From Genius Mind to Genius Heart: Wagner, Liszt and Dream's End

Wagner at Bayreuth (shows Franz Liszt at piano) by Gemälde von Georg Papperitz

"If I think of the storm of my heart, the terrible tenacity with which, against my desire, it used to cling to the hope of life, and if even now I feel this hurricane within me, I have at least found a quietus which in wakeful nights helps me to sleep. This is the genuine, ardent longing for death, for absolute unconsciousness, total non-existence; freedom from all dreams is our only final salvation."

"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head "Tristan and Isolde," the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the "black flag" which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die."

Wagner's Letter 168 to Liszt. The Project Gutenberg Etext of Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2, by Francis Hueffer (translator)

I suppose to find one's peer as an artist is an ideal that few artists truly find. In the artist's magic of self-distinction, and in their magnificent ability to penetrate the heart of all, there is a deep and rich yearning to struggle, co-exist and finally, bond with fellow colleagues in the field. The artist, however, is too often moved beyond the spheres of normalized human contact, and thus falls short in sharing the richness of their life with another, except in the case of a briefly interspersed encounter with love, endured while in the sweep and momentum of creation. The recording above bears such testimony, and the heartened dialogue which shifted the reigns from the genius mind to the genius heart in the Romantic age of music has no likely parallel than in the intercourse between Wagner and Liszt which produced such insurmountable passion. 

________

Separated friendships detached by the urban domestic strife of youth boggled into a labyrinth of direction often slides off course over more damaged rails and misbegotten paths, the hard-won industrial groove of 21^st century burning turns with a lifeless tour through the metal of pocket-worn need. 

White Buildings and Labours by Jayanta Bhattacharya

My friend, alone, and huddling over a home-cooked potluck gathering, strides in fully bedecked in Scottish kilt-wear. His face nearly contorted with the oncoming gripe of tears looks down and over his saran-wrapped goods. I comfort his back, emotionally elsewhere, long gone and hopeless for a friendship that’s as irrelevant as the contents of additional soup.

Scots boy in red kilt by Wilhelm Trubner

As I wander off, the air is opaque with a dark, runny stirring. The world commotion breathes heavily. A musical engagement is torn from my wife and I as our contact weans her ear from a phone of marital divorce, and the sky blackens with the frost of an easy death. 

Satire on Romantic Suicide by Leonardo Alenza Y Nieto

I tip toe up to my experimental end. I’ll have no burial, nor cremation, a sky birth in the way of my choice, a bungee jump without a bungee, and I dress for the occasion exactly as I would for my big day. My imagination jumps.  

_________

A great poverty aligns to the roof of the all-consuming jaw,
          That sweeps with the tornado dawn over the rushing plains
...
As American lore, talking through the human trees
          In a grave, over-worked rush to the gambled fortune
                 hidden in the proud dream
          To unite and be loyal to nothing,
          And yet return from the hollow
                 blank rough of our creative winter

excerpt from "Post-War Television Rites at the Dam of Time"

Reflection on Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

"Dreams and silence and night are the three elements, are very important for me. I just would like to in this album give it a question for the audience. What's happened, even in the 21st century we have this completely cosmic technology, and finally our life is longer but it is not so deep like it was, you know, 10, 20 years ago. What's happened is that this technology does not help for us in our life, that we are finally more alone." - Zbigniew Preisner

"Silence that arouses anxiety. Night that envelops sadness and despair. Dreams of hope for a transformation." - Lyrics form "Silence, Night and Dreams" sung in Latin and English, from Book of Job and Gospel of St. Matthew

Reflection on "Silence, Night and Dreams" by Zbigniew Preisner

This album stopped me dead in my tracks. In a pre-evening slump of energy, I dipped down into a reclining position, to receive the fullness of a truly heartened listening experience. There was no mediation, no other attention drawn, simply and fully, I became present in the music. And it took me there. The wave-like form of the movements called me into my own being. I lay, submerged in pure sonic form. An experience not yet had swept me into a simulacrum vortex, an open mind. I slipped as it were, directly into the centre of vacuum space. As I lay in my dark room, my eyes sank in the opaque mysteries of an unearthly darkness. The sopranos melted my heart and my body of water became as the grandiose demiurge of self-awareness.

One of my favourite aspects of Preisner's music is his use of silence. The storied conceptual sacrifice of John Cage flits in my mind, and then I hear a celestial soprano. What takes me away with this recording is how the singer, Teresa Salgueiro, of Madredeus had to learn to read music solely for this collaboration with Preisner, a self-taught musician himself!

Preisner's compositional style, ever-unique, reminds me more of landscape, at once abstract, at once pointedly accurate to the infinitesimal temporality. In my ear, it skies beyond "music" as knowably defined, and in a sense becomes likened to the essence of human experience, beyond expected form, the disquiet of artistic convention. For this reason, it is a personification of dream, a direct rendering of the heart of the maker. For more listening into Preisner's dream mind, listen to "Like a Dream"

Infinitely more could be expressed, for every one of the multiple listenings I've had since the full album's played through my airwaves, though I'll let your experience and mine to be yet further fulfilled in silence, night and dreams. Such is the character of night.

_______

Night on the bus route is darker than usual. It must be a new moon, or heavy unseen cloud cover. Friends sneer at my withdrawn attitude. “What is he concealing?” the fantasize grotesque in the bored clashing of spatial insensitivity. The mood is young and innocence carries a deft presence of unsightly, childish greed. I keep to myself. “Where do I get out?” I implore into the obscure open, unrecognized concrete slabs give the lonely night its shape. We are way out past our usual neighborhoods. I am afraid, though I hardly show it. The others step down at an abandoned building leading to a bridge into parkland, a notorious breeding ground of mischief for those called into the night. I get out at the next stop. As I cross the bridge, I am encroached on all sides by my jeering friends on the bus. They ask where I’m going, what I’m doing. I simply tell them that I’ve been working at a hardware store. The tower above me, they know I’m hiding something. The hallucinogens pulsate in my sleeves with the rumble of their own palpable life, an energy known by my night wandering guests as any intoxicating scent, wafting into their needful minds with a strength beyond another human presence.

_______

Night

"If you are surrounded by night in your dreams, you may expect unusual oppression and hardships in business...To dream of night time signifies obstacles in achieving your goals. You may find that some issues you are facing are still unclear. Take more time before making a decision...extreme darkness suggests that you are hiding something or are unwilling to see things clearly...The darkness represents a lack of awareness or illumination." (iDream)

_______

"you are as a message,
complete
full
with clarity & goodness in substance

a sleeping vessel,
purified constantly with the freshest, pure oxygen
gifted from up on high

a spiritual life force known only in the most ancient virgin forests,
an ecosystem wise with earthly pleasure,
swaying to magic rhythms

you bend your heart
scaling every obstacle
materialized by mortal touch

miraculous and soothing, not tempting but calm,
an emergent glow breaks the great fever
making modern man delirious with repeated history

your very being is the cure, and every expression a sacred step
bringing us closer to a shared peace among all humanity and all universal creation,
uniting us through a creative spark"

- excerpt from "you are as a message"

Speechless Movement of Noetic Sound

"...to use art not as self-expression, but as self-alteration; to become more open." 

"In Zen, they say, if something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for 4, if still boring, try it for 8, 16, 32, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it's not boring at all, but very interesting."

John Cage

________

At my father’s house, the neighbors are belligerent. They drink in squalor and rev engines in domestic rage, puffing their chests with the heave of self-created poverty, a traumatic school of bundled nerves, fraying and pressed against the hot ice of American dreams. On the road between my father’s and their house, I stare, empathizing with their tragic isolation. As I spin my head around to my father’s lawn, the grass is inundated with naked souls, barefooted and striving with dead honor to lust and feed off each other’s energy. Multi-colored bodies writhe and shake as a spawn of ghosts shrieking wildly in the post-greed high of the stubborn suburb.

Recoiling mad into my private bathroom at my mother’s I freak wryly, drowning my habit in a sore crack addiction. Black pills behind the mirror scream deftly into my ear at all hours. Howls brew, slaking my darkest corner with a dreamless food. Dispassionate and apologetic, I am exposed by my mother, who slowly weans me off the fatal addiction. Re-entering the street, I pass between the spiritual purgatory of population and the isolated wallowing of violent speed.

A time after, I walk carefully through a glowing green brush in the rural vein of the Northeast country. Carrying our instruments, my Love and I meander toward the new home of my father, way out in the bush of Maine. On their property, I play with a friendly cat, shaking a healthy, felled branch over its crooked head, radiant with happy fervor. We are received. I eat a stomach-full of red steak. I haven’t eaten meat in 7 years! The flesh is warm and satisfying. I ask, “Is the steak from Argentina?” The label says, “Made in America” just like any other consumer product. Sitting out by an outdoor hearth in the midday sun, my Love and I begin to play music for the flies. The wind is bright with security and home.

I imagine our next phase, on a bridge in San Francisco, street performing with a lively troupe and befriending a nut seller on our way to public grace.

________

Country

"To dream of being in a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country." (iDream)

Meat

"To see raw meat in your dream symbolizes that there will be many obstacles in achieving your goals. If you dream of cooked meat, this symbolizes that you will see others obtain the object that you have been striving for." (iDream)

________

separation into the unfair glory of a broken now,
embittered jealousy and temptation from the host of a brewing psychic sickness,
guarding the predawn monumental distance among the enchained
battered souls of a deeply entrenched loss
complexified and exponential falsification of death's human mask
still breathing the attuned words of spiritual greed in the crescent boon of a perfect desert sleep,
and involved within an enclosed world all their own,
the forgotten beauty of an intoxicating truth still relieves the air above with its tempting,
yet out of reach and petrified, animalistic burden
feeding on the glow of the moon
and the laughter of pagan lights streaking past the beyond
in pairs of three and nine,
we forever move. 

 

- excerpt from "4 Dreams"