jwilzewske: Francis Pott Beyond the Angle of Repose: Feeling Unreal, amidst Clouds of Unknowing

A nd therefore lift up thy head with a blind stirring of love; For if it begin here, it shall last without end.”
— Psalm 90.

T he] first performance of The Cloud was attended by some who had been caught up in the tragic events of ‘07/07’ [terrorist bombing in London]. While it is mistaken to view the music as a reaction to that event, which its completion predated, such happenings offer melancholy confirmation of an enduring darkness at the heart of man, and of his capacity for acts of atrocity alongside selfless heroism. For as long as mankind continues to crucify its messengers of peace, it will fail to see the means of salvation which may always have lain in its own hands. Notwithstanding those who would decry bailing out humanity’s sinking ship through the exercise of artistic expression, the contemporary individual spared terror and suffering at first hand can neither turn away nor remain immune to words written by a surviving Polish Second War poet, Jerzy Ficowski, which resonate still as our world attempts today and tomorrow to rise above the mortal tide of its own suffering:

‘ I did not manage to save
  A single life
  I did not know how to stop
  A single bullet…
  I run
  To help where no one called
  To rescue after the event
  I want to be on time
  Even if I am too late.’

[Tr. by Keith Bosley, Krystyna Wandycz]”
  — Francis Pott, Cloud of Unknowing, Program Notes.

D edicated ‘to Margaret Hassan and all innocent lives lost in Iraq or beyond’, Pott’s monumental, eloquent take on senseless violence and shameful hypocrisy offers a shield to the spirit against those who would destroy it. Unmissable.”
— Andrew Stewart, ClassicFM Magazine, SEP-2007.

O ne sometimes writes, hyperbolically, of a performance moving one to tears. But at the end of Francis Pott’s ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, genuine tears were shed. …A heartfelt plea for reconciliation and tolerance is very much the theme of Pott’s oratorio. But the work is far from being simplistic peace propaganda. The [50-year-old] composer draws his texts from the psalms, war poets, Blake and other visionary writers, and a mystical mediaeval tract. These are arranged in such a way that mankind's instinctive tendency to lash out at enemies or perceived enemies is continually, and often ironically, contrasted with individual man’s capacity for heroism and self-sacrifice, as epitomised by the Crucifixion.”
— Richard Morrison, The Times, MAY-2005.

I listened yesterday to Andrew Imbrie’s ‘Angle of Repose’, his famous choral work based on Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning religious novel of the same name. And then, oddly enough, my iPod’s random shuffle served up Francis Pott’s ‘Cloud of Unknowing’.

In physics, the ‘angle of repose’ is a phrase denoting the angle or slant at which objects on an inclined plane cease to slide downward and instead come to rest and are stable at rest—the point at which the gravitational force urging them downward is offset by friction and mutual cohesion. The emphasis Imbrie places on the ‘angle’ concept in his religious choral work implies that the doxastic ‘angle of repose’ is not hospitable to growth of belief but is instead a concept of loss or curtailment or restriction. According to Imbrie, faith becomes less significant and less conventional as we move to that angle of stillness where the aporias of the human condition and immanent evil in the world stand in contrast to the notion of a beneficent God.

Some related philosophy-of-religion questions arise:

Can faith flourish if (through a person’s choices or through a chain of events not of the person’s choosing— ) it reaches a cognitive angle of repose? Can faith (or, for that matter, knowledge) grow if it’s tenuously positioned precisely at the angle of repose? Is there beauty and value in a windswept dwarf tree that clings to a cliff—or must we always prefer a farmer’s exclusionary concept of beauty-as-prolific-production, or an investor’s—one who values only perpetually greater and greater returns, alpha without end?
Conversely, is faith genuine if the minimum angle at which movement occurs is artificially increased by pouring a cement of church dogma on the surface of belief? What authenticity can faith have if you stay always in the flatland, far away from slopes and cliffs, and never venture into steep regions where the pitch of the epistemological terrain exceeds the angle of repose?

In medieval times, the text known as ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ was meant to serve as a guide to the contemplation of God’s goodness—in a world obviously filled with suffering and evil. By contrast to the historical meditative purpose of ‘Cloud’, Francis Pott uses the text in his commission for the Vasari Singers to provide a withering critique of humanity’s heart of darkness. Pott’s ‘Cloud’ is an unrelenting 88-minute essay on a world riddled by dominionist, fundamentalist ideologies—Christian, Islamist, free-market capitalist.

Vasari Ensemble, photo by Canetty-Clarke

The libretto culminates in a brutal, ironic juxtaposition of ‘The Lord is on our side’ and Psalm 137:9——‘Blessed are they that taketh their children and dasheth the little ones against the stones’——while the tenor soloist futilely again and again tolls ‘The dead are all on the same side’, a line by the French WWI poet, René Arcos. We are way beyond any tenable religious angle of repose here. This is free-fall.

Particularly menacing in [Potts’ ‘Cloud of Unknowing’] fantastical design is ‘Is this He that was transfigured?’, an amorphous musical space that might have been filled by Arvo Pärt just as readily, or perhaps even Herbert Howells. In fact, it is the calculated exploitation of that most indispensable of musical building blocks – absolute silence – that fixes these choral and solo events together so utterly convincingly. The choir is never more stirring than in ‘In one little time may heaven be won and lost’, a chilling yet strangely conciliatory entreaty that trickles forward from an unending musical breath.”
— Mark Tanner, International Record Review, NOV-2007.

The original mystical/esoteric Christian text, ‘Cloud of Unknowing’, was written in the 1390s by an unknown English author, possibly Adam Easton, Cardinal of Norwich. Since God cannot be known by reasoning, the author tells the reader to dispense with any rational discourse entirely and to be submissive in a cloud of forgetting. The reader—a 24 year-old woman novitiate—is told to forget, forget, forget. Empty your mind. Blind, diffuse agape love is all that matters.

W hat we have, then, in ‘The Cloud’ is a continuing polite bowing to the authority of traditional Augustinian sub-faculties of the mind—later to be rejected altogether by Descartes—but at the same time an entirely new sense of freedom of choice in stripping back to one key faculty of divine apprehension, in this case the [uninformed, anti-intellectual] will.”
— Sarah Coakley, p. 81.

There are parallels in the ‘unknowing’ quietistic memes of Zen and Zen Buddhism, of course. But those are not so adamantly opposed to or dismissive of discourse and reason as the ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. For the medieval author of ‘Cloud’, a mystical, pious, contemplative state of mind is the card that trumps all others. ‘Cloud’ exalts a pseudo-Dionysian annihilation of the self as the highest goal to which any human can aspire. It privileges solitary, anchoritic, quietistic, monkish ways—and disparages discourse. We are to give up our impious individual identities and assimilate ourselves into the Borg.

A one-syllable workd such as ‘love’ is best. Choose one that is meaningful to you, then fix it in your mind so that it will remain there, come what may. This word will be your defense in conflict and in peace. Use it to beat upon the cloud of darkness above you and consign all distractions to the cloud of forgetting beneath you.”
— William Johnston, p. 56.

Have a look at Johnston’s translation. The 1390s Cloud is a zombie-like, self-mutilating cataphatism. We are told to renounce our social responsibilities for pious meditation—for neoplatonic, anti-intellectual self-absorption. (Or maybe it’s not cataphatic but instead apophatic—it doesn’t bind any specific Christian image of God; it’s imageless.) Cloud recommends that a pious will must rule the intellect. It maintains that bona fide spirituality involves the power of love only, and never the mind, never knowledge.

Francis Pott’s composition takes this medieval text and collides it with bible verses and canonical liturgical elements. The result is this stark and cautionary assessment of the role of religion in today’s world.

W e want to believe that the culture we live in is stable and dependable, that the moral confusion and depravity we see around us are merely aberrations of settled and established moralities, deviations from the rule of social convention [but recent events and trends have made such belief untenable, except by ignoring/denying those recent facts and events and trends].”
— James Davison Hunter, p. 221.

Some people have difficulty thinking critically or are uncomfortable because reasoning troubles the heart. Reasoning reveals problems which may not be solvable but which nonetheless require human effort and attention to reduce them. So why not instead cleave to regimes that maintain that the process of thinking isn’t necessary? Why not instead cleave to ancient teachings that argue that thinking is forbidden by God and the prophets—teachings that ascribe unpleasant or demoralizing feelings to wrong thinking?

B efore the mountains came into being, or earth and world were created, Thou art, O God, from everlasting to everlasting.
Thou causest men to die and sayest: ‘Return, children of men.’
For a thousand years are in Thy sight as yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.
Thou sweepest men to destruction. They are a dream. They are like grass which suddenly withers.
It blooms in the morning but is transformed at night. It is cut down and withers.”
— Psalm 90:2-6.

The adherent’s distress is reduced in proportion to the dumbing-down, the self-mutilation, the loss of identity. But what you don’t use you lose: the ability to think critically, the ability to remember the issues that pertain to the conflicts, the ability to remember who you are—these quickly atrophy. Eventually, the adherents no longer remember that they used to be able to think for themselves. According to van der Hart and colleagues, Wenninger and Ehlers, and others, such people tend to have more dissociative parts of their personality. They frequently have an ‘amnesia for their amnesia’, not recognizing that they have any impairment. They deny that any conflicts or trauma ever existed.

T o have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels.... [Instead,] we want character but without effort or conviction.... We want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend.... We want decency without the authority to insist upon it.”
— James Davison Hunter.

Victims of trauma bring to the treatment setting an extreme level of emotional intensity and level of distress that touch, surpass and transform the empathic sensitivity of clinicians who listen to their stories. Clinicians providing care to the victims are overcome by the empathic strain. And that strain jeopardizes the effectiveness of subsequent care by blunting the clinicians’ understanding of patients’ internal psychological dynamics. This music is beautiful and cathartic for us care-givers. But it is also stressful in its own right and, therefore, to be taken in moderation. Read the package insert carefully. Use only as-directed.

I n the two months immediately after the events people’s characteristics of gratitude, kindness, hope, leadership, love, spirituality—strengths connected
through a virtue-based view—were all significantly elevated... ”
— C. Peterson & M. Seligman, Character strengths before and after September 11. Psych Sci 2003; 14: 381-4. (Survey of 4,817 residents of NYC in 2002)
.

[Francis Pott’s other sacred choral works, including ‘My Song is Love Unknown’, ‘Christus’, and ‘The Souls of the Righteous’, are less apocalyptic/iconoclastic than ‘Clouds’ or his oratorio ‘A Song on the End of the World’. He was previously Lecturer in Music at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from 1992 to 2001, and since then has been Head of Music and Composition at London College of Music & Media, in Ealing, West London. In 1997, Pott won First Prize in the S. S. Prokofiev International Composing Competition in Moscow. ]

I n a final coup, Pott rudely interrupts the serenity with an anguished reminder of Christ’s cry from the cross, this time sung, harrowingly, by the soloist. But then a state of calm is reached at last as the choir sings an extended final Amen. The work ends with one last, enigmatic and hushed organ chord, which lasts for some 28 seconds and which, in the composer’s words, ‘enfolds all in its own seemingly eternal cloud of unknowing.’ I listened, enthralled, to this major addition to the choral repertoire. I can’t commend Signum highly enough for having the vision and the commercial courage to issue this recording.”
— John Quinn, MusicWeb International, OCT-2007.

I n character it is a work of pessimism and deep foreboding. The opening sections in particular pose a huge challenge for the choir, who are required to sing very quietly with every syllable stretched out to its fullest extent, often well beyond the point where the words become indistinguishable and we are indeed faced with a cloud of unknowing. But these clouds disperse to be replaced by visions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, intersecting with the mysticism of William Blake—potentially a powerfully heady mix, but one which I found to be perversely lacking in either menace or horror. An extended setting of Psalm 23, which the composer describes as a retreat from the noise of battle, marks a transition phase and the breakpoint between the two CDs. From here on the work settles into a quiet melancholy, a mood which sits very comfortably with Pott’s style, and a composition of significant stature emerges. Words become clear and telling, and in an atmosphere of gentle supplication the agony and the anguish of a conflict torn world are revealed.”
— Serena Fenwick, Musical Pointers, SEP-2007.

jwilzewske

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Francis Pott Beyond the Angle of Repose: Feeling Unreal, amidst Clouds of Unknowing

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