Thus Spake George Jones

After last week’s post, a tribute to Greek tragedy as seen by a bot, I started thinking about some of the Greek tragedies that I myself have read. Last week’s brief sampling of a play written by a graduate student’s bot featured so many familiar motifs that I started thinking about the genre’s essential plot elements. I can tell you this: in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, family strife plays a major role. If it’s not a wife killing a husband, it’s a parent killing a child. There are grand passions, grand betrayals, clashes between affairs of state and private duty, reunions after long separations, acts of revenge, occasional acts of loyalty (which seemingly never go unpunished), matricides, filicides, parricides. In short, Greek tragedies can be gloomy affairs, no matter how great the themes they are exploring.

I’ve concluded that Greek tragedy was the country music of 5th-century Athens. You know it’s true. If there’s any species of high art more calculated to have you crying in your beer by the jukebox at intermission, it’s the works of the ancient tragedians. Some of you Generation X and Yers may be scratching your heads doubtfully, and in a way I don’t blame you, because regardless of your familiarity with the ancients, you may never actually have experienced country music the way I did while growing up. While the plays of Classical Greece may be frozen in time, coming to us across an immense expanse of time and distance, country music has changed since my youth. Back then, in the heyday of Conway Twitty, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Porter Wagoner, and others, many of the songs I heard on country radio were painful to listen to. I don’t mean sad, I mean painful.

Those were the days of what I would call hard country as opposed to the soft country of today. I’m not an expert on country music but did grow up surrounded by it, as it was favored by both my parents. I often wondered why, because it seemed to me that if you were feeling OK to start with, listening to it would depress you, and if you were already depressed when you heard it, you’d soon feel infinitely worse. It was a mirror of things only half-understood that seemed to be happening around me, and why on earth would I want to listen to reality amplified as a form of entertainment? Not for me the ballads of unfaithfulness and Carroll County accidents—I gravitated as a moth toward a flame to the melodious soft rock of The Carpenters, Bread, Don McLean, and other gentle troubadours of the day.

I may have been absorbed in a romantic haze, but given the choice between that and the utterly too literal realities of the “Harper Valley PTA” variety, I feel sure I would make the same choice again. Nothing wrong with a little escapism in the midst of ugly realities, if escapism is your only choice. I think people do this as adults, too.

Nowadays, of course, a lot of country music is indistinguishable from pop music. Several times, while alone in my car on long trips, I have tuned into country music stations in places like Missouri and Ohio and been wrapped in a cocoon of love by various male baritones all singing of faithfulness and understanding in a way that would have made George Jones cringe. (I believe it was Mr. Jones who lamented the change in country music away from the adultery/murder/prison/drunkenness end of the county toward the kinder, gentler side of the district aspired to today. At least, he once did so in an interview.)

I will admit that some of today’s songs can be sappy (as opposed to starkly depressive as in the old days). Nonetheless, if I’m trying to get somewhere on the road, I’d rather by accompanied by a sympathetic chorus of we’ve-had-our-consciousness-raised good old boys, with an occasional renegade thrown in—mostly alluding to the nobler aspects of romance and human nature—than by a Conway Twitty dirge that might force me off the road into a ditch. It would probably take a listen to both sides of the first two Carpenters albums and a goodly dose of The Little River Band to set me right after that (and that still might not be enough).

Without a doubt, there are high culture advocates out there who see no connection at all between Greek tragedy and Johnny Cash and would sooner drink hemlock than admit they might be accessing the same dark strain of human experience. Personally, I wonder if the distinction between “high” and “low” art is a defense mechanism more than a valid division, but in any case, allow me just to say that Clytemnestra murdering both her husband and Cassandra had nothing on Johnny Cash singing “Delia’s Gone.” If you were in the bar at the intermission of Agamemnon and they started playing that song, you’d be out of the theater in a flash, Chardonnay unfinished, slamming your car door, spinning out, and searching desperately on the dial for a latter-day country music lullaby of the blandest variety to soothe your disordered senses. You might even be desperate enough for disco.

You Are Now Cereal

Phi Beta Kappa featured a post on its Facebook page the other day from Mr. Spencer Klavan, a graduate student who trained a bot to write a Greek play by having it watch many hours of tragedies. He stated that the excerpt in the post was only the first page, but to me, everything that needed to be said was right there on that page, rendering the rest entirely superfluous (though it was all excellent, I’m sure).

With a stage direction indicating that the setting is the exterior of a “Cursed Dynastic Palace,” you know you’re in the hands of a straightforward playwright who’s going to let you know exactly where you stand. And the rest of this one-page mini-play is just as carefully observed, with characters such as long-suffering wife Dyspepsia and chief god Stankrocles (in charge of mathematics and ancestral guilt, that double whammy of random but somehow meaningful jurisdictions) and an authentic Chorus that really knows its stuff: “Welcome home, Great King ! Watch out ! Everything is normal !”

The action is crisp and the verbs active. Dyspepsia carries a big knife, Stankrocles eats a sandwich, the Chorus dances, and Dundertron laughs. There are greetings, warnings, forebodings, dancing, and dead lions. And the climax, in which Stankrocles turns everyone into barley, is as satisfying as you could wish. What else is there to be said after that? You are now cereal. Deal with it. If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell it like it is, no holds barred (someone besides Wordplay), your search is at an end with Mr. Klavan’s bot. The sheer audacity of its storytelling and bold willingness to take risks in delivering a Greek tragedy attuned to our gainful (that is, grainful) times will dazzle you, make you laugh, and take your breath away.

As a drama that captures not only the spirit of an earlier age, but the nihilist zeitgeist of ours, this play cannot be beat. And besides . . . What? What are you asking? Catharsis? Well, what do you want that for? Are you feeling bad? All Wordplay can tell you is, if you don’t get catharsis from barley right now, you likely never will. It’s barley or nothing. And that’s some good fiber, too.

Sunrise With Parking Lot

This week’s post was inspired by a photo I took two days ago and posted to the Wordplay Facebook page. Here is the photo:

When I captioned the picture, I explained that I just happened to see the crepuscular rays when I was walking across the parking lot at the grocery store early that morning. I had never tried to photograph crepuscular rays with the sunrise and wasn’t sure I could capture the effect, but the photo turned out pretty well. What I like about it is the depiction of the ordinary in juxtaposition to something verging on extraordinary. When I was little, I thought that God looked like the rays of the sun streaming down (or in this case, up) from behind a cloud. What I see here is a schematic of what the universe may really look like if there is some immanent spiritual reality existing within it.

As I understand transcendentalism, that system posits the existence of God and a spiritual realm “out there” somewhere, beyond the physical world. I’m not sure I know where that might be, since I’m kind of a material girl myself, but we’ll put that aside. I don’t see a division between “spiritual” and “material,” believing that if God is anywhere, he is all around us. I admit that there is a certain beauty in imagining special realms set apart—over the rainbow, in the heavens, in fairyland, or wherever you may imagine it to be. But I look at it this way: It’s possible that spiritual reality co-exists with or intersects everyday reality in countless places but is only glimpsed at certain moments when a slight “separation” occurs, such as the one depicted above. I wasn’t even in a good mood when it happened—I was just there, which proves you don’t necessarily need to get in the right frame of mind to see it.

Now you may say, “But it’s only a sunrise,” and that’s true, of course. It is a sunrise, but I don’t know what’s “only” about it. I do know that now and then something wondrous seems to arise in the midst of an otherwise ordinary moment, something that inspires awe. I’m merely speaking for myself, but I think other people have felt the same thing. In “The Prophet,” Kahlil Gibran said, “Could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; and you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.” Now, it is a very tall order to suppose that one must accept everything just as it is, but I take his point. There is always beauty to be experienced, if you can bring yourself to see it.

I mentioned Hinduism last week, which reminds me that there’s a scene in the Bhagavad Gita (which you were supposed to read LAST YEAR and report back to me on, REMEMBER?) in which Krishna, who is talking to Arjuna about his doubts and fears just before a big battle, opens his mouth to show Arjuna what eternity looks like. Krishna, Arjuna’s friend, is really the god Vishnu in human form, an appearance he takes on in order to keep his divinity from overwhelming the ordinary humans he comes in contact with. It is awe-inspiring and chilling to think of eternity being that close to one, as if at any moment you might tumble into a black hole without even knowing it’s there. Many traditions, though, have stories of people doing just that.

One minute, you’re in Kansas, the next you’re in Oz. You’re on the way to the village to buy some bread, you come across a fairy ring, and you’re whisked away to Fairyland, where you may spend a hundred years before anyone realizes you’re gone. Or you’re a Grail knight and wake up one morning on the ground after spending the night in a castle that is now nowhere to be seen. Or you chase a rabbit down a hole and end up in a rather peculiar place with mad hatters and Cheshire cats.

I take these as metaphors for spiritual realities that, rather than being somewhere else, are really intertwined with everyday reality but can only be accessed via imagination, inspiration, or possibly some precipitating event. Some people are suspicious of the word “spiritual,” so allow me also to say that for me, talking about spirituality is akin to talking about a richness of experience that recognizes interconnections among all things and some kind of underlying order while also recognizing that we may not quite understand everything. I prefer to leave room for a little bit of mystery—which is probably only proper from a scientific point of view. Hubris can be dangerous—as the stories also tell us.

Germane to the Discussion

It’s true: we are living in a synchronistic universe. I wrote about similarities between art and life recently, and I was only using the language of art (Impressionism, Cubism) to describe my own experience. Really, though, it seems that other people may be caught up in the same slipstream (to dip into physics for a moment). How else to explain the phenomena of “doubling”?

It’s one thing for me to take a photo and then remark on how much it reminds me of a certain work of art. It’s another to come across a news service photo of an entire group of people in another country who have somehow managed, in their innocence, to re-create the scene in yet another famous work of art. The similarity of this group of German sunbathers to the people depicted in Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884” also reinforces my point about current reality being definitively Post-Impressionist. Not that I was thinking Pointillism exactly, but, sure, that works. We are out of the garden, but the colors are still there.

If the universe is truly—as the Hindus tell us—a dream issuing as a giant bubble from the mind of the sleeping Vishnu, lounging there on his cosmic ocean, perhaps we are currently living in the Art 101 bubble. Maybe from your wave, it looks Pointillist; from mine, it looks Cubist; and from someone else’s, it looks Surreal, but in any case—it’s all art, so don’t sweat it. We’re all living in a giant museum, and while you may be able to do little more than shuffle from one room to another, there’s always another masterpiece right around the corner. Think what you have to look forward to!

Now, I have heard of planned events in which people deliberately set out to re-create a famous work of art with living and breathing participants. That’s been done with Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in the Netherlands, and in Laguna Beach, California, they have an annual festival of “Living Pictures” in which masterworks are brought to life in a Pageant of the Masters. (By coincidence, and I swear I didn’t know this until two minutes ago, this year’s festival begins today and runs through August 31st. No fooling—here’s the link.)

Now if you don’t happen to live in a trendy place like the left or right coast of the United States, or Amsterdam, you can still get your share of arts and recreation. For example, I happen to know that just north of here, in Columbus, Ohio, there is a park in which “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has been reproduced using plants—so, no human actors, but the resemblance is still remarkable, as I can tell you myself, having seen it with my own eyes on a long-ago trip. Should your plans take you in that direction, check it out! I have photos that I took myself on my own Sunday morning visit, and while some of the hedges may have needed a bit of trimming, the overall effect was quite impressive.

Wordplay would like to be able to take credit for being prescient in all of this, but all we can truly say is that, given a surf board, we will ride a wave on Vishnu’s ocean as long as the next person. Longer, even.