with your host The Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist
a.k.a. D J Orfeo
This page is designed to provide a conceptual and imagistic background to "Re-Vision Radio."
The Meaning of RE-VISION RADIO
The concept behind the Tower of Song program is Re-VisionRadio. Re-VisionRadio has a double meaning.
(1) Re-VisionRadio means to re-vision or see radio again; to look at radio from a fresh, critical perspective; to reconceive and reinvent radio in a new way. (2) Re-VisionRadio means to re-vision radio also as a visual medium.
So the Tower of Song radio program is not only the aural broadcast, but also its visual cyberspace website. But what makes it a little different from other radio programs that have a website component is that it's not just that the website is used to stream the program, to display playlists, or to store past programs, but with the thematic images (and written text) to augment the Essay-with-Soundtrack the cyberspace website is synergistic with the presentation. Thus the audio broadcast and its visual component are integral to each other, so listeners can literally "see what I mean" in my Essay-with-Soundtrack: Re-VisionRadio.
And twenty-seven angels From the Great Beyond They tied me to this table In the Tower of Song.... And I'm just paying my rent every day--In the Tower of Song...
(Leonard Cohen)
Well, Mr. DJ I just wanna hear Some rhythm and blues music On the radio On the radio On the radio Uh-uh, all right Uh-uh, all right....
Turn up your radio and let me hear the song… Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that's enough, so you know it's got soul Radio, radio turn it up, hum La, la, la, la...
And the music on the radio, and the music on the radio Has so much soul, has so much soul And you listen, in the nightime While we're still and quiet And you look out on the water And the big ships, and the big boats Came on sailing by, by, by, by And you felt so good, and I felt so good Felt so good....
What I want to know is How does the song go? (Grateful Dead)
And everybody knows that on Re-Vision Radio the song goes perfectly with the essay, because Re-Vision Radio puts its philosophical message across best through song. As the song goes:
That's why I'm telling you in song. (Van Morrison)
And that "window in the Tower of Song" looks out over that "invisible landscape," or perhaps William Blake's world of Imagination:
"Such the period of many worlds. Others triangular, right angled course maintain. Others obtruse Acute, Scalene, in simple paths; others move In intricate ways, biquadrate, Trapeziums, Rhombs, Rhomboids, Parallelograms triple & quadruple, polygonic, In their amazing hard subu'd course in the vast deep."
Fenestra Aeternitatis (Window to Eternity) Ancient
Fenestra Aeternitatis (Window to Eternity) Modern
Re-Vision Radio's Orphic-Romantic Synthesis: Burning the Candle At Both Ends
The prototypical conception of the primary opposition of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus is one of the outstanding legacies of nineteenth-century Romanticism (philosophically formulated by Nietzsche). Simply put, as the theory goes, these two gods represent contrasting Greek cultural values and their respective psychological aspects; Apollo representing the Olympian civilizing principle, solar consciousness, masculinity, sublimation of instincts, rationality itself, and Dionysus representing the other side, that is, chthonic nature, lunar consciousness, femininity, sexuality, intoxication, ecstasy. The tension between Apollo and Dionysus was thus interpreted, generally, as the two sides of human nature (or the conscious and unconscious part of the psyche; the principle of individuation and the primal chthonic ground) and, particularly, the psychological situation of Western, nineteenth-century man, who, being too over-burdened by Apollonian values, needed to rectify the cultural imbalance by turning to the repressed Dionysian side of things (especially everything that had to do with the visionary "Romantic Imagination") by eclipsing solar-consciousness with lunar-consciousness--"the nightside of things." (This Romanticism was picked up by Freud and is reflected in his ego vs. id psychological theory.)
For the purposes of Re-Vision Radio, Apollo and Dionysus stand for the two archetypal principles of logos and mythos
repectively; the principles, or modes of expression, it wants to
unite--philosophy and music, dialectics/ argument and song, rationality
or the critical intellect and intuition/imagination. And this uniting, comes in the figure of Orpheus, who, as the threshold figure between worlds, mediates the the
respective domains of Apollo and Dionysus.
"Later, in the context of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, we will see Orpheus as the reconciliation of opposites--that is, as Nietzsche suggests, of Apollo as the principium individuationis and Dionysos as the primal chthonic ground, the Ur-Eine."
Orpheus, then, is the Romantic
rapprochement of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and is, therefore, the
supreme archetype of Re-Vision Radio.
Apollo
Orpheus
Dionysus
Yeah in the midnight, in the midnight, I burn the candle Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends And I keep on, `cause I can't sleep at night Until the daylight comes through And I just, and I just, have to sing. Van Morrison
Re-Vision Radio's host, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist—master
of radio ceremonies—with his late-night Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, seeking the twilight trance-state of reflection
and reverie, in anticipation of the nocturnal enchantment of the heartand, and longing to connect with that soulful dark blue-fire
rhythm of things, romantically
burns the candle at both ends—
the ends logos and mythos; reason and imagination—both scholarly rigor and poetical reverie, both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration, both the critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/artistic heart, both secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, both academic research and mystical insearch, both philosophical questioning and romantic questing, both Apollonian discipline and Dionysian abandon; both the sword of cutting discourse and the rose of healing music, both philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude—the ends of the Argument & Song on your radio dial, tuned to the Romantic Tower of Song.
Therefore, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack begins and ends, like the “Romantic Essay,” with an
“impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision.”
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-- It gives a lovely light! -- Edna St Vincent Millay
Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love When I'm away from you, when I'm away from you Well I feel, yeah, well I feel so sad and blue Well I feel, well I feel so sad and blue
Oh my dear, oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love When I'm away from you, I just have to sing, Just Have to sing my hymns Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love It's a long, long journey Long, long journey, journey back home Back home to you, feel you by my side Long journey, journey, journey
Yeah in the midnight, in the midnight, I burn the candle Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends And I keep on, `cause I can't sleep at night Until the daylight comes through And I just, and I just, have to sing
Sing my hymns to the silence Hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence My hymns to the silence
I wanna go out in the countryside Oh sit by the clear, cool, crystal water Get my spirit, way back to the feeling Deep in my soul, I wanna feel Oh so close to the One, close to the One Close to the One, close to the One
And that's why, I keep on singing baby My hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence Oh my hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence Oh hymns to the silence, oh hymns to the silence Oh hymns to the silence, hymns to the silence Oh my dear, my dear sweet love
Can you feel the silence? can you feel the silence? Can you feel the silence? can you feel the silence?
"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."
"School of Silence"
Radio Master (Magus) of Ceremonies
RE-VISION RADIO
MANIFESTO & VISIONARY RECITAL
"Our High Romantic Argument"
RE-VISION RADIO is a Musical & Philosophical-Literary program broadcast from an imaginal window at 88.9 on your radio dial from the TOWER OF SONG. It’s hosted by the Gypsy Scholar and Bohemian Essayist, with a flower in one hand (or name) and a sword in the other. RE-VISION RADIO is a “Soul-making” program, because it’s essentially an “underworld perspective”—a seeing below surface appearances to the occult or symbolic truth of things. Thus, Everybody Knows, RE-VISION RADIO is truly Underground Radio.
The experimental format of RE-VISION RADIO is a seamless remixing of argument & song, dialectics & music, or logos & mythos; in other words, philosophical-literary essays are put to music, producing the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.” And Everybody Knows that what takes pages of text to explain a song can express in a few powerfully meaningful verses. In mixing and remixing the noetic texts of Philosophy with the poetic texts of Song, RE-VISION RADIO offers its listeners an Orphic soundscape; an eclectic medley of the esoteric and the popular, high academic culture and low pop-culture—high argument & deep song—not from the Ivory Tower, but from “that tower down the track”: the Tower of Song. Because Everybody Knows that to really grok the meaning of a song context is everything, RE-VISION RADIO’s essays contextualize its songs, and, conversely, its songs compose its essay—adding layers of meaning. In the same way, this dialectical relationship between argument & song means that the prose essay contributes gravitas to popular song and, alternatively, popular song gives wings to the essay, composing a Musekal Philosophy. Thus, the fusion of song & argument is the rhyme and reason for the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which, juxtaposing argument withsong, makes for melodious (aesthetic) ideas and discursive notes—a kind of Philosophical Concert and, conversely, a kind of Musical Essay. This dialectical inter-textuality creates a novel radio art-form: scholarship as performance art (William Blake's "Mental Studies & Performances"), which is a Romantic way to “associate ideas in a state of excitement” and to “rave on words on printed page.” {Van Morrison} RE-VISION RADIO’S musical inter-textuality, because it reads metaphorically between the lines of Philosophy & Song, becomes the imaginal hyper-textuality of a Soul-text—a soul-inflected montage of spoken word and music. Thus, Everybody Knows that this imaginal kind of Radio-text, haunted by song, is inspired by the legendary Orpheus, divine rhetorician and magical “singer of love songs.” Questing back—”way, way back”—in search of the magical power of music, with the archetype of Orpheus as its guide, RE-VISION RADIO broadcasts a Musekal Philosophy (by way of the ancient “Sicilian Muse”), which is the perfect union of words and music broadcast through the Essay-with- Soundtrack—the Orphic synthesis of what has been called the “Infinite Conversation” and the “Endless Melody.” This perfect union of argument & song is the Romantic ideal of the synthesis of “poetry and thought,” “a union of fact and imagination;” “not Poetry, but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory.” With this Romantic union of poetic furor and reason, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack becomes “our high argument,” or elevated discourse—“Reason in her most exalted mood.” Thus, with the 19th-century “Romantic Essay” as its model, RE-VISION RADIO‘s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is a novel revival of the lost “Art of the Personal Essay” where “Soliloquy bridges the gap between high art and popular song.” The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is designed to communicate a musical sense of philosophy, one that can be understood as “Speculative Music,” from one point of view and, from another, ”Philosophy in a New Key.” Thus, Everybody Knows that the Essay-with-Soundtrack’smusekal philosophy is also a (Romantic) “philosophy of music:" a musekal philosophy that issues not in a discursive but in a lyrical knowledge. And, in seamlessly remixing argument & song through “Mental Studies & Performances” {Blake}, Everybody Knows, too, that RE-VISION RADIO’s scholarship as performance art makes philosophy sound more musical and, conversely, music sound more philosophical. Thus, in the TOWER OF SONG, philosophical essays aspire to the condition of music; to the condition of music translated into words: The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which approximates what the Romantics envisioned—the end of philosophy as poetry, or song.
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Going back—"way, way back"—RE-VISION RADIO's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (or the Essay in Argument & Song) would pick up the fallen standard of the nineteenth-century Romantic Essay, which sought to transcend the boundaries of prose and non-prose and conjoin philosophy with poetry. (This is in keeping with the Romantic’s penchant for mixing genres.) The Romantic Essay has been described (based upon its development by Wordsworth and Coleridge) as a "conjunction of Reason and Passion that did not draw particularly sharp lines of differentiation between ‘poetry’ and the ‘impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose.’" Thus, for Coleridge: “The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict, skillful, yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion.” Following in this Romantic genre, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is conceived of as "the perfect union of words and music." Thus, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, like the Romantic Essay, begins with an "impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision." The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack exists in a liminal radio space between argument and song, criticism and lyricism; finding the ancient muse where prose and music meet on the border between prose and poetry—a philosophical lyricism that is sophisticated, literate, poetic, and soulful. Thus, because the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is about the romance of ideas (eros plus logos; the heart’s desire for ecstasy and the head’s requirement for clarity), Everybody Knows that RE-VISION RADIO ’s Musekal Philosophy issues not in a discursive but in a lyrical knowledge. And Everybody Knows that Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted, with lyrical lusters, or snatches from song, breaking out between the lines of prose all over the page. With memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, a steady stream of correspondences between the ideas and the music is revealed as a sub-text. In reading between the lines of dialectics and song, moving back and forth between the prose and the music—with margins of nuanced associations—, a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy emerges as a hypertext.
Because of the “sympathetic magic” (vibrations of musical tones produced in something as a result of similar vibrations at the same frequency) of playing off the Argument with the Song, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s dialectical relationship of the musicality of the Essay and the philosophy of the Music means that that Argument adds rigor to the Song, while the Song adds lyricism to the Argument. In other words, the music adds the raw energy of Rock to the formal essay and, conversely, the formal essay contributes philosophical meaning to the music—"Three-cord rock merging with the power of the word." {Patti Smith} Thus, Everybody Knows the Essay hermeneutically informs the music, while the music ecstatically transcends the prose, giving emotional or imaginative heightening to the Essay—the charged expression of Argument; the supercharged expression that is Song. RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack attempts to overcome the dichotomy between the prose written word and the lyric that is embodied in song. Given that RE-VISION RADIO posits a dialectical relationship between Argument & Song, this means (when the essay is about the song and vice versa) that the Essay-with-Soundtrack seeks to overcome the dichotomy of the analysis of the song (“linernotes”) versus its performance. Thus the Essay-with-Soundtrack (as an Orphic radio-text that is structured by Argument & Song)is designed to allow the listener to dialectically re-cognize the Argument in the Song (as in the past with the "message" lyrics of the songs of the Sixties and today in the "rhythm and rhyme" rap lyrics of Hip-Hop) and, conversely, to hear the Song in the Argument. So completely would the Essay-with-Soundtrack mingle Argument & Song that the song speaks the essay, and, conversely, the essay sings the song. In another sense, the Argument's ideas create a feeling and set the contemplative mood, which is then amplified by the Song. In other words, the song becomes the introspective meditation through the philosophical essay and, conversely, the essay becomes the performance of the song through its heightened ideas. Thus, Everybody Knows that music underscores or enhances the essay—aestheticizes it—and, conversely, the essay conceptualizes and clarifies the song. In the TOWER OF SONG, then, you hear the nuanced gems of lyricism, because popular rock music provides the energy for the Essay-with-Soundtrack, while the essay simultaneously puts the music in hermeneutical perspective—philosophy synaesthetically heard/seen through the prism of rock-n-roll—and, thus, pop music is shot through with substance. Because it’s been said that Romantic Mind is "the union of deep feeling and profound thought,” RE-VISION RADIO in programming a mix of rigorous intellectual argument and an elevating musical sensuousness, strives to unite reason and imagination, intellect and feeling, head and heart. In other words, songs in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack are designed to connect the heart and the head—both expression and intellectualization—, issuing in a surging, luxuriant soundscape that is both viscerally powerful and intellectually beautiful. Thus the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, assaying back and forth between the dialectical and the musical, brings into play a paradoxical reuniting of the head and heart—-a Romantic commingling of a "sensuous reason" and a "feeling intellect," thereby synthesizing the left and right brain. "In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain." {George Szell} So Everybody Knows, "If my heart could do my thinking / And my head begin to feel / I would look upon the world anew / And know what's truly real." {Van Morrison} In practicing its own type of the Romantic “Arts & Sciences of the Imagination” {Blake}, RE-VISION RADIO delights in remixing what the Romantics poetically combined—"high Argument" & “song” (of "the Mind, / My haunt, and the main region of my song."{Wordsworth} RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, assaying back and forth between high academic culture (argument) and low pop-culture (song), takes its cue from the great Romantic composer, Beethoven, who, it is said, "took great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace," making his music "a union of sensuous and rational." It also looks to the American inspired scholar Emerson who dared to proclaim: "I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low." Thus, the Musekal Philosophy of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack broadcasts its meaning in two modes: Wordsworth’s "high argument" and Lorca’s "deep song."". . . they have climbed, / on high with song that is more sweet, more deep." {Dante, Divine Comedy} "Music that can deepest reach." {Emerson, The Essays} And, broadcast on radio, this seamlessness of going back and forth between high argument & deep song is really a gas: "So the words dissolve into the music, and the music dissolves into the words, and a refreshment is produced, kind of oxygen." {Alan Watts} Everybody Knows the Musekal PhiloSophy heard on RE-VISION RADIO means that a Song is as good as an Argument/Essay. In fact, through the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, they are in dialectical relationship; that is, there's a song waiting to be amplified out of an essay and, conversely, there's an essay waiting to be unpacked in a song lyric. Like the Prose-Poem, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (written with music in mind) has “the technical or literary qualities of poetry (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure), but is set on a page as prose.” It is a work in prose that has “poetic characteristics such as vivid imagery and concentrated expression.” Thus, Everybody Knows, the intent of crafting the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (synchronistically inspired by song) is to turn a phrase until it perfectly catches the color of the music. And Everybody Knows that the aim of RE-VISION RADIO, through its Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, is to not only to entice the listener to hear the familiar pop-song (empowered by philosophical meaning) anew (and see the essay's meaning amplified by song), but to seamlessly weave together essay & song so that the listener feels like the song was actually tailor-made for the essay. In another sense, the goal of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is to mix the Argument & Song so seamlessly that listeners won't know if the music exists for the philosophical essay, or the philosophical essay for the music; that is, whether the song simply provides an interlude in the reading of the prose essay, or whether the essay is simply an extended "lead in" to the main purpose of playing the song (i.e., showcasing the song). Therefore RE-VISION RADIO's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack dissolves the boundaries between scholarship and art, criticism and poetry, rhetoric and lyric; between, that is, Argument & Song—so much so that it is hoped the listener can’t make out where the Argument leaves off and the Song begins, and vice versa. This Orphic magic of entering completely into the song in a meaningful way (music’s “intellectual value," music giving "insight . . . a flash of understanding," its "the force of mental life, bringing on revelations,” music's connection with the “inner life of the mind,” the personally "associative" quality of music) is the purpose of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack:to find and enter into the TOWER OF SONG.
The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, fusing dialectics and love in “flowers of discourse,” has Dante as its guide, since the Florentine poet looked back to the Troubadour’s “Dialectic of Love” and desired only to write about the “Love that discourses in my mind" {Purgatorio}. In the paradise of discourse that is the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, both aspects of the psyche are given their due: reason and imagination, scholarly/critical intellect and intuitive/artistic heart, academic research and mystical insearch; both secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, both scholarly rigor and poetic reverie, Apollonian clarity and Dionysian obscurity, philosophical questioning and romantic questing. RE-VISION RADIO, then, questing—“way, way back”—carries on, in popular form, the great Platonic synthesis of logos and mythos (i. e., between the earlier mytho-mystical, as it was transmitted through the Greek Mystery Religions, and the newer rationalist development in Philosophy that had broken away from it: "Intellectual rigor [read: "the logical"] and Olympian inspiration [read: "the mytho-poetic"] no longer stood opposed.” Because Plato’s dialectic became—“after it has risen, with an incredible impulse, through the mania [madness] of Eros to the heights of philosophy”—mantic (poetic-prophetic) vision, RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay- with-Soundtrack would energetically channel “Philosophy” back through the powerful medium of radio, where it rises to the heights of enraptured song—“soul music.” Remembering that “Philosophy” for Plato is a “care for soul” and begins in “wonder," the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack spans both logos and mythos: both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration; the fusion of scholarly rigor with poetic reverie; philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude.Therefore, since it has been said that "Eros redefines reason in its own terms," RE-VISION RADIO's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixing PhiloSophy & Song (dialectics & music), replaces the "murders to dissect" {Wordsworth} mode of academic (Protestant) scholarship with service to Eros--insight, synthesis, celebration; "Reason in her most exalted mood," which, in service to Eros, through the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, becomes what Emerson envisioned as a higher reason: "the living, leaping Logos." RE-VISION RADIO’s reunion and fusion of Philosophy & Music—Musekal Philosophy—makes the ideal philosopher (according to Socrates and Plato) a "fervent musician," or a "musical man.” Moreover, because PhiloSophy is a form of “play”—an artistic endeavor—, it makes the scholar of philosophy a scholar-artist-musician (an Orphic Scholar), who is distinguished by his or her ability to play with knowledge and create a collage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz. (The ideal of the Orphic Scholar is about spontaneous prose; of speaking from your heart and bellowing it out as if you were a crazed jazz man.) Thus, RE-VISION RADIO's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is broadcast through what Blake called “Mental Studies & Performances.” In other words, the Gypsy Scholar attempts to make scholarship a performance art. Therefore, the Musekal PhiloSophy of RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay-with- Soundtrack finally leads not to ponderous academic desiccation, but to ecstatic Dionysian celebration—to the "Joyous Science” (of the Troubadours and Emerson and Nietzsche). This means it offers a mood of trance, enchantment, and ecstasy. "All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling." {Blaise Pascal} However (listeners be warned), it is not brain-dead, new-age spaciness, but rather, because Mueskal PhiloSophy is both logos and mythos, what the Romantic poet, Wordsworth, said was "Reason in her most exalted mood," which issues inwhat that Orphic scholar, Emerson, longed for: "music that can deepest reach.” And because Everybody Knows that the ability to express complex philosophical ideas in lyrics of song is the gift of Orpheus, RE-VISION RADIO broadcasts what one sixties singer-songwriter said the music of that time promised: "A deep ecstasy that can be had." Therefore, RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack and its Musekal PhiloSophy turn out to be, metaphorically and literally, what one modern philosopher envisioned as "Philosophy in a New Key." {Susanne K. Langer}
RE-VISION RADIO, as a Philosophical program, is about Ideas. As a Musical program, it's about Music as Idea (and, conversely, the Idea of Music). Thus Everybody Knows that it's about the ideas in the music and, conversely, the music in the ideas. And, therefore, the program is finally about a Musekal Philosophy—or, "Philosophy in a New Key." With musical echoes reverberating throughout the text, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted—memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, generating a steady stream of correspondences between ideas & song. In reading between the lines of dialectic and song, moving back and forth between the prose and musical text (with margins of nuanced associations)—a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy. Thus the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which shows music's role as a kind of verbal melody and, conversely, dialectic's role as a kind of melodious phrasing, is realized as a hyper-text of musical dialectic.
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The TOWER OF SONG program—“not for everyone, but for madmen only”—is underwritten by its ancestral tutelary deities: Hermes-Mercury—Trickster-god of those radio communications and connecting synchronicities—and Sophia-Magdalene, Our Dark Lady of the Romantic Tower of Song—Goddess-Muse of Eternal Wisdom & Wit and ancient lonely-tower libraries. RE-VISION RADIO is co-hosted by the Angel of Imagination & Music, along with its “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond” in hyperspace, where Ushahina, angel of the hours between midnight and the dawn, gets you on her wavelength.
The purpose of the RE-VISION RADIO program is to help guide its listeners—"in the middle of the night"—in searching for, by following the song, and entering into that long-abandoned Romantic “Lonely Tower,” situated in that alternative mental dimension—the “invisible landscape.”“Oh let my Lamp at midnight hour / Be seen in some high Lonely Towr, / Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, / With thrice great Hermes.” {Milton} Because RE-VISION RADIO is broadcast from this ancient Tower of the “Visionary Company,” where “the poetic champions compose,” in the midnight hour “those funny voices” whisper: “You can call my love Sophia, / I call my love Philosophy.” And, since the beginning of real Philosophy is the “sense of wonder,” Everybody Knows that the “sense of wonder” with radio is all in the mind's eye—radio as Theater of the Imagination—, making RE-VISION RADIO the alternative radio concept that lets you see what it means. And what it means, by way of the Romantic “Arts & Sciences of Imagination,” is that Golgonoozan “artifice of eternity”— The TOWER OF SONG.
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What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? (William Blake)
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions. (Margaret Fuller)
The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict, skillful, yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Let us bring to bear the persuasive powers of sweet-tongued Rhetoric and . . . let us have as well Music, the maid-servant of my house, to sing us melodies of varying mood. (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)
Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together. (Stephen Soundheim)
Whoever is possessed in any way by a deity indeed overflows on account of the vehemence of the divine impulse and the fullness of its power: he raves, exults . . . therefore this possession is called furor .... No one under the influence of furor is content with simple speech: he bursts forth into clamoring and songs and poems. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
A revealing glimpse of Mr. Farlow both as a person and a musician…. As much concerned with a philosophy of life as it is with music. (Talmage Farlow, film by Lorenzo DeStephano, 2006)
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who had led perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and unknown fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations. (Oscar Wild, 'The Critic As Artist')
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of ‘quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive. This sense of the archaic recurs whenever we find great art using popular forms . . . . (Northrop Frye)
"Play High/Low all the time." --Prof. N. O. Brown. The Gypsy Scholar has taken this advice (from poker) into radio, playing High/Low off each other--alternating back and forth between (Apollonian) academic high-culture and (Dionysian) popular low-culture; and within this dialectical mix, alternating high-culture music with pop-culture song--from the classical symphonic to the low-down rhythm'n'blues.
The "Manifesto & Visionary Recital" is both a description of the Orphic Essay-With-Soundtrack's synergy of Argument & Song and a demonstration of it (as its content is made up of argument and lyrics from poetry and popular song).
Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (a species of the Romantic Essay), in remixing high academic culture with low pop-culture, broadcasts big ideas through popular song, which issues in a Musekal Philosophy.
"Here was a man, who inside of a pop-song . . .you know, puts big ideas, big dreams. It reminded me of Keats or Shelley or, you know, they were poets I was reading as a kid. I said this is our . . . Shelley, this is our . . . Byron. You know, there was an otherness to the language. It was just a sensory overload of the language that first got to me." (Bono on Leonard Cohen)
Everybody Knows that this is because, like Leonard, the Gypsy Scholar looks to the Romantics for inspiration (and the Gypsy Scholar recognized early on in Leonard's career that the Romantic spirit was coming through him).
"We really took seriously Shelley's 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. It was an incredibly naive description of oneself. But, we certainly fell for that. We thought it was terribly important what we were doing--maybe it was, who knows?" --Leonard Cohen
Re-Vision Radio's Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist ("Radio Master of Ceremonies") broadcasts in exile (in his capacity of "Minister of Information & Culture" for the Visionary Company") from the TOWER OF SONG
The Tower of Song's poet-visionary in-residence
And twenty-seven angels
From the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song . . .
And I'm paying my rent every day
Oh, in the Tower of Song
Re-Vision Radio, discovering its true voice and vocation in the American Romantic-Orphic tradition, would sing "The Bohemian Hymn," a la Emerson, and thus emplay a Bohemian mode of scholarship as an artistic endeavor. In other words, Re-Vision Radio’s modern-day Romantic Gypsy Scholar is distinguished by his ability to play with knowledge and create a collage of ideas or an intellectual chamber music of mind-jazz ensembles--a "work of ecstasy" that celebrates, Dionysian style, with "music or dancing." This means that Re-Vision Radio's scholar-artist--an "Inspired Scholar"--doesn’t put scholarship in service to Thanatos
(death) that (as Wordsworth complained) "murders to dissect"
(reductionism and literalism), but instead puts it in the service of Eros (life and love), which synthesizes and celebrates in the form of a Musekal Philosophy-- in the TOWER OF SONG.
The Trickster-god strikes again! The Gypsy Scholar was presented with this picture by a friend (who inserted my name). It seemed too serendipitous to be anything but prophetic. Notice the last sheet under the stack: "Cohen."
Orpheus In Underworld
Why the "GYPSY SCHOLAR":
A Note To Listeners from a Lyrical Scholar Working With Music
In response to questions from a number of listeners who have wondered why I call myself the “Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist,”
I offer the following as an explanation of not only the radio handle,
but a little about the madness in my method of scholarship as presented
in my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.
Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words—words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must belong to the “misunderstood” class, or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities. –C. G. Jung
It is because the mind is at the end of its tether that I would be silent. It is because I think there is a way out—a way down and out—that I would speak. Sometimes—most time—I think that the way down and out leads out of the university, out of the academy. But perhaps it is rather that we should recover the Academy of earlier days—the Academy of Plato in Athens, the Academy of Ficino in Florence. . . . At any rate, the point is first of all to find again the mysteries. By which I do not mean simply the sense of wonder—that sense of wonder which is the source of all true Philosophy—my mysteries I mean secret and occult; therefore unpublishable; therefore outside the university as we know it; but not outside Plato's Academy, or Ficino's.” –N.O. Brown, ‘Mind At the End of Its Tether’ (Phi Beta Kappa Graduation Address, Columbia University, 1968) I have chosen the epithet of “Gypsy Scholar” because I’m a grad-student who has fallen outside the conventional academic role. (An autobiographical account of how this came to be was presented in my radio essay, “Musekal Philosophy,” early in 2005.) Suffice to say here that it all has to do with discovering the Romantic poets, writers, and philosophers as a mere freshman in college. Thus, the epithet is taken from a Romantic poem by Matthew Arnold, entitled “The Scholar Gypsy.” [See below.] The added "Bohemian Essayist" epithet comes from the fact that I discovered that the Romantic poets were the spiritual ancestors of the "Beat" poets, who themselves were the early founders of the "counter-culture" of the Sixties. Thus, the radio handle of "Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist" represents my Beat-oriented rejection of the academic establishment and of its high cutlure: "Rouze Up, Oh Young People of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings ! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University, who would, if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War" (William Blake). It represents, more precisely, my own attempt to bring togather the best in learned, high cutlure and popular culture, but not through the Ivory Tower, but "that tower down the track." ('The Tower of Song'): As the Orphic scholar, Emerson, put it: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” Therefore, the "Gypsy Scholar" stands for the affirmation of my "amateur" status (the "love" of it). The other reason for “Gypsy Scholar” is that I understand myself (because of the underground nature of the radio program, and because of the political reality in America today) to be broadcasting in exile—feeling myself to be an alien in my own country—from the “Lonely Towr” of Song. “Accident and coincidence play as prominent a role in directing and shaping one’s intellectual work as do research skills and discernment, perhaps a larger role.” (?)
My vocation as a radio DJ began my freshman year at an ivy-league college, when I had my very first experience with radio there, which had its studio at the top of the prominet university bell tower. (My first "tower of song"!) It was in the wake of the 1960s, and I especially enjoyed the wrtings of the new generation of socio-literary critics, who would use epigraphs not form elite poetry but from popular rock lyrics (like those of Dylan). After a while, my appetitie for the mixing of the popular and the academic demanded more; not just popular folk-rock or rock lyrics prefacing a learned tome, but bursting out all over the prose-text in a non-linear fashion. My own process of writing college papers reflected this imagined phantasmagorical style. I would listen to the popular music of the time while writing. Sometimes these curious synchronistic moments would happen, wherein what I was writing about would be echoed in a song over the radio. As I became more atuned to these fanatasic synchronicities, their rate seemed to increase. This caused me to concentrate more on the art of writing, and soon I was thinking about the rhythms of the great prose works we were assigned in my English Lit. courses. I found myself wondering about a way to match these prose rhythms with music; i.e., to literally hear these underlying rhythms of syntax by exteriorizing them with music. Alas, these crazy notions didn't get very far. This was, after all, the academy, and students weren't expected to take these kinds of liberties with their papers. Indeed, even though some of my academic mentors were breaking out of the strict form of the dissertation--blending prose and poetry, or writing in aphoristic style--none of them dared to get this funky. Thus, my novel idea of the scholar-as-artist was shelved in the library of my mind until I graduated. Years after, I found myself doing radio, and with the advent of the computer hyper-text, new life was breathed into my scholarly fantasy. I thought, "Why couldn't a new scholarly form of the dissertation be multi-dimensional --text, images, and music? Yet, it wasn't until recently, when radio stations integrated their broadcasts with the internet, that this fantasy could be realized. Thus, I became the "Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist" (not in the Ivory Tower, but in the Musekal Library in the Tower of Song).
The form that my scholarly fantasy took was what I called the "Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack." However, I wasn't content to push the boundaries of academic form by simply inserting popular song lyrics into the essay as epigraph. I would follow the Orphic muse and let the lyric lusters of snatches from song break out between the lines of prose--all over the page. Thus, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted--memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, generating a steady stream of correspondences between the ideas and the music. In reading between the lines of dialectics and song, moving back and forth between the prose and musical--with margins of nuanced associations--, a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy emerges as a hypertext.
Interestingly enough, I had a curious confirmation of my choice for a radio-scholar name when the famous NPR radio scholar, Maureen Corrigan, came to town last September to promote her book, Leave Me Alone I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. It certainly sounded intriguing (being that my program comes out of my passion for books and a magical library)—, and even more so when I read the announcement over the air that she would actually be making an appearance in the KUSP studios for a discussion. I was taken by Ms. Corrigan and got her book, which I asked her to autograph. I told her what I did on radio. But little did I know what was in store for me until I opened the book and scanned through it. This is what I discovered on page 97: “Even when I finally was awarded my Ph.D at thirty-two, I hadn’t yet held down what my parents considered a ‘real’ job. For years before and after I officially became Dr. Corrigan, I was what they call in the profession a ‘gypsy scholar’—one of a multitude of excess eggheads who roam from campus to campus, teaching introductory courses like ‘Composition.’ I became practiced at moving into temporary teaching positions and other people’s offices.” This was all new to me, and I couldn’t help feeling that my choice for a radio handle was inspired (since I had been doing radio at KUSP for months before the book came out).
Therefore, although I have not yet earned my Ph.D., I consider myself the holder of another office (a higher office): a Prof. of Song—way up here . . . in the Tower of Song.
My ideal for what I do on radio (the Orphic Scholar) is embodied in one figure—Orpheus. The legendary Orpheus was (other than the founder of the mystery school named after him) a bard, a prophet, a rhetorician, and a musician ("a singer of love-songs”). As is well known, Orpheus’ music could perform magic, making inanimate objects come to life and dance. The ancient writers refer to something called “The song of Orpheus.” And some modern scholars write of “The Orphic Voice: the Speech of the Soul.” My vision is of a new kind of scholar, the Orphic Scholar, who wishes to “write anecdotes of intellect”from “that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains.” (Emerson). So let me try to convey the heart and soul of my inspiration from that imaginal place (where “I’m paying my rent everyday”), which is located in that “invisible landscape,” or “unknown country.” "You see him spend his Soul in Prophecy. / Do you believe it a confound lie / Till some Bookseller & the Public Fame / Proves there is truth in his extravagant claim." –William Blake
"The works that take you there have just one meaning. / Thrown into a burning bush with a crackling sound. / What you learn in silence. / What you win through screaming. / What you have is nothing there till you lay it down... " –Bob Franke, song ‘Holy Ground’ Reclaiming the amateur status of a Bohemian Essayist, I do not pretend any pure originality. I freely admit to being influenced by the creative ideas and visions of my favorite writers. But I have to qualify this by also admitting that I make them my own not because they are something totally new or alien to my mind, but because they are immediately recognized as something I've also known but not articulated—something I've already intuited. Because I've lived with and gotten to know these ideas and visions for so long, its practically impossible to separate "my own" thoughts from "their" thoughts and, therefore, I only claim to contribute to the already circulating intellectual and visionary data the novel imprint of my own interests, passions, and insights on the pre-existing work of others. "Tied to this table / In the Tower of Song, I invoke the ancient "Sicilian Muse" and seek to enter the Blakean mental storm of furious invention; thoughts racing ahead of the mind, as I work on the great Insight. "In the lonely, dead of midnight In the dimness, of the twilight By the streetlight, by the lamplight . . . In the sunlight, in the daylight And I'm workin', on the insight . . ." (–Van Morrison) My only claim to so-called "originality" could be in organizing the material of others in my own novel way; organizing it so that syncretic connexions are made between ideas that have not been, as far as I am aware, heretofore generally recognized (although the information and the clues for a syncretic re-visioning have been laying around for some time). Because I rely so much on the energy of the speculative imagination of the “poet,” I agree with the image of the scholar-as-artist: "My way of working is one of letting the mind play freely around a subject where there has been much endeavor but little attempt at perspective." I enjoy a mode of scholarship as artistic endeavor, where the modern-day "Gypsy Scholar" is distinguished by the ability to synthesize and "play with knowledge"--to create “a collage of ideas.”Of course, it has been said before that the business of the writer is to "play with words" (a serious play, as Plato told his students). The Gypsy Scholar's Orphic-Dionysian style of postmodern scholarship has recently been affirmed:
"Today, in the 21st century, the problem is synthesis--collage--how to put it all together, or put it in juxtaposition so it makes some sense." --Jennifer Stone (7/17/7)
My method is largely intuitive (the intuitive imagination of the poet); that is, generally speaking, intuitions and insights come first about a subject, and then I go to the "experts" to substantiate them, as with the following find:
"To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backward. His conclusions are reached before his premises."
“He is an authentic intellectual, able to make transcendental leaps of intellectual connection. So that he can see buried within a play or deep within the plot of a complex symbolist novel the kernals of philosophical ideas going back to the ancients. He’s capable of seeing these connections and eloquently describing them in an accessible way. Capable of synthesizing connections, roots, sources, that usually only scholars who have studied the material extensively over a long period of time can do.”
And my purpose in citing the “experts” is to bring to bear as much scholarly evidence as I can for my intuitions. In other words, bring the weight of recognized scholarship to support my independent ideas/insights—my "extravagant claim.”
“As creative artists often do, he pursued his work by means of ‘hunches’ and ‘intuitions' that shot ahead of his analytical mind.”
It should be pointed out that my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack falls between the cracks of conventional, academic composition, locating itself in the genre of the Romantic Essay (which demonstrated the Romantic's penchant for the mixing of genres); the "conjunction of Reason and Passion that didn't draw sharp lines of differentiation between poetry and the impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose". Thus, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, begins "from a fairly strict following of traditional 'public' discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision.” And therefore, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack seeks, through the magic of the coming together of the spoken word and music—of argument intermixed with song—, to conjure up a mood, which is, at the same time, a thinking mood; a new mood of thought—“Reason in her most exalted mood”—the thought of the heart in its higher, visionary mode. So, in creating a kind of Orphic medley of knowing and loving, I'm affirming the return of eros to scholarship (from Plato) and, thus, asserting the intimate connection between knowing and desire, between love and ideas; when we love we want to know, we love to know—knowing and desiring are two sides of a single creative moment. This means that the kind of scholarship I practice is not in service to what the Romantic poet, Wordsworth, called “murders to dissect” (to the principle of analytical reductionism), but rather in service to the principle of eros, which unifies and celebrates--a "work of ecstasy" that celebrates, Dionysian style, with "music or dancing." This means that the "Gypsy Scholar" is a scholar-artist--an "Inspired Scholar." This union of philosophy and love (eros) looks back to Plato and Socrates (The Symposium), and means that in the Tower of Song you can’t tell whether the philosophers are singing of love’s ecstasies, or whether the lovers are reciting philosophy’s arguments.
However, it would be a misunderstanding to think that I’m taking a “new-age” position in rejecting (or devaluing) critical thinking and its methods; no, I want to combine both analysis and synthesis.The Prelude, that "glorious faculty," which is noted: "higher Reason or poetic imagination.") My ideal of scholarship is, surprisingly, very ancient, and goes back—“way, way, back”—to Plato’s philosophy, in which: "Intellectual rigor [read: logic] and Olympian inspiration [read: mythopoetic] no longer stood opposed.” After Plato’s synthesis of logos and mythos, it was the nineteenth-century Romantics who took up the abandoned project of reuniting philosophy with poetry, or reason and imagination—attempting to heal the wound between head and heart. Thus, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack takes its cue from 19th-century “Romantic Essay,” in that “it engages the reader in a discursive process,” and moves in a pattern from “discursive argument to poetry,” being a “text of self-discovery.” In bringing together Argument & Song, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack“a union of fact and imagination,” which refuses to “separate imagination and intellect, inner experience and the world,” and strives toward that “moment in which poetry, philosophy, and criticism begin to coalesce.” In this coalescence of Philosophy and Music, poetic enthusiasm is no enemy to scholarly discipline.
The way my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack works rhetorically is by utilizing both reason and imagination; both scholarly rigor and poetical reverie, both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration, both the critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/artistic heart, both secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, both academic research and mystical insearch, both philosophical questioning and romantic questing, both Apollonian discipline and Dionysian abandon; both the sword of cutting discourse & the rose of healing music, both philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude—so that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack finally leads not to ponderous academic desiccation but to ecstatic Dionysian celebration—a sort of mind-jazz ensemble. Therefore my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s hybrid “flowers of discourse” dissolve the boundaries between scholarship and art, dialectics and poetry, rhetoric and lyric; between, that is, Argument & Song—so much so that it is hoped the listener can’t make out where the argument leaves off and the song begins, and vice versa. “Language is a rose, and the future is still a rose, opening. . . .” (Carole Maso)
Therefore, having come this far in my vocation as a Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist, I can only give this farewell to my academic fathers:(Note: What I reject is the new-age abandonment of the "left brain," i.e., critical thinking in favor of the "heart," which, ironically, is anything but a "balanced" paradigm. I favor not the solving of the Western mind's dominance of "reason" by going to the opposite extreme of un-reason, but by the synthesis of reason/logic and imagination/intuition--the "left"- and "right-brain." Therefore, the new-age claim that one doesn't need reasoning powers because one has "intuition" is myopically wrong-headed. From the synthetic point of view, one's "intuition" is reason--logos--taken to a higher power--thus Emerson's "living, leaping Logos," which he identified with the higher Reason of Hermes Trismegistos. Wordsworth concurs, naming it in his poem, aims at
"Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
In the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s wild embrace of both mind and heart, the eye of soul opens, and a soul-text gives voice to the full-bloomed gnosis of love and the love of gnosis."A lady asks me/ I speak in season/ She seeks reason for an effect, wild often/That is so proud he hath Love for a name." (Ezra Pound) In presenting the fruits of my intellectual work, through scholarship as performance art (Blake's “Mental Studies & Performances”), I look back to a mentor (the poet-prophet of Imagination), who addressed his readers in the following way: "The Author hopes no Reader will think presumptuousness or arrogance when he is reminded that the Ancients entrusted their love to their Writing, to the full as Enthusiastically as I have . . . for they were wholly absorb'd in their Gods. . . . Therefore, dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent." --William Blake
"Mr. ___ writes as an Orphic musician; not one who plays literally on a lyre, but one who calls forth the harmonic and tuneful voice of being itself."
Why the "Gypsy Scholar" is out of the Ivory Tower into that "Tower down the track."
The Scholar Gypsy by Matthew Arnold 1855
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes! No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropped herbage shoot another head. But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green, Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!
Here, where the reaper was at work of late - In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves, Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use - Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn - All the live murmur of a summer's day.
Screened is this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field, And here till sundown, shepherd! will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.
And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book - Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore, And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deemed, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
But once, years after, in the country lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew, Met him, and of his way of life enquired; Whereat he answered, that the gypsy-crew, His mates, had arts to rule as they desired The workings of men's brains, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will. "And I," he said, "the secret of their art, When fully learned, will to the world impart;
But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
This said, he left them, and returned no more. - But rumours hung about the countryside, That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied, In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey, The same the gypsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring; At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors, On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors Had found him seated at their entering,
But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly. And I myself seem half to know thy looks, And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace; And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks I ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;
Or in my boat I lie Moored to the cool bank in the summer-heats, 'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills, And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.
For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt's rope chops round; And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Plucked in the shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.
And then they land, and thou art seen no more! - Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come To dance around the Fyfield elm in May, Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam, Or cross a stile into the public way. Oft thou hast given them store Of flowers -the frail-leafed white anemony, Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves, And purple orchises with spotted leaves - But none hath words she can report of thee.
And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames, Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass Where black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames, To bathe in the abandoned lasher pass, Have often passed thee near Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown; Marked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare, Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air - But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!
At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills, Where at her open door the housewife darns, Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate To watch the threshers in the mossy barns. Children, who early range these slopes and late For cresses from the rills, Have known thee eyeing, all an April-day, The springing pastures and the feeding kine; And marked thee, when the stars come out and shine, Through the long dewy grass move slow away.
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood - Where most the gypsies by the turf-edged way Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagged and shreds of grey, Above the forest-ground called Thessaly - The blackbird, picking food, Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all; So often has he known thee past him stray, Rapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
And once, in winter, on the causeway chill Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go, Have I not passed thee on the wooden bridge, Wrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow, Thy face tow'rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge? And thou hast climbed the hill, And gained the white brow of the Cumner range; Turned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall, The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall - Then sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.
But what -I dream! Two hundred years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls, And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe That thou wert wandered from the studious walls To learn strange arts, and join a gypsy-tribe; And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid - Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave, Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade.
- No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; 'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers. Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our worn-out life, and are -what we have been.
Thou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so? Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire; Else wert thou long since numbered with the dead! Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire! The generations of thy peers are fled, And we ourselves shall go; But thou possessest an immortal lot, And we imagine thee exempt from age And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page, Because thou hadst -what we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, And each half lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose tomorrow the ground won today - Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it! -but it still delays, And then we suffer! and amongst us one, Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days; Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes.
This for our wisest! and we others pine, And wish the long unhappy dream would end, And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear; With close-lipped patience for our only friend, Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair - But none has hope like thine! Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray, Roaming the countryside, a truant boy, Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away.
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife - Fly hence, our contact fear! Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood! Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern From her false friend's approach in Hades turn, Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silvered branches of the glade - Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue, On some mild pastoral slope Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales Freshen thy flowers as in former years With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, From the dark dingles, to the nightingales!
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of out mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers, Adn thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.
Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles! - As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise and emerging prow Lifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Aegaean isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine - And knew the intruders on his ancient home,
The young light-hearted masters of the waves - And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail; And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves.
A NOTE ON THE POEM
The Scholar Gypsy was a student of "pregnant and very ready parts" who, his humble birth preventing advancement at Oxford, joined the company of Gypsies, who taught him their lore and livelihood.
The story is first told in the Vanity of Dogmatizing by Joseph Glanvill (1661), who alludes to an unnamed colleague from whom he heard the events, which took place "very lately". The student is therefore unlikely to have been born much before 1635. Glanvill saw in the Gypsies' reputed ability to influence other peoples' thoughts, by the power of suggestion or "Imagination", a physical explanation for the ability of Angels to steer humans aright or astray.
The story was made famous in "The Scholar Gipsy" by Matthew Arnold (1853), who was more interested in the romance of a disaffected Oxford student, which recalled to him his own days at the University, when he and his friends spent much time roaming the "Cumner range". This includes Boar's Hill, where Arnold composed "Thyrsis"; the city has now designated a "Matthew Arnold field" where the poet is supposed to have been inspired.
"Om Wagi Shori Mum" ("Hail to the Lord of Speech! Mum!")
In Buddhism, Manjushri is the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. He is revered as the patron of arts and sciences, the master of eloquence. Writers in the arts and in science traditionally invoke Manjushri's assistance. Authors often open their books with versus in his honor. The Sanskrit name Manjushri means "gentle glory" or "sweet glory." Manjushri is also known as Manjughosha (meaning "gentle-voiced one" or "sweet-voiced one") and as Vagishvara ("Lord of Speech"). He holds a sword of "Discriminating Wisdom" in one hand and the lotus-flower of "Compassion" in the other.
