My Years With Proust - Day 557

Indecipherable they may have been, but they had nevertheless been in the end deciphered, by dint of patience, intelligence and respect, by the only person who had been sufficiently close to Vinteuil to understand his method of working, to interpret his orchestral indications: Mlle Vinteuil's friend.  Even in the lifetime of the great composer, she had acquired from his daughter the veneration that the latter felt for her father.  It was because of this veneration that, in those moments in which people run counter to their true inclinations, the two girls had been able to take an insane pleasure in the profanations which have already been narrated.  (Her adoration of her father was the very condition of his daughter's sacrilege.  And no doubt they ought to have forgone the voluptuous pleasure of that sacrilege, but it did not express the whole of their natures.)  And, moreover, the profanations had become rarer until they disappeared altogether, as those morbidly carnal relations, that troubled, smouldering conflagration, had gradually given way to the flame of a pure and lofty friendship.  Mlle Vinteuil's friend was sometimes tormented by the nagging thought that she might have hastened Vinteuil's death.  At any rate, by spending years unravelling the cryptic scroll left by him, by establishing the correct reading of those illegible hieroglyphics, she had the consolation of ensuring an immortal and compensatory glory for the composer over whose last years she had cast such a shadow.  Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage.  Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based on genuine love, not weaken family feelings and the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them?  Adultery then brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 263-264

Proust revisits the relationship between Mlle and her friend, the one that he watched through the window years earlier and the one that has haunted him.  He tells us that their fiery passion had eventually given way to "the flame of a pure and lofty friendship."  As we've discussed several times, although Proust often refers to homosexuals as "inverts", which, again, may be his own conscious or unconscious mechanism for disguising his own sexuality, in other ways he consistently displays an understanding that transcends his age.  He tells us, "Relations which are not sanctioned by the law establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, and even more solid, than those which spring from marriage."  Essentially, a relationship outside the bounds of a hetero-normative one bounded by a societally ordained marriage can be just "as manifold, as complex, and even more solid."   However, what really jumped out at me in this passage were his comments on adultery.  Proust writes: "Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based on genuine love, not weaken family feelings and the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them?  Adultery then brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter."  Years ago when I was reading Playboy to the blind in Atlanta, and I know I've shared this story before so please bear with me, I remember reading a story about a professor who had done a lot of research on infidelity and come up with a series of categories.  At the time, the one that resonated with me was the Maintenance Affair; that is, an affair that allowed you to stay in the marriage because it provided something that was missing from the marriage, whether that was some particular aspect of carnal gymnastics or someone to go to the art museum with.  I think Proust would have understood that concept, and I certainly did at the time.  As I've grown older, and now that I'm free of the whirlwind, I've often reflected back on my understanding, and promotion, of the concept of the Maintenance Affair then.  Was it really just cognitive dissonance?  Was it a way to reconcile my innumerable failings in the guise of some (probably dodgy) intellectual construct?  Or is this just another indication of the cooling of my blood (I suppose the answer is somewhere between Lucinda Williams's Hot Blood and Buddy Guy's Done Got Old)?  We've been talking a lot lately about the difference between The One and The Ones, and I wonder what role that plays in the equation?

My Years With Proust - Day 556

Then the phrases withdrew, save one which I saw reappear five times or six without being able to distinguish its features, but so caressing, so different - as no doubt the little phrase from the sonata had been for Swann - from anything that any woman had ever made me desire, that this phrase - this invisible creature whose language I did not know but whom I understood so well - which offered me in so sweet a voice a happiness that it would really have been worth the struggle to obtain, is perhaps the only Unknown Woman that it has ever been my good fortune to meet.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 262

Dar Williams has a simple and beautiful little song entitled Miss You Till I Meet You, and it was impossible for me to read this passage from Remembrance of Things Past without thinking of it. She sings: "I tried again, I went last night/ another date was just not right/ and as I drove myself back home/ a little voice said "just be alone"/ but sometimes I think/ I see you in a crowd/ it's not picture perfect you're just meant for me somehow/ and I'll miss you till I meet you." Essentially she's yearning for someone, in love with someone, she's never met.  I've talked about the fact that after all these years I really don't believe in The One, although you might convince me of the existence of The Ones.  And you do miss them and yearn for them and long for them, because they are a product of your own imagination - and because of this even when you're actually with The One (or a suitable member of The Ones) you might still long for The One because what you want is the imagined version as compared to the tangible, and thus disappointing, reality.  Maybe Proust found The One in this passage of music, which was "so caressing, so different . . . from anything that any woman had ever made me desire . . ."  We've all heard, and loved, songs that reminded us of women we've loved, if only from a distance.  I think the first one that filled that bill for me was Angie, a fair to middling Rolling Stones song, but one which I always associate with this older girl, appropriately named Angie, who lived in my neighborhood while I was growing up. She had absolutely no contact with me whatsoever other than answering the door in a bikini when I came by to see her brother, but I was in serious love/lust with her, and I can't hear that song, even today, without feeling an elegiac stab in the heart.  But Proust, typically, is talking about something more profound.  In his mind the women didn't give life to the song, the song gave life to the, yet unknown, women.  He continued: "this invisible creature whose language I did not know but whom I understood so well - which offered me in so sweet a voice a happiness that it would really have been worth the struggle to obtain, is perhaps the only Unknown Woman that it has ever been my good fortune to meet."  This "Unknown Woman" lived in a state of perfection within the music, and she would then drive our quest and shape our perception of every woman we ever meet.  I've said before that maybe Proust was far more interested in the idea of a woman than in an actual woman, and now she has a name, even if it is just the "Unknown Woman."  Plato famously proposed that we spend our lives trying to find the other half of our being that was carved off before birth, although I don't know if we need to be that metaphysical.  Maybe we are born striving after beauty, whether it is physical or emotional, and we'll miss it until we meet it.

My Years With Proust - Day 555

   The andante had just ended on a phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered.  There followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: "It's a difficult thing to play well." Other more agreeable people chatted for a moment with me.  But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing?  I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality.  And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.  It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so intoxicating that,m on emerging from that paradise, contact with more or less intelligent people seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. 

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 260

I think this is one of the most beautiful passages on the primacy and magic of music that I've ever read.  Proust's point is that music can take us places so sublime, that it is jarring to leave the purified realm of the ethereal and return to the mundane and coarse. Proust writes, "But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing?  I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality." I've told the story of the days when I took the Link bus into Burlington when we lived in Barre, which presented a perpetual scheduling challenge but which also gave me the chance to read uninterrupted.  Except that I seldom had the chance to read uninterrupted because, even though I had a copy of Bleak House open on my lap, people would interrupt me with all sorts of inane comments/questions, mainly because, I'm sure, in their minds the thought of reading was a horrible necessary evil and that they were doing me a favor by giving me a break.  No matter there rationale, I often found it painful to leave not just the story, but more importantly the transcendent space where I was hiding.  However, this abrupt and unwelcome return to the mundane is but a distant pale shadow of the pain that Proust is describing.  His argument, essentially, is that music is a language much richer and purer and unsullied than the written and especially the spoken word.  As we know, the medium is the message, as I often tell my students when explaining that the fact that I grew up reading - as compared to growing up communicating using texts or tweets or Instagram or Facebook posts or any of the various versions of instant messenger (and I'm not pissing on those entirely because at one time or another I've used, and still use, all of them) - and how that changes not only the speed of which we gather information but what we do with it and our joy in finding it.

This made me think of the works of music that had the most power to draw me into their world, and which, in turn, made returning to this world most difficult.  Essentially, which were the works which if I were listening to them and someone distracted me I'd have to toss them quite energetically out the window.  Some of them are clearly my favorite songs, but in this case I'm focusing on the ones which just take me to a place where I'd prefer to stay - and asking me to take off my headphones is not appreciated.

Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto in E minor.

Neil Young, Expecting to Fly.

Bill Evans, Young and Foolish.

Peter Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6 (Pathetique).

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme.

Miles Davis, Stella by Starlight.

REM, Flowers of Guatemala.

Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else.

Bill Evans, Waltz for Debbie.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Partita no. 2.

Miles Davis, So What.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 9 in D minor.

John Coltrane, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G.

Bill Evans, Some Other Time.

Neil Young, Helpless.

Not surprisingly, considering Proust's original point, the majority of these are purely musical, that is, they are no words, which means that I have a lot of jazz and classical.  That said, a couple songs made their way in because they, despite the words (and not that the words are counterproductive, but I'm trying to remain true to Proust), elicited a feeling and took me to a place where it was painful to leave. I suspect they survived the cut because they were meaningful at certain painful or transitional times of my life so they exist in their own worlds as passages that take me someplace within seconds and maybe I don't even hear the rest of the song.  If Proust is right, and not just giving into a flight of fancy, then the words would corrupt the purity of the music, but in these instances I think the words are as evocative as the music and hence it doesn't sully the experience.

My Years With Proust - Day 554

And even when I bore in mind that acquired originality which had struck me that had struck me that afternoon, that kinship, too, which musicologists might discover between composers, it is indeed a unique accent, an unmistakable voice, in which in spite of themselves those great singers that original composers are rise and return, and which is a proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul.  Though Vinteuil might try and make more solemn, more grandiose, or to make more sprightly and gay, to re-create what he saw reflected in the minds of the public, in spit of himself he submerged it all beneath a ground-swell which makes his song eternal and at once recognisable. Where had he learned this song, different from those of other singers, similar to all his own, where had he heard it?  Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge. . .

   . . . Composers do not actually remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which - for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself - proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul.  But in that case is it not true that those elements - all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest - are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which extoriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, without the aid of art, we should never know?  A pair or wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 258-260

Today's passage is incredibly rich, so much so that's taken longer today to get my brain around it all to write it up in a way that makes any sense.  Truthfully, I should have divided it into several sections, which would have made it much more manageable. However, if I keep doing that, as much as I'm enjoying this process, I'll never get finished reading and commenting on Remembrance of Things Past.

Proust is continuing to discuss Marcel's response to the Vinteuil sonata, but more importantly, to art in a broader.  He mainly discusses how art impacts us changes our perception, if not changing everything about us.  And the change can be so profound that it is as if we had traveled to another world.  Proust tells us, "A pair or wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything that we saw in the same aspect as the things of Earth."  But the thing is, that no journey truly means anything if you don't change your perception of the universe around you.  He continues, "The only voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is . . " Not to be too self-serving, but this is one of the things that I really like about our particular student trips that we run at Champlain because they're not trips in a can, but rather trips that are specifically designed to magnify the course themes, with the goal of not simply going overseas, but to make the experience as transformative as possible.  Because, and I have to agree with Proust here, and I know this is going to sound like a poster in a teenage girl's bedroom, but it's not the destination but rather the journey - and in this case the intellectual journey. However, because it is an intellectual/spiritual journey, maybe the travel itself is almost incidental to the transformation.  In fact, maybe the biggest transformation is one that takes place through art.  As Proust sums up, " . . and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star."

With this in mind, Proust talks about the special power of the artist, and how they, just as they help viewers/listeners travel to new world, even internal ones, they in turn live in their own worlds.  Proust writes, "Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge. . ."  How does the artist return to that "unknown country, which he himself has forgotten"?  And this really sounds like poster material, but I think Proust's argument would be that they have to stay true to themselves.  He continues, "Composers do not actually remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which - for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself - proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul." Certainly Proust himself never gave up on his vision for his masterpiece, even when it was obvious that he probably was not going to outlive the novel itself.  And I know that everyone can see this coming, but I just go back to Neil Young after the wild popularity of Harvest.  He could have churned out Harvest II and Harvest III, but instead he embarked on what is sometimes referred to as the Ditch Trilogy: Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight's the Night; three very dark and immensely unpopular albums (except for certain odd Indiana teenagers) which are his best albums.  I'm paraphrasing, but he said that Harvest put him in the middle of the road, but it made for a boring trip, so he headed for the ditch where the ride was rougher but the people were more interesting.  As he sang, "I need a crowd of people around, but I can't stand them day to day."  That reflects is introvert side (which I can certainly appreciate), but I think it's a testament to a desire to not please the audience, because in the process of chasing that success you could not be true to any personal vision.  You'd have to move to another world, a sterile artificial one, and you'd have a much greater difficulty getting back to your homeland.

Twin Peaks Football League Draft 2017

And it's time once again for our annual fantasy football draft in the Twin Peaks Football League.  We're kicking off our fifth season, and, like my fantasy baseball league, the Irrational League (which has been going on so long we can't remember when it started, but we agree that it was over twenty-five years ago) it's mainly an excuse to get together.  None of us are really that competitive, although competitive enough to talk mild smack and leave taunting notes on office doors. This year Craig Pepin and I have a side bet on whether Marcus Mariota (CP's pick) or Jameis Winston (mine) score more points, with a Montreal Alouettes jersey hanging in the balance.  It's a 14 team league, which means that you run out of players you like (or have even heard of) pretty quickly, and by the 10th round (of 16) you're thinking of drafting a second Defense just to follow the medical dictate: first off, do no harm.  I had the first pick in the draft (the order is determined by drawing names out of an Omani hat, which is as official as it gets), which means that in the snake draft I wasn't picking again until the end of the second round and the beginning of the third (so, essentially, I picked 1st, 28th and 29th).  So by my third pick I had moved beyond panic to quiet acceptance of my impending doom.

Your 2017 Springfield Buffalo

Jameis Winston (QB)
LeVeon Bell (RB)
Lamar Miller (RB)
Terrelle Pryor (WR)
Marvin Jones (WR)
Travis Kelce (TE)
Mark Ingram (FLX)
Cardinals D/ST (D/ST)
Kai Forbath (K)

Willie Snead (BE)
Kevin White (BE)
Josh Doctson (BE)
Tyler Lockett (BE)
Bengals D/ST (BE)
Breshad Perriman (BE)
Jared Cook (BE)

There were many brilliant moments in the draft.  We draft online which means you have exactly two minutes to draft before the window closes and you get whoever the system thinks you should have (if you haven't set up your queue), which leads to a bit of mock stress (last year my friend Cyndi was timed out twice, which led to a barrage of profanity).  My favorite moment was drafting Willie Snead of the Saints, who I actually like, and then finding out that he was suspended during the draft. Doh!

I think we can assume that it will be another year with a championship for the SB.  I love my team so much I already have multiple waiver claims in process to dump half these dogs.

My friend Cyndi, focused this year.  Every time she was up to draft, and the clock was ticking, I would begin talking to her in earnest about travel courses we could run together (as a true older brother would).

Shirt of Excellence

Recently my friend Craig gave me an amazing t-shirt that he stumbled across.  He thought it was a perfect fit for me because, in his mind, I'm all talk with my rhetoric with my students and in the end I'm a pussy cat - whereas my theory is that I seem nice but in the end I flunk them.  Either way, I'd better enjoy the shirt while I have it because apparently several people have their eyes on it.  I've taken to leave it hanging on the back of my office chair as a welcome to anyone visiting (I sometimes swap it off with my Drive-By Truckers inspired "Hell no I ain't happy" t-shirt, depending upon daily mood).

My most excellent friend and de facto little sister Cyndi has stolen the shirt not once, but twice.

And my utterly mad student Carolanne stopped by my office after I had left for the day and, instead of leaving a note like any sane person would do, she put on the shirt, took a selfie, and emailed it to me to scold me for not being in my office (at her beck and call).

Clearly, Champlain needs better security.

And just about the time that Carolanne returned the shirt Kathy swiped it and another email arrived.  If only women over the years had shown as much interest in the owner of the shirt.

My Years With Proust - Day 553

For those phrases, historians of music could no doubt find affinities and pedigrees in the works of other great composers, but only for secondary reasons, external resemblances, analogies ingeniously discovered by reasoning rather than felt as the result of a direct impression.  The impression conveyed by these Vinteuil phrases was different from any other, as though, in spite of the conclusions to which science seems to point, the individual did exist.  And it was precisely when he was striving with all his might to create something new that one recognised, beneath the apparent differences, the profound similarities and the deliberate resemblances that existed in the body of a work; when Vinteuil took up the same phrase again and again, diversified it, amused himself by altering its rhythms, by making it reappear in its original form, those deliberate resemblances, the work of his intellect, necessarily superficial, never succeeded in being as striking as the disguised, involuntary resemblances, which broke out in different colours, between the two separate masterpieces; for then Vinteuil, striving to do something new, interrogated himself, with all the power of his creative energy, reached down to his essential self at those depths where, whatever be the question asked, it is in the same accent, that it is to say its own, that it replies.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 257-258

Proust writes in rich and evocative language of Vinteuil's masterpiece, or at least his imagined masterpiece.  One of the most amazing aspects of Remembrance of Things Past is the complex world that he creates, and his discussion of Vinteuil's sonata, which pops up occasionally over hundreds of pages of the novel, is describes so intensely the deeply here that it's almost hard to remember that it is an imaginary piece.  For some reason this passage reminds me, not of any particular classical music piece, but rather John Contrane's seminal album A Love Supreme, which I cannot recommend too  highly.  There have been many songs, paintings, poems and buildings over the years that have been identified as spiritual.  If there is one that clearly deserves that designation it is A Love Supreme. Coltrane was influenced by his own Christian roots, Ahmadiyya Islam, some Indian mysticism, and his own deeply spiritual quest.  It is broken down into four passages: Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm. I love every section, but go back and forth on whether Resolution or Pursuance is my favorite; they both make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  So why did the Coltrane album come to mind?  Part of the reason relates to Proust's description of the Vinteuil piece: "And it was precisely when he was striving with all his might to create something new that one recognised, beneath the apparent differences, the profound similarities and the deliberate resemblances that existed in the body of a work; when Vinteuil took up the same phrase again and again, diversified it, amused himself by altering its rhythms, by making it reappear in its original form, those deliberate resemblances, the work of his intellect, necessarily superficial, never succeeded in being as striking as the disguised, involuntary resemblances, which broke out in different colours, between the two separate masterpieces . ."  At one point in A Love Supreme Coltrane takes four notes and plays them something like thirty different ways, as if he is exploring, testing the limits, but still coming back to the unity of all things.  However, maybe what made me think of the Coltrane album most insistently is Proust's final description of the sonata when Vinteuil, "striving to do something new, interrogated himself, with all the power of his creative energy, reached down to his essential self at those depths where, whatever be the question asked, it is in the same accent, that it is to say its own, that it replies."  I can't read that without thinking of Coltrane.  A Love Supreme is a required purchase for anyone with aspirations of cultural sophistication, and who needs that jump start in their own quest for God.