It’s Greek Day in Astoria, so I thought I would begin with a few words on that Spanish painter El Greco.
El Greco is a painter who truly understands light. He recognizes the power of light and shade and uses it to illuminate the most profound of human truths. In his hand light can not be a mundane thing. Even when the light comes from a specific source, sun or candle or angel it is no mundane thing. El Greco understood that light must simultaneously be the candle and a reflection of the human soul. It is both inner and outer truth.
There are many painters who do this and I am not making claim to some hierarchy of value. Rather I am considering his vision as one rigorously disciplined and always maintaining a clarity of purpose. Like Prospero, Domenikos Theotokopoulos was a spiritual exile in his native land. For both of them it took exile, one forced and the other self imposed, in order to achieve the fullness of their vision.
The chiseled faces in El Greco’s work speak to a spiritual striving that never quite reaches fulfillment. A striving that perhaps achieves its goal and as a result sees even farther than before. A striving that is always forward and never resting. The clouds of uncertainty broken by the burning wings of an angel.
Linguistic communication requires both speaker and listener to have a common background. A mutually agreed upon set of signs and signifiers such that speech and understanding may occur. When discussing visual language the same is not necessarily the case. Sure Artaud misunderstood the complex system of signs in Balanese dance just as Brecht misunderstood the Carefully constructed Daoist symbolism in Chinese opera. Yet each of them in their own way were affected by these systems and able to take away a powerful experience. And while there may have been a literal misunderstanding, there was, functionally, a powerful and transformative communication.
El Greco had to move to Catholic Spain for his work to be fully understood. Chagall, a Russian Jew, needed Paris. In the same way Brecht and Artaud both needed to lose their native language to find a deep inspiration so too may a deep inspiration need to lose its native language.
This, in many ways, is the power of dance and opera. Opera, even when you speak the language, may only communicate a small subset of the actual words. The emotional and energetic arc of the piece is carried musically. It is the music and the staging that tells the story. The words are there for plot not story. It is the poetry and music that is alive. When the plot is forgotten, the true story gets told. When Mimi stops talking about her job and sings “I stay alone in my tiny white room, I look at the roofs and the sky. But when spring comes the sun’s first rays are mine. April’s first kiss is mine, is mine!” Then the story is told.
The Situationists were fond of the Derive, the random goalless walk through a city, for this very reason. It is only when the goal is forgotten that it can be achieved. When the plot is pulled away, then the story can be revealed. Joseph Campbell might argue there are a finite number of plots. And he may well be correct. But there is an infinite number of stories that can be told.
