zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — Talmud, hypertext, spider webs, Indra’s net, noosphere, rosaries, renga, the bead game, Xanadu, hooks-and-eyes, onward! ]
.

Let me firmly anchor this post and its comments, which will no doubt shift and turn as the wind wishes, in discussion of the possibility of improving on current affordances for online deliberation.

Let’s begin here:

@hipbonegamer @Aelkus @pmarca Andy van Dam cited “Talmudic Annotation” as ur hypertext pattern since the mid 1960’s pic.twitter.com/F1XKEf9F7G

— Greg Lloyd (@roundtrip) December 11, 2014

**

There are a variety of precursor streams to this discussion: I have listed a few that appeal to me in the sub-head of this post and believe we will reach each and all of them in some form and forum if this discussion takes off. And I would like to offer the immediate hospitality of this Zenpundit post and comment section to make a beginning.

Greg’s tweet shows us a page of the Talmud, which is interesting to me for two reasons:

it presents many voices debating a central topic

it does so using an intricate graphical format

The script of a play or movie also records multiple voices in discourse, as does an orchestral score — but the format of the Talmudic score is more intricate, allowing the notation of counterpoint that extends across centuries, and provoking in turn centuries of further commentary and debate.

What can we devise by way of a format, given the constraints of screen space and the affordances of software and interface design, that maximizes the possibility of debate with respect, on the highly charged topics of the day.

We know from the Talmud that such an arrangement is possible in retrospect (when emotion can be recollected in tranquility): I am asking how we can come closest to it in real time. The topics are typically hotly contested, patience and tolerance may not always be in sufficient supply, and moderation by humans with powers of summary and editing should probably not be ruled out of our consdierations. But how do we create a platform that is truly polyphonic, that sustains the voices of all participants without one shouting down or crowding out another, that indeed may embody a practic of listening..?

Carl Rogers has shown us that the ability to express one’s interlocutor’s ideas clearly enough that they acknowledge one has understood them is a significant skill in navigating conversational rapids.

The Talmud should be an inspiration but not a constraint for us. The question is not how to build a Talmud, but how to build a format that can host civil discussion which refines itself as it grows — so that, to use a gardening metaphor, it is neither overgrown nor too harshly manicured, but manages a carefully curated profusion of insights and —

actual interactions between the emotions and ideas in participating or observing individuals’ minds and hearts

**

Because polyphony is not many voices talking past one another, but together — sometimes discordant, but attempting to resolve those discords as they arrive, and with a figured bass of our common humanity underwriting the lot of them.

And I have said it before: here JS Bach is the master. What he manages with a multitude of musical voices in counterpoint is, in my opinion, what we need in terms of verbal voices in debate.

I am particularly hoping to hear from some of those who participated in tweeted comments arising from my previous post here titled Some thoughts for Marc Andreessen & Adam Elkus, including also Greg Loyd, Callum Flack, Belinda Barnet, Ken (chumulu) — Jon Lebkowsky if he’s around — and friends, and friends of friends.

What say you?

[ by Charles Cameron — Swift, Bach, sharia, semi-trailers, and a quick look at Ferguson / St Louis ]
.

I offer you Ms Taylor Swift as captured in a very clever DoubleQuote in the wild which I discovered via a friend, Deborah Tobias:

By way of comparison, here — as seen in my earlier post Ms Swift, Sara Mingardo, JS Bach and a quiet WTF — is the remarkable Ms Swift’s mouthing of Bach‘s Chorale Prelude for organ BWV 732, Praise God, you Christians all together, as posted on YouTube by VoiceOfShariah:

Quite how sharia comes into the picture I don’t claim to know…

**

You wanna nother DQ, nothing to do with Ms Swift this time? I took a fancy to this one:

New Yorker cover artist says he didn’t see R.J. Matson’s August cartoon. http://t.co/KKAUlTCCWK pic.twitter.com/m9TLy01qII

— Andrew Beaujon (@abeaujon) November 26, 2014

Those two images coduld be polarizing — or they could serve as bridges: that’s one of the interesting things about some, if not all, DoubleQuotes. There’s a good commentary from Erik Wemple blogging at WaPo.

[ by Charles Cameron — Dostoevsky, Hopkins, Caravaggio, Mozart, Bach, Fellini, Cervantes — that’s who! ]
.

For context and contrast, first read this:

Pope Francis decided at the last minute not to attend a Beethoven concert last evening, Fox News and others reported. Fox News comments, “Unlike his predecessor Benedict, who was well-known as a music lover, Francis has shown scant interest in music, liturgical or otherwise.” The concert, an event long planned for the Year of Faith, included Beethoven’s 9th symphony with choir and orchestra.

Pope Francis supposedly said “I am not a Renaissance prince who listens to music instead of working,” Vatican Insider first reported, later softening its report to preserve the general sense without quoting the pope directly.

— then this, from the first extended interview of Pope Francis, which has just been released.

While I’m sure plenty of others will mull over other aspects of what he has to say for himself, I’m taking my own insights into his character from the artists in whose work he finds inspiration:

I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.

I have read The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of The Betrothed: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains….’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.

Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his ‘White Crucifixion.’ Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfils me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the ‘Parsifal’ by Knappertsbusch in 1962.

We should also talk about the cinema. ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is ‘Rome, Open City.’ I owe my film culture especially to my parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.

Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.

**

Mozart, Et incarnatus est:

Mozart, played by Clara Haskil:

Bach, Erbarme dich, from the Matthew Passion:

Fellini, La Strada, innocence:

Fellini, La Strada, despair:

No wonder, then, that he loves the poetry of his fellow Jesuit, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”‘

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

— nor the works of Caravaggio, whose rap sheet was impressive to say the least:

Arriving in Rome in 1595 at the age of 25, the hot-headed painter’s police dossier — hand-written in Latin and vernacular Italian and bound in great volumes that were stored in the archives until now — makes Caravaggio come across as almost compulsive in his lawlessness. For instance, the man was weapon-obsessed, sporting a sword, dagger, and pistol at various times. He was twice thrown in the clink for carrying arms without a permit, and known for beating strangers in late-night fights and pelting police with rocks.

The documents add fresh color to well-known parts of the Caravaggio legend. Regarding the 1606 brawl during which the artist killed one Ranuccio Tommassoni, leading the artist to flee Rome and causing Pope Paul V to issue a death warrant, the documents reveal that the fight was over a gambling debt, and not a woman, as some accounts have suggested.

It is all the more appropriate, then, to close this post with Caravaggio’s own meditation on the martyrdom by crucifixion of the first Pope, St Peter, whose chair Francis now holds:

_______________________________________________________________________________

.

h/t Damian Thompson, who tweeted “I never thought I’d hear a Pope rave about Haskil’s Mozart, Furtwängler’s Beethoven and Knappertsbusch’s legendary 62 Parsifal.”

[ by Charles Cameron — some very beautiful music accompanied by unexpected visuals ]
.

I am in full agreement with this tweet today from our co-blogger here on Zenpundit, Scott Shipman:

Never gets old: J. S. Bach – Cantata BWV 63 – Christen ätzet diesen Tag – 5 – Aria (J. S…: http://t.co/ir40uHdBhX via @youtube

— J. Scott Shipman (@jscottshipman) June 26, 2013

Cantata 63, Christen ätzet diesen Tag, is indeed among the five or so works of Bach to which I find myself constantly turning, though not to this particular movement or performance. It is the work that John Eliot Gardiner performed so movingly, and that wonderfully caught for us on DVD — I’ve spoken of it before.

Today, though, Scott’s post brings us a mystery I’ve been pondering, and preparing to post about, for a few weeks now. It involves a series of videos, as you can see, and videos take time to watch, I know. I can only say that the music of Cantata 63 itself is wonderful, and the mystery really quite a puzzle. I hope you will find both worth your while.

**

Without further comment, then, here is Taylor Swift performing Love Story:

That seems simple enough.

Here, though, is the same footage used to present Cantata 63, directed by Karl Richter:

And here is what I take to be the same exact recording, presented with different visuals:

Remarkable.

To my mind, those three videos taken together raise all sorts of interesting questions about the sacred and the profane, eros and agape, aesthetics, mixology, you name it…

**

Here is Sara Mingardo singing the recitative O Selger Tag from the same Cantata — in the superlative rendering which I mentioned above — and only recently rediscovered on YouTube, and can thus bring you:

I have listened to a number of versions of this aria — and to my ear, mind, and heart, Mingardo brings a devotion to this “mere” recitative which far outdistances the others.

**

Now for the second part of my puzzle:

The second of those videos, with the glamorous Ms Swift’s imagery accompanying Herr Bach’s cantata, was posted by one “voiceofshariah” whose 117 videos include more Bach with Taylor Swift imagery:

— quite a glorious Bach organ piece with which I was not already familiar — but also, under the name “afghanistansomalia”, this version of the B Minor Mass, which I discussed here earlier in a post titled Osama and the flute of the devil:

— which you’ll note is posted after bin Laden‘s death, and — as if to confuse matters even further — this video, again with OBL visuals, of Maurice Jarre‘s soundtrack for the David Lean / Peter O’Toole film, Lawrence of Arabia!

Whoa! Osama bin Laden and Lawrence of Arabia?

What one is to make of all this, I can only guess. I desperately want to get back to the simple appreciation of beauty, however, and will do so, I hope, in an upcoming yet related post.

[ by Charles Cameron — you can safely ignore this if you have zero interest in any or all of Bach, Eliot, Christianity and Sufism ]
.

It’s Sunday evening here, let’s start with Yehudi Menuhin playing Bach — the great Chaconne:

**

This post began to coalesce for me when Dr Alan Godlas, whose web-pages at the University of Georgia offer, among other things, a profound “gateway to Sufism“, gave me his permission to quote a comment he’d made in a private communication:

Sufis and Muslims need to learn how to recite and listen to the Qur’an (and how to do dhikr and practice Islam and Sufism) at the depth at which Bach wrote this Chaconne and at which it was played by Menuhin.

**

That really gets to the heart of the issue of spirituality and beauty — and it brought to mind a comment made by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict Emeritus, in his speech at Rimini on The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty:

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgement and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true”. The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration. Isn’t the same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the Trinity of Rublëv? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be shared.

**

John Eliot Gardiner, the great conductor of Bach with whom I apparently spent some of my earlier school-years, offers us an intriguing insight in In Rehearsal with John Eliot Gardiner (Bach Cantata No. 63), immediately after Sara Mingardo‘s deeply devotional rendering of the recitative O selger Tag —

Nota bene: Bei einer andächtigen Musik ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnaden Gegenwart. Now I find that very, very significant. That he’s saying wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present. Which, from a strict theological point of view is probably heresy, heretical, because it’s saying that music has an equivalent potency to the word of God. And I think that in essence is why Bach is so attractive to us today because he is saying that the very act of music-making and of coming together is, in a sense, an act which invokes the latency, the potency, the potentiality of God’s grace, however you like to define God’s grace; but of a benediction that comes even in a dreadful, overheated studio like Abbey Road where far too many microphones and there’s much too much stuff here in the studio itself, that if one, as a musician, puts oneself in the right frame of mind, then God’s grace can actually come and direct and influence the way we perform his music.

**

But I’ve quoted both Benedict and Gardiner on this very topic before, I know, so I’ll move on to the poet TS Eliot, who in Four Quartets tells us:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

**

I would like to offer three more interpretations of the Bach Chaconne, and one anecdote. The first interpretation is of the entire Solo Violin Partita #2, including the Chaconne, by the young and already great Hilary Hahn. Her rendition of the Chaconne alone is available as a separate YouTube video here:

There’s also a Busoni piano arrangement, played here by Helene Grimaud — it was, I think, our own J Scott Shipman who introduced me to this stunning performance:

And even more amazing, perhaps, is the disc called “Morimur” by the Hilliard Ensemble, which you can watch much of on Youtube here, then purchase in full and with a detailed accompanying booklet here…

**

Finally –since I obviously love the Chaconne — I would like to leave you with the story of a double performance of this same piece by violinist Joshua Bell at L’Enfant Plaza metro in Washington, DC — as told by Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten — who won a Pulitzer for this article:

Pearls before Breakfast:

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play …

Go ahead, read it if you haven’t already — it’s quite a story!