious and secular as well, I suppose) still prey on people, and fissures still grow in families as a result. In Tartuffe, it's clear to me that the villain's appeal to the father of the central family is less based on piety than on a kind of midlife crisis. Orgon, the father, wants someone to admire and spoil him more than his own wife, children, and servant do. He wants to assert his authority, too. The idea that taking friends, family, etc. for granted is a reciprocal concept — for instance, at the beginning of the play his manners are so bad or his feelings so self-absorbed that it appears that his wife's brief illness could hardly interest him less — is beyond his understanding.

In a complex way, I like that Molière points out how, in fact, all of his dramatis personae are irritating. Orgon for the reasons mentioned above; his brother Cléante for his air of mental and moral superiority and his uninterest in tactfulness to accommodate Orgon's sense of pride; his daughter Marianne for her flightiness and her inexperience with independent thinking; his servant Dorine for being pushy and aggressively critical (she is critical with good reason, but even the best of persons has some feelings that might be injured), and his son Damis for his hotheadedness and his lack of subtlety. Perhaps it is all the worse for Orgon's feelings that despite these shortcomings of judgment or manner, they are all right where he is wrong.

I still think that Tartuffe is the really interesting character, although well described as utterly loathsome, and I wondered how I'd portray him if I were an actor. How slimy? how essentially gloomy? how evidently fake? self-admiring or, more likely, self-despising? And what did he do before he tried 'grifting' for money and shelter with the pretence of religious feeling?