Fragments of Intensity (What Is Romantic?)
Ingfrid Breie Nyhus
I went the other day to a minimalism concert, but found it romantic. Broad strokes, rich sound, swelling harmonies. Some of what is called minimalism can be quite romantic. What is minimalist and what is maximalist? Some will describe the romantic as excess – surplus, overabundance. What is the most and the least of more or less?
«'The worst of romances is’, said Oscar Wilde, 'that they leave one so un-romantic’. In the same way the reader who gnaws his way through the 11,396 books on Romanticism, begins to feel cured of Romance for life» (Frank L. Lucas: The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, 1935).
Etymologically, 'romantic' derives from the meaning Roman, but from the Middle Ages fables about knights and chivalry and love were called romances. Tales of heroes. Isn't also Romanticism, the cultural legacy that still strongly defines us today, a story about heroes?
The man standing on the top of the mountain is small in the face of nature’s powerful forces, but he still stands there invincible and unafraid. The sea of mist beneath Caspar David Friedrich's back-turned mountain wanderer is a landscape of infinity. Aspiration towards the infite: «to call oneself a romantic and to look systematically at the past is to contradict oneself ... To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts» (Charles Baudelaire: What Is Romanticism, 1846).
«The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature ... is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror» (Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757). Astonishment – when the body fills with a gasp.
Can you imagine a musician inhaling mightily through vibrating nostrils as she brandishes her arm in the opening attack on the instrument?
We heard a performance of a song by Sergei Rachmaninov a while ago. The singer had a fantastic volume, extreme fervour. She gripped the body of the piano tightly as her vibrato voice unfolded in dramatic, oscillating waves that shook her and shook us. She was taken over by her own expression and the physical forces of sound, yet simultaneously, she was in control, both of the pianist and of the music she brought to bear.
(I've also heard vibrato singing that felt like an endless stream of trembling shrieks, without it being poorly sung, but there were days I wasn't receptive to it).
Johann Heinrich Füssli's demon, crouching over the sleeping woman, bores its glass gaze into you. According to Edmund Burke, the experience of the sublime – accompanied by a certain horror, awe, paralysis, terror, perhaps fear of death – creates an opportunity for self-examination. Caspar David Friedrich is to have said that the painter must paint not solely what is before him, but also what he sees on the inside. If he sees nothing on the inside, he must stop painting what is on the outside.
«The Romantic space ... can risk the investigation ... of the grandness of the universe ... precisely because it simultaneously requires an inner exploration that knows no boundaries. The intuition-based spatial infinity of [William Turner's 'Light and Color'] would be unthinkable if he not simultaneously reversed his telescope into the innermost regions of the heart» (Giorgio Arcangeli: Lo Spazio Romantico, 1972).
Romantic as far out and deep in, at the same time.
Or wuthering heights.
For something to be high, something else must be low. Arc shape; the line that ascends in a crescendo and descends in a diminuendo, like a softly rounded tree-covered knoll, or a dramatic mountain massif. The Mannheim Rocket blasts off. The musician follows the momentum of the line.
(While I'm writing this, the fire alarm goes off and I run into the composer Asbjørn Schaathun in an orange vest herding people out of the building. The most romantic are ruins overgrown with thistles, and the most non-romantic are Gro Harlem Brundtland's planning skills, he says.)
In Jena towards the end of the 18th century, a circle of writers initiated the idea of a romantic form of poetry. Madame de Stäel spread their ideas throughout Europe, and from there European art circles debated how to understand the term 'romantic'; did it mean a combination of comedy and tragedy, was it a new philosophical system, did it mean to stop shaving? The original Jena definition: «Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. ... It embraces all that is purely poetic, from the great systems of art ... to the sigh, the kiss that the lyrical child exhales in artless song ... Other types of poetry have been completed and can now be fully analysed. The romantic type of poetry is still in a state of becoming; in fact, that is its real essence: that it should forever be in the process of becoming and never be perfected» (Friedrich Schlegel: Athenaeum-Fragmente, 1798).
Throughout the 19th century, the framework for creating form and expression in the European art world was disputed and dissected. In music, there was a movement away from rhetorical formal qualities towards ever more of the imagination’s irrationality – away from harmony as a defining formal element, via greater detours away from the magnetism of the circle of fifths, until the notes were carried off in other directions and opened up the formal space.
«Women Romantic writers tended to celebrate, not the achievements of the imagination nor the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of the rational mind... Mary Wollstonecraft was particularly dissappointed by the sketch of the ideal women [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] drew in Emile ...: ‘A woman's education must ... be planned in relation to man. To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young.’ ... Wollstonecraft insisted that the historical enslavement of women has corrupted men. ... The sublime is associated with an experience of masculine empowerment; its contrasting term, the beautiful, is associated with an experience of feminine nurturance, love and sensuous relaxation. ... The sublime has for Burke the qualities he associated with his powerful, demanding, violent, unloving father ... In contrast, the beautiful has the qualities Burke associated with his gentle, shy, devoted mother; it is ‘small’, ‘smooth and polished’, ‘light and delicate’, gently undulating, regular. ... Does it any longer make sense to use the term ‘Romanticism’ to refer to the writings of women during the period 1780 to 1830, given that the concepts and cultural practices we have traditionally identified with the Romantic movement were produced primarily by men ... Many of the women writers ... insisted that women as well as men are rational creatures» (Anne Mellor: Romanticism and Gender, 2013).
What is the opposite of romantic? Or, what lies in between far out and deep in (large and large)?
The Japanese term wabi-sabi evolved as a counter-response to the perfection and grace of the Chinese tea ceremony, emphasising the beauty of the flawed, the raw, the imperfect, the uncontrolled, the vague, the maybe-ugly, the cracked; that which is not quite complete, or that which is slightly broken. «Ancient pond / a frog leaps in / splash» (Matsuo Basho, 1686).
«I've always found it quite easy to be for instance a muffin, or a chair ... to approach another state with a kind of expanded or exaggerated empathy, a recognition of coexistence, perhaps, entails that the attentiveness, the senses, are wide open ... one tree has a different 'presence' than another tree» (Janne-Camilla Lyster: Koreografisk Poesi, 2019).
There are many ways of being light and dark. I've always been drawn towards monochrome visual expressions.
Silence's temperatures.
As we play, Live sings out a word while her face opens in a broad smile, and in that moment, I think that the romantic must be the yes, the unreserved smile.
«Alcohol, I gather, does not so much stimulate the brain as relax its higher controls. Romanticism is likewise an intoxication; though there are varying degrees of it, just as there are day-dreams, night-dreams, nightmares, drink-dreams, and drug-dreams. … auto-intoxication … Again the Romantic writers use language in a dreamier way; with vague overtones and associations that shall echo through a mind whose attention is not riveted but half relaxed. … It follows that it is also wiser to avoid too much criticism and self-criticism, that influenza of modern intellectuals – How many modern poets have sunk to become critics and never risen again!» (Frank L. Lucas: The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, 1935). The yes of the moment: Lord Byron could write poetry while getting dressed, William Morris could write 700 verses in a day, and yet both were reluctant to revise what they had written. Lucas' explanation is that revision calls for a critical wakefulness; the opposite of an intoxicated, creative semi-trance.
«Our time, the present, is in fact not only the most distant: it cannot in any way reach us. Its backbone is broken and we find ourselves in the exact point of this fracture. This … permits us to grasp our time in the form of a ‘too soon’ that is also a ‘too late’: of an ‘already’ that is also a ‘not yet’» (Giorgio Agamben: What Is the Contemporary?, 2009).
«I got lost several times in the long halls and … I was struck by a strange sight. A creature of enormous size (I don’t know if it was a man or woman) flew about and fluttered about the space with difficulty and seemed to flounder in the thick shadows. … It was of a ruby color and its wings sparkled with a thousand changing light reflections. …I could not keep from uttering a cry of terror, and I woke up with a start» (Gérard de Nerval: Aurelia, 1855).
In everyday speech, romanticising is used as something beautifying, perhaps also naive. Pipe dreams. Dream images. Vaseline on the camera lens. If I perceive music as romantic (not as in originating from the Romantic period), I often hear a glorified image that lacks proximity, that lacks contact. Romantic can be tacky, it can be glossy, it can be overly sentimental, it can be pompous. The gasp can easily become a parody. Projecting can become posing. The gorgeous can become too gorgeous. Virtuosity that is merely clever is not romantic, it is drearily dull. The grandiose can so easily land wrong. The romantic can be a bit cloying, someone said. Romantic can be bloom time. I'm happy to say yes to the yes, but I also need some type of resistance, something that holds back so that the music doesn't slide past too quickly; content or texture that interests or captures, on its way by my ear. I don't easily like well-temperered major.
I'm listening to a favourite album, the musicians drive with something hoarse, obscure, creaking, undercurrent, and I drift into the sound.
Live and I explore romantic and unromantic, how romantic music sounds when played unromantically, how unromantic music sounds when played romantically, in all the (almost too many) ways romantic and unromantic can be understood. I become interested in the different types and degrees of intensity one can tune oneself in with. Intensity sent from far away, like someone shouting but simultaneously almost inaudible. Invasively emotional, loudly breathing intensity. Mild intensity. Non-intensity. Silent intensity. Inwardness that emanates spatial intensity. Heart-clutching intensity. Gasping intensity. Everyday intensity. Sacredness. Shock-like intensity, on, off. Intensity on the first notch. Thoughtful intensity. Empathetic intensity. Laid-back intensity. Non-intense intensity. Inner pressure. Pressure-less contact. Relaxed body, activated vocal cords. Intensity that has no intention to underpin. Inward pressure, outward pressure, being the witness of, being inside of the sound, what can exert pressure and take hold.
To taste is to navigate. Trying to hit or miss one day, trying again the next day, and the next day. I like how time pushes away every hit or miss. And that even metal nails weather away.
«...in order not to drown in the story and in all the thoughts that have been thought, I will trust the heart, I write, the heart of the mind, a deadly arrow. I would rather have one eye too many than be blind on both? I write to get closer to the past, to get closer to the future, to get closer to the moment, to absorb it into my blood: to be able to swallow, breathe to keep from sinking to the bottom. I want buoyancy, I search, yearn…» (Tone Hødnebø: Skamfulle Pompeii, 2004).
Dear Emily,
I cant come in this morning, because I am so cold, but you will know I am here - ringing the big front door bell, and leaving a note for you.
Oh I want to come in, I have a great mind now to follow little Jane into your warm sitting room; are you there, dear Emily?
No, I resist temptation, and run away from the door just as fast as my feet will carry me, lest if I once come in, I shall grow so happy, happy, that I shall stay there always, and never go home at all! You will have read this quite, by the time I reach the office, and you cant think how fast I run!
Aff
Emily.
P.S. I have just shot past the corner, and now all the wayside houses, and the little gate flies open to see me coming home!
Little Jane - A Letter
From Emily Dickinson
Tone Hødnebø
Til Emily Fowler (Ford)
klassevenninne ved Amherst Academy
1849?
Kjære Emily
Jeg kan ikke komme inn i morges siden jeg fryser,
men du vil oppdage at jeg er her og ringer på den
store dørklokka og legger igjen et lite brev til deg.
Jeg vil så gjerne komme inn, jeg har god lyst til
å bli med lille Jane* inn i den varme stuen din; er du
der, kjære Emily? Nei, jeg motstår fristelsen og løper
vekk fra døra så fort føttene vil bære meg, for at jeg ikke
skal bli så glad når jeg først har kommet inn at jeg blir der
for alltid og aldri mer drar hjem. Du vil ha lest dette brevet
før jeg når postkontoret, og du kan ikke tenke deg
hvor raskt jeg løper.
Kjærlig hilsen,
Emily
PS Jeg har nettopp sprunget forbi hjørnet, og nå alle
husene langs veikanten, og den lille porten åpner seg på vidt gap
for å se meg komme hjem.
***
* FOOTNOTE:
