Going in, your expectations are vaguely negative. You've never been a fan of country music, and she's been known to twang. Her songs, in the air since forever, render you otherwise familiar, but absent a secondary motivation, you would have stayed home. Your wife, an initiate though hardly a zealot, draws you out.
You prepare yourself for a mob scene. You don't encounter one—a good thing for you, not so for others, but you'll only dwell on them later. Your theater is nevertheless filled with enthusiasts. Ads and previews urge the lights toward darkness. Then, blackout and the final moments. Something shifts in the air. Even you can feel it.
At last she materializes, and when she does, the theater explodes.
Song from the screen. Song from the seats. Song from the aisles and doorways. Song, somehow, even from above. What is this? Where has it come from? You've never experienced anything like it before, yet you're wracked by atavistic shudders. A contradiction. Somewhere deep within you lies a passkey. You can't extract it, so you stop thinking. You wait, watch, listen.
Minutes elapse. Twenty. Forty. She withdraws to a piano. Merciless closeups ensue and fail to reveal flaws. How? Time assails all prisoners. Makeup can't guard against angstrom-length distances. Corruption sets in long before thirty-three trips around the golden orb. But not for her. Evidently she alone abides.
And she goes on. As does the theater. The universe pounds and cries and pulses and moves. Then the light catches her in a novel way. Her eyes widen and flash, slip sideways, flash again, and all at once she arrives.
Ἀθήνη γλαυκῶπις.
Glaukopis Athena.
Bright-Eyed Athena.
You tumble into recognition:
"[In ancient Greece] there was at bottom no opposition of public and chorus: for all was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and singing . . . A public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theaters the terraced structure of the theatron rising in concentric arcs enabled every one to overlook, in an actual sense, the entire world of culture around him, and in an over-abundance of contemplation to imagine himself one of the chorus . . . The power of this vision is great enough to render the eye dull and insensible to the impression of 'reality,' to the presence of the cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every side . . . The architecture of the scene is a luminous cloud-picture and the Bacchants swarming on the mountains behold this picture from the heights, —the splendid encirclement in the midst of which is visible the image of Dionysus."
Panta rhei from the oft-forgotten subtitle, Out of The Spirit of Music. And of course music is Euterpe's purview. And of course Athena isn't Dionysus. But you discard trivialities because pedantry, snobbery, and cynicism damage your antennae right when you need them most.
But you discard trivialities because pedantry, snobbery, and cynicism damage your antennae right when you need them most.
Here it is, a trans-civic, trans-continent, transnational chorus casting off superfluities, feeling "surrounded by such a host of spirits with whom they know themselves to be essentially one." Extraordinary, "the suddenly swelling Dionysian tide then takes the separate little . . . individuals on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and on broad shoulders to bear them higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common."
As for those stranded in theaters more sedate than yours, the phenomenon "epidemic in its manifestation" seems to have left them behind. "In the midst of a world of sorrows [where] the individual sits quietly," they sought more transcendent heartache:
"the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers . . . [the reminder]—as medicines remind us of deadly poisons . . . that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us. At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals, nature seems to reveal a sentimental trait; it is as if she were heaving a sigh at her dismemberment into individuals . . . it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual . . . the wretched fragile tenement of the human individual."
You sympathize but cannot assist. Her every step is a thunderbolt, detonating "the terrible awe which seizes upon man, when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, when the principle of reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception."
You're part of the chorus—"average citizens who have achieved nothing remarkable," says Mr. Stop-All-The-Clocks. You take comfort in his error. Not about your place. About that, he's spot-on. Rather about your recognition. About what it recalls. "The nearest modern equivalent," he claims, "is not any work of the theater, but a ball game or a bull-fight." Well, not anymore. Not after this.
Hearken. The gods appear at their leisure. They rule over light and sound. They take human form, yet shapeshift. They suffer in enigmatic ways. They make the earth tremble. They rend the sky. They boil the seas. They bully the stars. They, not you, will live forever and be remembered, so you abandon yourself to the visitation and manage to forget, for the space of a breath, that your life is small, short, and speeding by.
You prepare yourself for a mob scene. You don't encounter one—a good thing for you, not so for others, but you'll only dwell on them later. Your theater is nevertheless filled with enthusiasts. Ads and previews urge the lights toward darkness. Then, blackout and the final moments. Something shifts in the air. Even you can feel it.
At last she materializes, and when she does, the theater explodes.
Song from the screen. Song from the seats. Song from the aisles and doorways. Song, somehow, even from above. What is this? Where has it come from? You've never experienced anything like it before, yet you're wracked by atavistic shudders. A contradiction. Somewhere deep within you lies a passkey. You can't extract it, so you stop thinking. You wait, watch, listen.
Minutes elapse. Twenty. Forty. She withdraws to a piano. Merciless closeups ensue and fail to reveal flaws. How? Time assails all prisoners. Makeup can't guard against angstrom-length distances. Corruption sets in long before thirty-three trips around the golden orb. But not for her. Evidently she alone abides.
And she goes on. As does the theater. The universe pounds and cries and pulses and moves. Then the light catches her in a novel way. Her eyes widen and flash, slip sideways, flash again, and all at once she arrives.
Ἀθήνη γλαυκῶπις.
Glaukopis Athena.
Bright-Eyed Athena.
You tumble into recognition:
"[In ancient Greece] there was at bottom no opposition of public and chorus: for all was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and singing . . . A public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theaters the terraced structure of the theatron rising in concentric arcs enabled every one to overlook, in an actual sense, the entire world of culture around him, and in an over-abundance of contemplation to imagine himself one of the chorus . . . The power of this vision is great enough to render the eye dull and insensible to the impression of 'reality,' to the presence of the cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every side . . . The architecture of the scene is a luminous cloud-picture and the Bacchants swarming on the mountains behold this picture from the heights, —the splendid encirclement in the midst of which is visible the image of Dionysus."
Panta rhei from the oft-forgotten subtitle, Out of The Spirit of Music. And of course music is Euterpe's purview. And of course Athena isn't Dionysus. But you discard trivialities because pedantry, snobbery, and cynicism damage your antennae right when you need them most.
But you discard trivialities because pedantry, snobbery, and cynicism damage your antennae right when you need them most.
Here it is, a trans-civic, trans-continent, transnational chorus casting off superfluities, feeling "surrounded by such a host of spirits with whom they know themselves to be essentially one." Extraordinary, "the suddenly swelling Dionysian tide then takes the separate little . . . individuals on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and on broad shoulders to bear them higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common."
As for those stranded in theaters more sedate than yours, the phenomenon "epidemic in its manifestation" seems to have left them behind. "In the midst of a world of sorrows [where] the individual sits quietly," they sought more transcendent heartache:
"the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers . . . [the reminder]—as medicines remind us of deadly poisons . . . that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us. At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals, nature seems to reveal a sentimental trait; it is as if she were heaving a sigh at her dismemberment into individuals . . . it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual . . . the wretched fragile tenement of the human individual."
You sympathize but cannot assist. Her every step is a thunderbolt, detonating "the terrible awe which seizes upon man, when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, when the principle of reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception."
You're part of the chorus—"average citizens who have achieved nothing remarkable," says Mr. Stop-All-The-Clocks. You take comfort in his error. Not about your place. About that, he's spot-on. Rather about your recognition. About what it recalls. "The nearest modern equivalent," he claims, "is not any work of the theater, but a ball game or a bull-fight." Well, not anymore. Not after this.
Hearken. The gods appear at their leisure. They rule over light and sound. They take human form, yet shapeshift. They suffer in enigmatic ways. They make the earth tremble. They rend the sky. They boil the seas. They bully the stars. They, not you, will live forever and be remembered, so you abandon yourself to the visitation and manage to forget, for the space of a breath, that your life is small, short, and speeding by.