Surreality

A slice into the pleasure of the text. My impressions of Le Marteau sans Maitre, chamber piece by Pierre Boulez, poems by Breton-inspired Rene Char. Surrealism as revolution, the Art of Protest. The idea of Marcuse (he attributes to Aristotle) that the cathartic effect of art has a dual nature: “both to oppose and to reconcile, both to indict and to acquit, both to recall the repressed and to repress it again” (Eros and Civilization, 145).

 

Executioners of Solitude

 

The music hits with the impact of lightning. Three poems set to three diverse types of variations. Middle range instruments: viola, guitar, alto flute, alto voice. Percussion drum drumming in the ears, and that too atypical quincunx of bongos, so much so that it floods out of the peripheral notes and diagrams and crashes onto the pillory of the individual pieces. One poem sung then mirrored in a hall of three drummer’s variations, One poem sung with a before and afterward. Then the Executioners.

One poem garroted twice as if one sluice of the blade were not enough to do the damage. Twin blades. Doubles. Bloody and electric. Char and Boulez. Twelve pitches, twelve diacritical dynamics. – Would a player pay attention in their long hours of practice in solitary rooms, the shadings between mezzo-piano and forte, side by side by side again. Two blades slicing down simultaneous and apart, the condemned hanging in two spheres. One sphere is imitation, or perhaps the handkerchief of relief, thrown on the dial of the sun, now dark. Alone, the hangman walks with me to the green room, a draught of some cool liquid, and finally, after two labored attempts at life, accepts the restraint of an unconscious purpose that allows us both to do the things we do. 

 

__________

Reference

Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization. Beacon Press, 1955.

 

Nick Harris

3/19/2025