One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally

Most every weekend I spend in Pittsburgh with Matt we make pilgrimage to Caliban Books on Craig Street, a rare and vintage book shop that lies in between the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.  It is the rare occasion indeed that I leave without something, whether a cookbook I'd long sought, a CD from their $5/disc rack of used classical recordings, or a book I went in not knowing how desperately I needed.

Today fell deeply into that last category.  

My chosen undergraduate major was English, a track that virtually predisposed me to the accumulation of dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of books.  Not one to suffer silently, I choose instead to continue buying books, knowing full-well that I will never likely read every single one of them.  

I consider the mission to be salvific in two ways:  the book is there for me when I seek it out and I save it from going to a person who will let it be passed on to someone who won't care for it - its contents or mere presence.

At Caliban today I faced down a ten foot wide shelf of vividly bright, gorgeously bound editions from "The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written" collection printed by the Franklin Press.  There, in crimson red with gold accents and binding, was a copy of The Poems of John Donne.  

I've long had a thing for Donne.  Honestly, I can't even begin to pin down when, where, or how I first came across his Divine Sonnets.  I'd wager a brief gloss during some year of high school English, however I can't be sure.  One of these poems in particular - the tenth, at least according to the Westmoreland manuscript - "Death Be Not Proud" - has inspired, troubled, and stuck with me since at least high school.  

The text is straightforward enough:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou are not soe,

For, those whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,

Rest of their bones and soules deliverie.

For thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleep as well,

And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.  

In personifying Death, playing upon the mind's picture of a Grim Reaper, Donne utilizes modes of the Christian theology of resurrection to present an image of Death vanquished, the human soul redeemed and granted life eternal.

Of course, meditating upon and then mitigating the sting of death is a process far deeper than can be contained in fourteen lines.  In the four hundred and one years since the poem was written, critics have gone on about the modified Petrarchan rhyme scheme, the images contained in the lines, capitalization, punctuation, and everything else that people who put store in literary criticism salivate over.

I read and pondered the poem as much as a high school student who pretends to greater understanding and depth than their average classmate could.  Yet, something remained missing - some ineffable connection between my experience and Donne's words.  It wasn't until I saw HBO's 2001 film adaptation of Margaret Edson's play, "Wit", that the poem really plugged in and lit up for the first time.

The play's protagonist, Professor Vivian Bearing, an expert on Donne, is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.  The play traces the progress of her journey through an experimental course of incredibly strong chemotherapy and flashes back through Bearing's life, recounting an episode of her time as an undergraduate student, first tearing through the tenth Divine Sonnet in a way that a capricious young academic can (in other words, messily and with a certain youthful tenacity).  

In a scene that makes me shiver to this day, E.M. Ashford, the younger Bearing's professor, admonishes the student for choosing an inappropriate edition of the Divine Sonnet under consideration.  

Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?  The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death — capital D — shall be no more — semi-colon!

Death — capital D — comma — thou shalt die —exclamation point!¹

Gardner’s edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 — not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, death thou shalt die.

(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.)

Nothing but a breath — a comma — separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn’t you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.

Talk about nailing it down.  Small details, sure.  The difference between a comma and a semicolon is only the merest millisecond of breath - a conscious pause of infinitesimal value - but when one considers this literary fine print, it's enough to astound the reader.  

And Matt will tell you that the first thing I did was turn to the index and then onto page 356.  The last line was indeed punctuated correctly.  Otherwise, I'd likely have left the book behind, red leather binding or no.  I might not be a hyper-adherent of the critics, but when something this minute makes sense, it's enough for me.  

This, however, wasn't the 'Eureka!' moment for Donne in my life. 

At the very end of Edson's play, Professor Bearing lies dead on her hospital bed, wholly exposed, her garments torn open by well-meaning medical professionals seeking to resuscitate her in spite of her wishes.  And, in a pre-recorded voiceover, Bearing's voice recites Donne's poem - deliberately, measured, and without the excessive emotion we might believe due this moment of fatal reckoning.  The viewer is in tears, their dramatic journey completed in a truly splendid moment of catharsis.  And with the precision of a surgeon, the voice reassuringly connects that moment of life, death, soul, God, past, and present.  

As presented by Emma Thomson in the HBO adaptation, the moment is heart-rending (even if Bearing remains shrouded).  The battle has been lost - at least in purely physical terms.  But the metaphysical / existential passage of life into life everlasting is so perfectly crystallized in this minute and twenty seconds.

It was then, during my freshman year of college, that it became clear.  I'd already experienced my father's death when I was thirteen and, to the best of my knowledge, fully passed through mourning that loss.  I should have known what it meant to see a once vibrant and robust person wither away.  Basically, I understood the first twelve lines of Donne's poem.  

The last two had eluded me until that moment on screen.  There was no need for a brightly lit sequence of passing through a tunnel into some divine waiting room.  No Wagnerian theatrics for gathering the heroic dead.  Only an elegy - marking the pain of loss and the hope for redemption.  That "...expansion, / Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate" that Donne writes of in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

Only a comma.  

The Architecture of Downtown Pittsburgh

A few weekends ago, Matt and I spent the better part of a Saturday late afternoon and evening walking around Downtown Pittsburgh so that I could shoot some of the architecture in those environs.

Like most industrial cities that rose to prominence across the early and middle 20th century, Pittsburgh's buildings are an eclectic hodgepodge of styles, materials, sizes, shapes, and colors.  From humble two and three story structures as ornate as Greek temples to a Brutalist/Modern steel tower that thrusts over 800 feet into the sky, Pittsburgh's signature style is hard to define.  But from that intensely jumbled juxtaposition, one is able to appreciate the unique details that define the 'Burgh as having a skyline unlike any other.

In the heart of downtown, just in front of the historic Omni William Penn Hotel, the place where Lawrence Welk's "Champagne Music" met up with the bubble machine that helped defined an era in entertainment, there is a small park called Mellon Square.  Standing in the middle of that space, one sees the  futuristic aluminum-clad facade of the ALCOA Building, the stately brick of the hotel, a sandstone neoclassical department store, and then this building seen at the right:  the Flemish-Gothic styled Union Trust Building.

Begun in 1915, the building features an exuberantly ornate mansard roof fronted by pierced gothic arches on the frieze.  Along the roofline, dozens of windowed dormers punctuate the golden tile work.  Atop the roof (and unseen in this photo) are two slender chapel-like rooms that are used as housing for mechanical systems.

The idea of stately simplicity of lower levels erupting into a signature-style roofline is not unique to the Union Trust Building.  Truly, the most original variation on this theme punctuating the Pittsburgh skyline is the main tower of PPG Place.

A decidedly modern twist on the Neo-Gothic look, PPG Place stretches skyward 685 feet before terminating in glassy turrets and mock battlements.  It seems only natural for a company once named Pittsburgh Plate Glass to be housed in a building that uses copious amounts of glass in such unique ways.  Opened in 1984, PPG Place encompasses a large plaza in the midst of the complex that, during the winter, features a skating rink.  Dwarfed beneath the soaring skyscraper and surrounded by lighted trees, skaters, and music, the environment is magical.

Like the combination of styles found near Mellon Square, PPG Place is located directly behind one of the oldest areas of the city, Market Square.  Surrounding the square are low-set two and three-story buildings dating back to the 19th century.  Recently renovated, Market Square is now free of vehicular traffic, lending a continental air to the traditional heart of Downtown with trees, cobblestone paving, and benches and cafe tables to serve as a lunchtime stop for the thousands of downtown office workers or tourists overwhelmed by the variety of sights to see around them.

But before you think that Pittsburgh can only do Gothic or slight shifts thereof, let me assure you that the skyline is also home to modernist buildings, art moderne, and - indeed - quite odd entries in the realm of skyscrapers.

The building dominating the center of this photo I took last summer is the U.S. Steel Tower.  A strange hybrid of the International, Brutalist, and Modern styles, the U.S. Steel Tower is Pittsburgh's tallest building, topping out at 841 feet.

Opened in 1970, the U.S. Steel Tower is some 400 feet shorter than the Empire State building in New York City, but has almost 100,000 more rentable square feet than the New York landmark.

Each floor, in fact, is nearly an acre of space unto itself.  This is building as behemoth.

The facade is dominated by what is called Cor-Ten Steel, an alloy patented by U.S. Steel.  Rather than needing painting and regular maintenance, the surface of the steel oxidizes - rusts, really - both strengthening and creating a protective layer atop the structural steel.

Note:  I had to use this older picture because there is almost no place close to the building where one can get a proper photographic vantage point.  This shot was taken in May, 2010 from the terrace of the Civic Arena, a landmark structure that is currently being demolished.  

Unlike most modern skyscrapers, this one is not about glass surfaces, sleek forms, or modern curves or angles.  This hulking triangular building is dark, even forbidding when you stand in its shadow.  The airy, two story glass-walled atrium at ground level doesn't feel quite right.  It's almost as if the structure is levitating, something a tower with that seeming bulk has no business doing.

This building is Pittsburgh.  It's symbolic of the city's past as a gritty industrial center as it stands side-by-side with such structures as the bright, sleek Bank of New York-Mellon Tower, seen to the left.  Banking, healthcare, and education have replaced blast furnaces and crucibles as the pivot point upon which Pittsburgh's economy turns.  Dominated by the U.P.M.C. (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) logo since 2008, the past and present are layered upon each other on the U.S. Steel Tower.

Naturally, this is only a small taste of the wild array of architectural styles that make up Downtown Pittsburgh.  And, like any major city, the skyline is an amorphous and constantly shifting value.  Within the next few years, PNC Bank will be adding a $400 million, forty-story energy efficient skyscraper.  However, before the first glass curtain walls rise for that new building, Pittsburgh will be losing a significant piece of its cultural and architectural history: the Civic Arena.

Envisioned in the 1950s as the heart of a major cultural center that would feature housing, retail, office space, an opera house, and a symphonic hall, the Civic Arena was built with the best intentions of erasing urban blight and replacing it with clean, clear statements of modernity.

In its fifty years of existence, the Civic Arena went from hosting light opera in the summers to being the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins NHL team.  The Beatles, The Doors, and Elvis Presley played beneath the once retractable dome.  (It hasn't moved in decades thanks to the addition of seating decks high up in the structure.)  However, the arena outlived its use.  Not enough amenities, too-narrow concourses, poor sight lines.  Those factors all sealed the fate of the building that is defined by the largest retractable stainless steel roof in the world and the enormous support arm made of locally-made steel.

Will its absence be as acutely felt as some New Yorkers still claim for the loss of Penn Station in 1963?  It's too hard to guess.  This fall, the city and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals denied pleas to save the so-called Igloo from demolition.  The interiors are all but destroyed now and the roof will be dismantled come Spring.

Tracing the ebb and flow of a city is easy to do when you look up and around.  Stand on a street corner in any major city in America.  You'll see stone facades from the 1900s littered with ornamentation.  Bold curvilinear, streamlined buildings marked the boom years of the 1920s.  The Space Age brought sleek lines and glass exteriors.  And the last two decades have driven skylines ever higher in even more inventive ways.

Pittsburgh's evolution from the steel capital of the world, through the decline of the steel mills in the 1970s, and finally reinventing itself into the banking and healthcare center it is today is reflected in the towering walls of glass, carved into the granite and sandstone, riveted into the steel beams of this city.  The men and women who work in and around these buildings are as much Pittsburgh as the buildings they see from their office windows.  The skyline, like the three rivers that form the Golden Triangle of Downtown, defines the very essence of the American dream: ad astra per aspera.

Take a drive sometime on Interstate 376 Eastbound.  Go through the Fort Pitt Tunnels.  And as you emerge into the sunlight, see a city unfold across your dashboard.  A world connected by bright yellow bridges.  A city of steel.  Pittsburgh.

Sit in the upper deck along the third base line of PNC Park.  Don't go for the Pirates.  As the home team loses yet another one, watch the sunset turn the hundreds of colors on the skyline into blazes of glowing amber.  See the lights come up against the darkened sky, illuminating the spires, pinnacles, and roof lines.

It's more than steel or the Steelers.  Pittsburgh is a place of past, present, and future - of arts, sports, learning, and commerce.  Of men and women from far-flung corners of the Earth.  These buildings define all of it in largely concrete terms:  a city in and of the world, at once influenced by it and setting the trends.

There's a reason that the Economist voted Pittsburgh as the most livable city in America.

And this is surely a big part of it...

(All photos copywright The Cosmopolitan Bear, 2010 and 2011)

Die Welt Der Herr Wagner, Die Meister

Ever since the new production of Siegfried premiered at the Met on Thursday last week, I've been dwelling on Wagner - as character, composer, cultural influence, and, at times, cultural pariah.

I spent the majority of this afternoon listening to the Georg Solti / Wiener Philharmoniker recording of Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg.  Among Wagner's operas, it's probably one of the lesser known scores.  Registering around four and a half hours of disc time, it's not exactly a short bit of entertainment.  Then again, little of Wagner's music could be categorized as brief.

Yet, for all of his long-windedness, Wagner is a cultural phenomenon without much comparison.  How many other composers are so universally recognizable?  In that, I mean that you can speak to a person who knows nothing about opera and might never have heard of The Ring Cycle, but if you play the Walkurenritt (Ride of the Valkyries) theme for them, they'll instantly know it - probably to the point of being able to hum along.  My own slightly tonally challenged boyfriend can intone Donner's "Heda! Heda Hedo! from Rheingold as a sort of inside joke between us.  (Naturally, I counter with the Valkyrie's "Hojotoho!  Hototojo!" from Walkure.)

Last night, after feeling like I was losing my grip on sanity for the majority of the day due to grading and an absurd inability to find what I was looking for, I began to read a fascinating book about opera composer Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival, which he created.

Written by Fredric Spotts, Bayreuth, A History of the Wagner Festival, chronicles the then hundred and eighteen year history of the Festival.  (The book was published in 1994).  Since its inception in 1876, the Bayreuther Festspiele has featured only the works of Richard Wagner.  Legendary actors, conductors, directors, and designers serve as prominent signposts along the, at times, highly contentious past of the festival.

Of course, the largest problem in the room for most critics - however much it might remain unstated - is Hitler and his co-opting of Wagner's canon as part of his nation-building agenda.  This includes pictures of S.S. stormtroopers atop the King Ludwig balcony of the Festspielehaus and Hitler saluting the crowd on the plaza below.

Wagner's own notable and well-documented anti-Semitism is often linked with the rise, decades later, of Hitler's Nazi party and the Third Reich.  Yet, of course, many musicians that played in the orchestras at Bayreuth were Jews.  Wagner had a deep admiration for the music of Felix Mendelssohn and even allegedly carried on an affair with a half-Jewish woman.

In truth, while Wagner might have had antipathy for some Jews, the overall focus of the problem isn't him.  The composer himself died in 1883, six years before the Fuhrer's birth.  Adolf Hitler, in amalgamating his idea of a perfected German Vaterland, combined elements of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the Teutonic Nibelung mythology, Wagner's concept of a universal, all-embracing artform (Gesamtkunstwerk), and the Romantic notions of German society that suffuse Wagner's operas as ideals of the new Reich.  The whole thing is further complicated by Winifred Wagner, wife of the composer's only son, Siegfried Wagner.  She became close friends with Hitler and, via her ingratiation, furthered the nationalistic mythology inherent in the operas by her father-in-law.

In the post-war decades, with the next generation away from the paterfamilias, Wolfgang Wagner worked to absolve the Wagner family of the Nazi stain and spent 57 years at the helm of Bayreuth, 42 of those years alone at the top after the death of his brother, Wieland.  Productions became more abstract, losing their overwhelmingly German nature.  In the Centenary production of Der Ring Des Nibelungen, director Patrice Chereau removed both time and place from Das Rheingold, placing the Rheinmaidens atop a hydroelectric power dam rather than in the depths of the Rhine.

Yet, the music persists.  Opera companies peg their reputations on daring new productions of the Ring.  Los Angeles found out in 2009 that if you push the boundaries of taste too far, as with Achim Freyer's $32 Million production, you may well lose your shirt.  Critically reviled, bashed by the actors for the impediments caused by the sets and costumes, and deeply in debt after its initial run, the LA Ring was shelved and doesn't seem to have much for future prospects.

The new Metropolitan Opera Ring is experiencing teething problems of its own.  No, it's not a matter of taste as much as technology.  Conceived by the forces behind Cirque du Soleil, the new Met Ring is dominated by a behemoth set piece that the creators affectionately dubbed "The Machine."  A mammoth set of 24 revolving planks, the Machine has a bad habit of freezing up at inopportune times - like opening night of Das Rheingold.  The $40 Million-plus production even necessitated a retrofitting the support structure beneath the side stage of the Met where the Machine would be stored, an additional $5 Million endeavor.

While audiences around the world flock do the latest Meistersinger or Parsifal, in some places Wagner is still, shall we say, verboten...

Such was the strength of post-war hatred of Wagner among the Jewish establishment that his music was unofficially banned in the state of Israel.  Only in 2001 was conductor Daniel Barenboim able, after much debate, to play the overture to Tristan and Isolde at the Israel Festival.  He'd first wished to present the first act of Die Walkure, but was persuaded by the Israeli government and Holocaust survivors to change the program.

Very few remain as loved and loathed, as studied, and as venerated as Wagner.

As I continue through Spotts' book and the recorded operas, I'm sure I'll have more interesting tidbits to offer about the man, his myth, and the operas he left behind.