Monday 27 November 2023
Although not particularly religious, Steve found spiritual nourishment in mankind’s artistic creativity. His musical record collection was modest but impressive. His collection consisted of classical music. A young man during the sixties and seventies, he didn’t listen to rock music; he never heard of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, or Aerosmith. “I did see Joan Baez perform,” he would confess. With his precious The New York Times “Arts” section, he would scan for off-off-Broadway performances or classical recitals in churches or small concert halls. For Steve, New York’s WQXR classical radio station was his worship music.
One summer Sunday afternoon, Steve called me. Once I answered, he didn’t bother to greet me. “Dan! Turn on WQXR NOW!,” he beseeched. “I know; I’m listening to it right now,” I countered. “Talk later,” he barely finished speaking his words while ending the call. Hypnotized by the mournful, dreamy sounding music, I didn’t take what might have seemed to another person to be a rude, abrupt phone call because the music was transcendent. Steve broke the enchanting spell that bewitched him long enough to alert me to WQXR’s performance of Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, also known as “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” He was sharing his experience with this extraordinary music, making sure that I had my own experience with this music. When you eventually listen to Górecki’s masterpiece, you’ll understand immediately that Steve’s behavior on the phone wasn’t ill-mannered. Desperately and impatiently needing not to squander another second on the phone, he needed to experience the music. I understood.
That day while listening to the music, I learned what twentieth century suffering, death, loss, and grief sounded like. What does the world sound like after someone tortures another person? After the war criminal walks out of the torture chamber? After that person exits the room and leaves the victim whom he had been beaten, dying on the floor? After the broken and abject person clings to consciousness? After the condemned individual dies?
Does life still go on after the horrors? Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 doesn’t seethe in anger. His music doesn’t sound like resignation. I wondered what exactly struck Steve about this composition. The music is a soundtrack of melancholy and tragedy; however, the music’s moodiness is hard to pin down. The music’s energy is dark and emotional, but strangely consoling. The tiredness of living through a terrible ordeal is what I feel each time I listen to Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36. For days, Steve couldn’t talk about Symphony No. 3. The music utterly stunned him. Unlike me, he didn’t know music theory, and he didn’t play a musical instrument. Frankly, he didn’t need to know what a Major third interval meant; he intuitively heard and felt its emotional power. Whether the music was set in G minor or E-flat didn’t matter. Steve never worried over such things.
I easily imagined Steve’s reaction while listening to Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36. Steve’s spellbound face… eyes closed… a peaceful smile, one shaped by a bliss brought upon by a revelation, an enlightenment from the universe’s creative energy. That face, that one, that face of Steve’s now dominates my memories of him, not the other one—the green and purple one—I had envisioned after his death. When Steve encountered art, in any of its multiple forms, he seemed to be closer to a contentment that counterpoised his depression. Those moments sometimes were fleeting; however, I believe that without art, literature, music, Steve’s condition would have overwhelmed him sooner. For Steve, art served a moral purpose, one that addressed not only ethical dilemmas but political questions. Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 merged a religious lamentation motif with Polish folk music and the existential dread of losing one’s family to the horrors of Hitler’s crimes against humanity. For Steve, Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 became a powerful confirmation of everything he loved about music: keeping alive the memories of those whom we lost. And for me, Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 serves as Steve’s requiem.
Steve and I attended the Museum of Modern Art’s (October 28, 1998-February 2, 1999) retrospective exhibition on Jackson Pollock. This time, Steve taught me a life-changing lesson on the significance of the artist. On that December night, I connected powerfully with Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943) painting. Pollock’s thick, heavy brushwork—yes, Pollock, indeed, used a paintbrush, not his famous dripping technique, to create this dynamic work of art. As I approached closer to the canvas, I felt the art work’s energy; it simply was vibrating. It reminded me of van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) and Cypresses (1889). In a similar way in which van Gogh recreated the movement of wind with his brush strokes, Pollock captured the pulse of life with his brush strokes in the painting’s many figures and objects. The two mysterious and mythic figures in Guardians of the Secret stood at attention, demanding something from me. I tried in vain to decipher this painting’s meaning; however, what consumed me was its spiritual force. To me, the painting was simply alive. Steve noticed I was transfixed by this work. “What are you thinking,” he posed.
I had finished a graduate course paper on the literary critic, Walter Benjamin; in particular, I wrote about his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). According to Benjamin, when a work of art which is mass reproduced as copies for consumption, those copies can never possess the artistic energy, or aura, that the original always has. No matter how detailed and accurate a poster, for example, of Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret, that reproduction would never duplicate or substitute for the original. The colors are off. The size is wrong. Everything is not what the original has. The poster isn’t—could never be—Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret. In other words, technology could not replicate the work of art’s aura. No poster could ever render that energy I felt when I stood before Guardians of the Secret. The original work of art was/is life. It is precious.
“Steve, that literary theory course actually taught me something. Benjamin taught me about aura, and I see it here,” I argued. He immediately shook his head. “No,” he countered. “Benjamin… none of those literary critics taught you what you just said. Pollock revealed it to you; he taught you that lesson,” Steve began. At that moment, I wasn’t completely convinced by Steve’s argument. I initially thought Steve was too narrow-minded, too unwilling to give credit to Benjamin. After all, I just read the Benjamin essay, and he taught me this crucial lesson on the significance of art: its divine-like quality, its creative, life-affirming vitality. Moreover, Benjamin wrote his essay in 1935, and Pollock painted his work in 1943.
Steve had none of it. He insisted I should always privilege the artist. The artist, not the critic, is the creator. The artist’s work endures, long after critical fashions fade away. “Aren’t we critics?” I challenged. “Stick with Pollock, Melville. You’ll be in good company,” he insisted. “They are your teachers,” he emphasized. “Learn from them,” he added.