Before we start talking about T.S. Eliot-
Odi profanum volgus et arceo -
I hate the vulgar crowd, and keep them away:
grant me your silence. A priest of the Muses,
I sing a song never heard before,
for young women and boys.
The poet Horace adopted shades of Homer’s style and rhetoric as he laid down his third books of odes around 23 BC. He saw a Roman Empire that was still on top of the world, but beginning to show signs of decay, immorality, and vulgarity. Does any of this sounds familiar? Like so many of the brilliant thinkers of today, Horace saw a world on the brink and yearned for yesterday – if the people could just get their lives right and embrace the old fashioned virtues, then the deep, structural problems with the Romans would magically fix themselves, and all would be right with the world. And so, this particular book was written for this purpose – to weave an epic story of the moral values that made his nation great, and call all of the citizens of the country to embrace these values and revitalize the nation. So, how does he start? With a little rhetorical nod to Homer. And what does he see as the problem?
Us. While we might think of vulgarity or profanity when we see the word Vulgaris (as Josh Homme did when he chose Era Vulgaris as the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s fifth LP), the root meaning of the word is actually “common”. The whims and impulses of the average person were the root of vulgarity in Horace’s aristocratic social circle. This wasn’t a blanket pronouncement; Horace came from the lower classes himself, so he certainly didn’t believe in a caste system – but the lifestyle of the average Roman, living from day to day, working hard and being loud, focused on food and shelter and sex, didn’t lend itself to the kind of meditative, transcendental thinking needed for a person to elevate above the vulgar state. So, what was his solution, the first step on the road to becoming as cultivated as the founders of his country?
Let the tongue be silent.
This art of silence, cultivation, and calm reflection was a song the youth hadn’t heard before – and if they piped down and listened to others for once, instead of pursuing the passions of the day, they could learn something, and get a taste of what their forefathers had. The commons were vulgar – thoughtless, tacky, loud (ever wonder why we use that word in that context?). But with a little work, a new spirit could spread all the way from the bottom to the top of the chain, that snotty young Emperor by the name of…
Hm, let me Google that for myself… and it says… ah, I see.
Some guy named Augustus Caesar. Anybody heard of him?
Yeah, it turned out the the much heralded moral decay Horace saw wasn’t the end of civilization after all, just a natural evolution of the societal norms he’d been accustomed to during his life. And the things Horace cherished : living without fear, seeking the simple things in life, willingness to fight for the country’s glory – all of it survived and even flourished in the reign of Augustus.
We haven’t come nearly as far as we might think in the couple of millenia since Horace wrote this poem. Critics still say that modern culture plays to the lowest common denominator and is vulgar by definition. But, just like it was back then, the thoughts and concepts cherished by the literary community are still reflected in a lot of the music we hear today.
And that brings us back to this funny lookin’ fella.
[23:49] bone machine: actually, the wasteland is a good poem
[23:49] bone machine: BUT
[23:49] bone machine: four winds, is it?
[23:49] frozenatlantic: yes
[23:49] bone machine: or four seasons or whatever[23:49] bone machine: that’s the best
[23:49] bone machine: four winds, right
[23:49] bone machine: it’s fantastic
[23:50] frozenatlantic: no no no
[23:50] frozenatlantic: it’s quartets
[23:50] bone machine: yes, that
[23:50] frozenatlantic: yup[23:51] bone machine: four quartets is that bright eyes record, but I wasn’t mistaking it for that, I just thought it was the name of the TS Eliot poem/poems as well for a second
[23:51] bone machine: I don’t wanna be that guy who fucking mistakes T S Eliot for Bright Eyes, or even give the appearance of that, so there’s the clarification.
T.S. Eliot – one of the pioneers of the modernist movement. While he was a writer who placed a lot of value on the way words sounded and felt, he didn’t sit down and write a bunch of obtuse riddles to himself. The Four Quartets, which was cited as his favorite piece in Eliot’s catalog, is a meditation on how people could console themselves in the face of mortality, and in a broader sense, the permanent and unfeeling march of time.
The first poem in the quartet is called Burnt Norton, and cleverly frames this struggle against time in terms of quantum mechanics. The speaker imagines himself looking through a series of doors, each containing more and further doors behind those – a dizzying array of possibilities, echoes of doors never opened that would drive him insane if he contemplated all of them for long enough. And the only place one could watch all of this and be sane was “the still point of the turning world”:
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Before you forget that this isn’t supposed to be PoetryZeitgeist (a great idea though, and I’m totally going to copyright it)… lets see… still point in a turning world? Eliot later tells us that we can make peace with time by suppressing our passion – and one popular song has a narrator who was torn up with it, and as a result, has cast it off, giving him the perception to notice the changes around him.
The world has turned and left me here
Just where I was before you appeared.
And in your place an empty space
Has filled the void behind my face.
The speaker is distant and removed from the world before and after he was left. I mean, we’re seeing allusions to modernist poetry to make over the top emo lyrics seem slightly less emo than they actually are.. but hey, that’s life. The previous song on the album shows a narrator who is out of control, bugged out with his passion, and now that his relationship is over, he’s retreated inside himself, and since he’s cut himself off from everything and everyone else, he can look through those mythical doors that Eliot spoke about into other, happier realities.
To be fair, Rivers Cuomo is a dork who went to Harvard, so he probably had plenty of time to ponder ideas like this. But this isn’t the only place we can find references to the heady material we see in poetry. Idlewild’s a Scottish band that, even as they recovered from being an indie “it kid” hangover, have practically spilled from the seams with allusions to poetry and philosophy, in fact, Scottish poet laureate Edwin Morgan is featured on one Idlewild track and on lead singer Roddy Woomble’s solo album.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who pioneered existentialism – which, for the purposes of not kicking off a college-level dissertation – is the idea that nothing exists outside of our own thoughts, and nothing has meaning outside of the meaning we attach to it. Sartre’s ideas are probably of particular interest to those trying to define themselves as separate from the ideas of their predecessors. Woomble talks about writing sentences in order to ignore them, and admonishing the listener to ignore them too – which is obviously an impossible task. He runs into the same problem when composing : making a conscious effort to ignore everything he’s heard beforehand. Even the individual words used day to day have inherited their meanings and connotations from others, and so whatever poignant wisdom he writes didn’t really come from himself. When Idlewild echoes Sartre in the chorus, “I Am What I Am Not” is more than catchy wordplay – it’s an omission that everyone is defined by how alike or different they are from something else, not on their merits as some individual entity.
Originally, this song was set to just be the ending monologue of Ulysses (yes I said yes I will yes), but the notoriously tightwadded Joyce estate denied permission for her to use the lyrics, and despite spending a year trying to get them to change their minds, she eventually had to rewrite the lyrics from scratch, and, in the end of things, The Sensual World was likely better off for it – the new words make the song more memorable and extend the purpose of Joyce’s story to other situations.
You could probably spend a long time discussing songs that are allusions or allegories to classical works, whether it’s from The Cure (Killing an Arab is based on a passage about halfway through The Stranger), the Alan Parsons Project (Tales of Mystery and Imagination is pretty much a concept album themed around the works of Poe), or Yes (the ties between Close to the Edge and Siddhartha could probably merit its own post), the strongest evidence for how the vulgar medium of popular music still carries many of the ideas of philosophy and/or the literary movement is through the ideas and themes in the songs themselves, not just a convenient calling out or line-dropping. Pink Floyd’s Time is another song that brings a unique take to an intellectual concept, in this case the concept of “carpe diem”, taking advantage of every moment of time afforded before it slips away. The song tells a story about a bored character who goes around his hometown, not finding much of interest at all. But time shifts abruptly, with “ten years” behind him out of nowhere, that he missed the starting gun in the frantic race against mortality. Pink Floyd might have found agreement with this old work of poetry that originated the phrase “carpe diem”:
Ask not—we cannot know—what end the gods have set for you, for me; nor attempt the Babylonian reckonings Leuconoë. How much better to endure whatever comes, whether Jupiter grants us additional winters or whether this is our last, which now wears out the Tuscan Sea upon the barrier of the cliffs! Be wise, strain the wine; and since life is brief, prune back far-reaching hopes! Even while we speak, envious time has passed: pluck the day, putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow!
Hey, is that our old friend Horace popping up again? How special. The knowledge that Horace’s admonitions have survived to the present day should give a great deal of comfort to our modern philosophers who worry about the coarsening of our culture and all of its vulgarity.
The commoners retain so much more than anyone thinks.
[00:53] bone machine: that second of the four quartets COMPLETELY ties into Ozymandias and Watchmen and almost alot of what I took away from it
[00:53] bone machine: man’s relationship with earth and time, and the futility of trying to stand in the face of inevitable change[00:54] bone machine: because Eliot’s whole thing in there is about humility
[00:54] bone machine: and if you read the Ozymandias poem, it’s the exact opposite
[00:54] bone machine: but it’s about the shortsightedness and lack of conscioussness that comes with hubris
[00:54] bone machine: which ties into the first quartet, I believe
[00:55] bone machine: about how time’s movement allows us but a scant glimpse of consciousness from the still point in the center at which we stand
[00:55] frozenatlantic: mmm
[00:55] bone machine: kinda like the whole idea that the earth is constantly spinning, but because we’re moving with it at the same speed, we can’t even perceive that it’s spinning at all[00:57] bone machine: there’s not such thing as time, anyway
[00:57] bone machine: it’s a tool of measurement, not a force
[00:57] bone machine: people talk about it as if it exerts it’s own force
[00:58] bone machine: I think it merely measures the decay rate that comes as a result of other forces
[00:58] bone machine: but is not one of the forces, unto itself, exerting the pressure that creates decay
[00:58] bone machine: meaning like
[00:58] bone machine: time doesn’t “age” people[00:58] bone machine: other phenomenon causes cellular decay
[00:59] bone machine: but those things happen over a period of time, so we measure it as such
[00:59] frozenatlantic: right
[00:59] bone machine: but it isn’t “time” itself doing it
[00:59] frozenatlantic: well of course
[00:59] frozenatlantic: time isnt physical
[00:59] bone machine: yeah, but a ton of people seem to act as if time is physical
[00:59] bone machine: “the ravages of time”
[00:59] bone machine: what a misnomer
[01:00] bone machine: oh well
[01:00] frozenatlantic:
[01:00] bone machine: my brain was on fire for a minute there
[01:00] bone machine: but I don’t really know where to go with it next
