The Appeal of Indeterminacy in the Corpus Christi Carol

 

I append the text of the carol in the form printed in Greene’s anthology A Selection of English Carols.  This is the same version recorded in Richard Hill’s early sixteenth century commonplace book.

  

     Whereas non-aesthetic discourse most often aims at clarity and monosemy, poetry commonly cultivates multiple meanings and, in some cases, glories in obscurity.  Cultivated at times by the Troubadours of trobar clus and the French Symbolists, indeterminate meaning plays a role in all aesthetic texts. In the “Corpus Christi Carol” semantic uncertainty is foregrounded.  R. L. Greene, the editor of the Oxford book of carols noted of it "This carol has been subject to more discussion than any other in the whole canon." [1]  It is hardly necessary to review the scholarly literature to come to this conclusion.  Virtually all who comment on the poem describe it as enigmatic and mysterious, and critics generally make the observation in an appreciative tone.  

     Shorn of allusive associations, the Corpus Christi Carol sketches a melancholy scene portraying types of human suffering.  The chorus, to be sung with each verse, opens with the standard baby-soothing line “lully, lullay” (the source of the word “lullaby”), though no infant is to appear.  Instead the soothing, satisfied sound of the first line is succeeded by a harsh plaint over lost love: “The faucon hath borne my make away.”  The sense of loss and longing is then suddenly transferred to a mysterious tableau: in a hall there is a bed upon which a knight lies bleeding while a woman kneeling at his bedside weeps for him.  It is unclear what relation this pair might have to the persona whose lover had been carried away.  On the poems’ purely emotional register the potential joy of a child evoked in the first line is interrupted, overturned even, by suffering such as love-longing and the pains of mortality both for the dying and for those whom survive.  As such the poem achieves a grand sort of pathos with its elegantly understated yet powerfully suggestive image.  Anyone might be either the suffering knight or the grieving maiden and indeed everyone is both.

     The song, however, concludes with a final couplet which, though it adds what looks like definitive information, in fact only complicates the interpretive challenges of the poem as a whole.  

 

    And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon: 
    Corpus Christi writen theron.

 One might suspect that the explicit Christianity of this conclusion might privilege a reading of the poem as straightforward orthodox piety.  Christ is then figured in the bleeding knight, [2] while the “may” in mourning is Mary.  The nonsense syllables of the chorus “lully, lullay” associate the implied dramatic moment with Christmas (rather than the summertime Corpus Christi) at the outset.  The virgin is rocking the baby Jesus while envisioning the passion with which his life must end.  To some the image signifies not the body of Christ per se but rather the presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread “bleeding” from being dipped in wine.  Of course, the host (derived from hostia = sacrificial victim) is symbolically identical to Christ.

     As though in a palimpsest, behind the Christian images of the song are discernable the patterns of the Fisher King and the Grail Legend, themselves ultimately derived from Celtic mythology.  Meaning has drifted and eroded during the centuries-long transmission of these stories through the adoption of Christianity and the leading actors’ demotion from deities to heroes to supporting actors in a Christian story.  This semantic evolution has caused the Grail theme to acquire a reputation – well-justified in many cases including the Corpus Christi Carol -- for haunting mystery.  The elliptical narrative and the grandly portentous atmosphere of spirituality suggest the aesthetic occult, like Masonic paraphernalia. 

     In R. L. Greene’s ingenious historical interpretation [2] the associations with the Eucharist are the basis for the argument that the carol is a partisan song in which Catherine of Aragon laments the accession of Anne Boleyn and the introduction of the Anglican Church.  Whether this reflects an early sixteenth century understanding is irrelevant to the poem’s reception by most modern readers. 

     The ambiguities are part of the design of the text as it exists today, some the result of the evolution from earlier forms, some as elements of theme, some for style.  The identity of the speaker who has lost a mate is unclear.  Why is the orchard brown?  Why is the knight bleeding?  What is the relation of the knight and the grieving lady?  Many readers have suspected that the final line mentioning Corpus Christi is a late addition aimed at establishing the poem’s orthodoxy.  To what extent does it suggest a Christian antidote to suffering?  And what else might bring an end to the sadness?  How could the speaker regain a lover?  Why does the tense change from past to present continuous with the line “And in that bed ther lith a knight”?

     The effect of this catalogue of questions, which might be might be lengthened almost indefinitely, pointing in a variety of hermeneutic directions, is most prominently to convey a tone of haunting mystery.  As the practice of cults has shown from Pythagoreans and Orphic initiates to Theosophists and present-day adherents of QAnon, the very uncertainty of interpretation enhances a sense of deep if unfathomable significance.   Rather like a grand passage of Beethoven it seems to convey meaning beyond words, but nonetheless of vital importance. 

     The indeterminate meaning has at least one clear implication: there is much we do not know.  If nothing else, the mysterious scene the poem sketches for its hearers represents the ineffable spectacle of that most familiar and unknown of things, everyday reality.  The echoes of Celtic and Christian myth agree in their fundamental paradigm: each presents a convincing picture of a world of suffering familiar to all, embodied in the Fisher King’s wounded father, the bleeding knight and in Christ on the cross.  Each offer as well a solution, figured in Bran’s magic cauldron, the gallantry of Percival and Galahad, the divine person of Jesus, and the eucharistic host in which the god lurks.

     Yet why is the knight suffering?  We know no answer, just as we are baffled by the origin and the meaning of the Holocaust or of our myriad pettier complaints.  What is the outcome for the knight and maid?  For the reader?  Who can say?  A more determinate theme would be a false one.  It is the reader’s own nescience about everyday life reflected on the page and colored with the resonance of the deepest human emotions, given comely form and the pleasing accompaniment of sweet music.  Yet in the end the grace of the poem, the beauty of its melody, seems redemptive, the composed response soothing all souls.  Everyone is the infant being lulled to rest, “lully, lullay.”  If we have nothing else, we have yet beauty.  Here is the source of the song’s charm. 

 

1.     1.  Richard Greene, editor, A Selection of English Carols, Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series, Oxford/Clarendon Press, 1962, 230.  Significant variations including additions occur in later versions, including the addition of a thorn at the foot of the bed and a hound lapping the C.  Benjamin Britten’s setting is often featured in holiday concerts.

2.      2.  See R. L. Greene, “The Meaning of the Corpus Christi Carol,” Medium Aevum 29 (1960): 10–21.

3.      3.  Christ is often depicted as a knight in medieval art and literature, in, for instance, the Ancrene Riwle, William Herebert, and Piers Ploughman.  Ephesians 6:13-16 describes the arming of God’s soldier.

 

 

 Lully, lullay, lully, lullay,
The faucon hath borne my make away.
 
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
 
In that orchard ther was an hall
That was hanged with purple and pall.
 
And in that hall there was a bed:
It was hanged with gold so red.
 
And in that bed ther lith a knight,
His woundes bleeding by day and night.
 
By that beddes side ther kneeleth a may,
And she weepeth both night and day.
 
And by that beddes side ther standeth a stoon:
Corpus Christi writen theron.

Poems from Planetary Motions

  

 I post primarily prose here, but this month I mark the publication of Planetary Motions by offering a poem from each of the book’s sections along with a few brief and, I trust, superfluous, comments.  For further information, see the listing on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Motions-William-Seaton/dp/B08MS5KNJB/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ASZSKJYZS5VG&dchild=1&keywords=planetary+motions&qid=1606054981&sprefix=planetary+mo%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1

 

 

• 1.      Other Scenes

 

 

                        Dia de los Muertos

          On Dia de los Muertos some here choose

          to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,

          and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill

          mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.

          Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt

          and dares the other men to come and fight.

          In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.

          Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.

          Their glance tells me there's nothing more to say.

 

 

This is Guatemala where Gallo is best-known as a beer (not wine) brand.  The nervous scroungy free-running dogs of developing countries well suggest the tone of life in poor neighborhoods.  In this setting the universal theme of mortality is colored by the traveler’s knowledge of pre-Columbian human sacrifice, brutal colonialism, and the barbaric violence of decades-long civil unrest. 

 

 

 

• 2.      Divagations

 

 

I hurtle through the light and dark by trees

that reach and strive indifferent to my course,

by rocks with memories back before the flood,

each facet marking some old painful break,

eruption, gash, reshuffle. Read there, see

tomorrow far more live and clear

than ever sortilege, astrology,

or hepatoscopy could claim: beat grass

and withered weeds, a sudden bird, and wind

that envies leaves of shrubs and, homeless, sighs. 

 

 

I meant to suggest that the most common sights are surely more beautiful, remarkable, and significant than divination or magic.  The scene before the eyes is always a gaze at the morphing flow of phenomena.  Sometimes even the wise wind sounds sad.

 

 

 

• 3.      Appetites

 

Feast

 

O be for me an oyster raw,

unfathomable: inside the shell

a lopped but answering tongue,

and be for me an onion soup,

so thick and savory-sweet.

O be for me a leg of lamb,

as rich and strong as scrubby hills,

and be for me a Brussels sprout,

compact and layered like a late quartet.

O surely you’re my bread

and fit me like inhaled air.

Do be for me tonight a custard flan

so melting to the tongue

               with caramel atop

it brings an end to words.

 

 

Or as Bessie Smith sang, “Give me lots of candy, honey, love is grand.”

 

 

• 4.      Songs

 

 

Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp

through the golden filigree of printemps.

Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light

that ravish the soul at the very first sight,

confusing their victims, occluding their might.

Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.

These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune

of garnet greens and things unseen,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,

a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.

 

 

My goal in these songs is to turn the focus from content to the melody of words, a quality often neglected in contemporary poetry.  I think of Keats describing Negative Capability, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  In another letter he spoke of “the 'burden of the Mystery.'”  Just listen; no understanding needed.

 

 

 

• 5.      Momento Mori

 

 

Dead trees in the forked arms

of their fellows that followed,

knot-eyes wide with utter unbelief

like comrades in war unable

to believe their trench-mates gone.

The forest floor has generations

layered like old Troy, but back and back

to time’s get-go and each supports

the next till in the ultimate sub-basement

the elevator operator lifts one wry eye,

the door slides, the secret’s out

and all distinctions fade.

Then everything relaxes, all lets go,

no longer any gap from one to one,

the manic dance may pause --

so brief! -- between exhale/inhale,

before time’s arrow like

some god of locomotives,

blows a lonely whistle

and speeds on down the line

as though the terminus

               must hold that counter

where one can sit

               and ask one’s heart’s desire --

so well worth racing toward!

 

 

In what I like to think is a reinforcement of theme, several of the images here are fading from the general imagination.  The locomotive had more powerful associations in the era of steam, and elevator operators are now rare birds, building a muted strain of nostalgia into the story. 

 

 

• 6.      Lama Swine Toil

 

 

The Lama’s Parable of the Not-OK Corral              

              

He walked the dusty, sun-baked streets of a town

on the far frontier of metaphysics.

His faithful Indian companion whispered sutras in his ear.

The townspeople hustled off to shelter behind the nearest

received ideas.

The tumbleweeds blew, and the buzzards cried out wise

suggestions,

but he never heard and just stared straight ahead.

At the street’s opposite end, walking slowly toward him, was his

enemy,

his brother, his mirror-image.

(And the town’s pretty schoolmarm walked an identical street

at that very moment, facing a Doppelgänger of her own,

her foot like his poised seeking the next step,

and neither could help it at all.)

The sweat dripped down his cheek.

The Avidya Boys, he knew, were crouching in doorways,

leaning from second-story windows,

and the gang from the Hungry Ghost Ranch,

covered him from every angle.

The clock ticked on toward the highest of high noons

when time, that old codger, will expire, as did Gabby Hayes in

1969. 

Suddenly he heard from behind the voice of the cosmos, deep

and unmistakable,

“Drop your ego on the ground right there, I’ve got you

covered.”

And he knew the jig was finally up.

 

 

 

Another apocalyptic anticipation like the last, here employing the “Old West” set that once proved hospitable to many of this country’s myths, a redeemed Spahn Movie Ranch of the mind, maybe, artificial, playful and beneficent. 

 

 

• 7.      Translations

 

 

Horace, Odes I, 11

 

Don’t ask, Leukonoe, it is taboo to know

what fate I’ve got and what’s awaiting you.

Forget the Tarot reader. It is best to tough

it out. Know Jupiter may give us many years

or this may be the last we see the Tuscan sea

come break against the rocks. Be wise; strain wine;

don’t hold great long-term hopes. We talk and jealous time

runs on. Just seize this day, think nothing of the next.

 

It is almost the last shred of the once-sizable fund of Horatian maxims that all educated European people used to carry about – carpe diem.  Ecclesiastes said the same.  Horace is one of the greatest of poets, though I fear he loses a very great deal in translation.

 

 

Moréas’ Symbolism

 

Translations from Moréas are my own.  See endnotes for the original French.

 

     Like most of the manifestoes written during the great procession of modern art movements, Jean Moréas’ “Le Symbolisme” [1] is stronger when treated as an imaginative text than as a theoretical statement.  There was no stable and organized Symbolist group though Moréas did publish a short-lived journal called Le Symboliste; some of his ideas were shared with others often identified as Symbolists, others are his alone.  Indeed, the essay imagines Symbolism as not quite realized.  “the Supreme Enchantment has not yet come: a stubborn and jealous job of work awaits newcomers.” [2]  Far from setting out a coherent program, the essay sails on the high winds of the author’s animated spirits, charged with polemical energy, expressing total confidence against the background of a dazzling display of pyrotechnic rhetoric. 

     Moréas opens with an idea that implies no stable set of literary recommendations.  He proposes a cyclic and organic concept of art in which each movement is born, ages, and then declines as the next arises. [3]  The sole imperative is that proclaimed by Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” [4]  Culture follows an inexorable recurring pattern in which “that which had been novel and spontaneous turns cliched and commonplace.”  Thus “after the classical cliché, there came the romantic cliché.” [5] 

     Such ideas are widespread – one thinks of the neoterics of the first century C. E. or Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Nova Poetria of the early thirteenth, but they are hardly universal.  Defenders of imitation of the masters and strict adherence to convention are always available to assert an opposite tendency, thus creating a dynamic tension on both sides.  In “Le Symbolisme” this role is filled by the Intermezzo character called “un détracteur” who is prone to such utterances as “but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!” and “Horrors!  Not to respect the alternation of rhymes!” [6] 

     Moréas proceeds to the alternatives to Symbolism as the mode of the coming generation.   He concedes Naturalism a certain value as novelty as a counterweight to the banality of a Romanticism “sunk in senility.”  Such innovation, while “legitimate” is “ill-considered” and “naïve.”  “One can,” he sniffs, “only seriously value the work of the Naturalist writer as a cry of protest.” [7]  The basis for his reaction against Naturalism is his rejection of the Platonic concept of art as imitation.  According to Moréas, his “simple and exceedingly succinct point of departure” is the principle that “art cannot be faithful to the objective”.  [8]  There could scarcely be a more energetic challenge to any realistic style that aims at imitating lived experience.  While language cannot reproduce reality for Moréas, it can reflect subjectivity.

     Another competitor for the leading role in art is the school identified as Decadent.  Having asserted that impressions are all that exist, it is unsurprising that Moréas’ strictures on the Decadents are unashamedly subjective.  Such writers are “tough and stringy” like an ill-prepared beefsteak, as well as “frightened and groveling” like despicable weaklings. [9]  The reader can only speculate about just what he means.  There is little clue to the specific characteristics of the Decadent group or to Moréas’ objections, but it makes for lively reading. 

     He does propose Symbolism as the “reasonable” alternative corresponding to “the actual spirit of the creator in art” [10], and he does sketch out some characteristics of the sort of new writing he would approve.  He energetically defends obscurity and ambiguity and declares Symbolism the “enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility, and,” Moréas concludes climactically, “objective description.”  He declares that “the essential character of symbolist art consists in never aiming at the conception of the idea in itself,” but rather in assuring that the idea “never lets itself be seen without the sumptuous gowns of extraneous associations.” [11]  A certain extravagance is implied by the adjectives “sumptuous” and “extraneous.”  The delight in verbal collage, in resonant if in part arbitrary and improvisatory imagery, is implied by the sentiment and reinforced by the out-of-the-way choice of “simarre” rather than “manteau” or “robe” for “gown.”  The Symbolist will make use of “perceivable appearances” not to reconstruct reality on the page, but to suggest “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas,” [12] though just what those ideas are remains intentionally enigmatic.

     Moréas offers to provide an “exact translation“ of just what his theory means in  practice: “unpolluted words,” “arching and periodic phrases intermixed with waves of its absence,” “meaningful pleonasms,” “mysterious omissions,” “anaculothia held in suspense,” indeed “all bold and polysemous tropes.”  His emphasis here, far from prescribing a particular style, is to endorse enthusiasm and showy rhetoric.  The passage itself goes on to recommend language that is “good and luxuriant and frisky” and ends with a delicious and gratuitous reference to certain archers of antiquity: “free writers who let fly their barbed language much like the sinuous arrows of the Toxotes of Thrace.” [10]  

          Moréas lets the cat altogether out of the bag eventually when he imagines this art of the future inn this bravura passage, replete like Rabelais’ catalogues, as decadent as Huysmans on Silver Latin, as crankishly bookish as Baron Corvo.

 

At times mythic phantasms are evoked from old Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiris to the nigromantes [necromancers] lavishly turned out on Caliban’s rock or by Titania’s forest to the mixolydian music of barbitons and octochords. [11]

 

One could disentangle some of the elements so gleefully thrown together here beginning perhaps with the echoes of the demiurge in neo-Platonism, Spenser, and Shelley (who associated it with the French Revolution).  The reader, though, has hardly a moment to consider before this initial figure is succeeded by another and then another.  After half a dozen allusions, Moréas concludes the display with three rare ancient Greek words. 

     Surely this is recreational language, meant less to be understood than to create a tone, a mood, a curious symbolic pattern that involves the reader in an experience rather than inviting exegesis.  Far from a meticulous structure where every mot is juste, this is a bricolage, looking as though it has been constructed from whatever happened to be at hand.   

     Summing up the characteristics of Symbolist writing, Moréas notes, “The very truth of lyric poetry is found in seeming disorder, luminous madness, and passionate grandiloquence.”  He advocates running the risk of an “excess of rhetorical figures and colorful expressions.” [12] 

     With such energy and improvisatory enthusiasm, Moréas’ reader feels at some distance from the Symbolism of Mallarmé and Valéry whose magisterial, even still-Parnassian, tone suggested a cool composure as opposed to Moréas’ excitement.  Their thoughtful lexical precision contrasts with his eruptions of exuberant words.  Though Moréas insisted that his images would aim at “primordial ideas,” in practice he cares little for such moorings, letting his words float freely like a skyful of clouds. While both Mallarmé and Valéry stuck to alexandrines and sonnets until the very end, Moréas recommended a looser prosody which in his description sounds rather like syncopated jazz.  “An alexandrine with multiple and mobile caesurae, the primary task of certain numbers -- seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – resolute in many rhythmic permutations of which they are the sum.” 

     Moréas then might be considered less as the inspiration of the French poets generally identified as Symbolist and of their American cousins Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, perhaps in more recent years, than he is of freer word-slinging rhetoricians from Apollinaire to Gregory Corso.  Though Moréas had posed as the herald of the new Symbolist movement, a few years later he had changed direction and began to advocate neo-Classicism,  the “école romane,” a taste that persisted to the end of the poet’s life.   This group became associated with nationalism, reactionary views, anti-Semitism, and, through Maurras, the formation of the fascist Action Française.  In this way a writer who had been a young radical came in time to be a monarchist, a writer who had shouted for novelty came to idealize past masters, and a rebel became a defender of privilege.  The scheme of generational evolution Moréas had outlined gained, at least in his own case, a sort of ironic truth as he abandoned the provocative and exhilarating coruscations of “Le Symbolisme.”

 

  

1.      Published in Le Figaro for December 18, 1886.  A twenty-first century American can only feel nostalgia for those long-ago days when a newspaper of general circulation would publish aesthetic polemics and people would discuss such issues in the cafes.

 

2.      “Cependant le Suprême Enchantement n'est pas encore consommé : un labeur opiniâtre et jaloux sollicite les nouveaux venus.”  The extravagance of the capitalized “Supreme Enchantment” is a giveaway of the self-indulgences to come.

 

3.      Darwin was surely an influence in Moréas’ time.  Similar ideas have been advanced by Vico in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth by Harold Bloom with the addition of an overlay of neurotic guilt in descriptions of the “anxiety of influence.” 

 

4.     Make it New was the title of Pound’s 1934 book of essays, but he had earlier used the phrase, in fact a translation of M. G. Pauthier’s French version of the Chinese, in his 1928 translation of the Confucian text he titled Ta Hio: The Great Learning.  

 

5.      “ce qui fut le neuf et le spontané devient le poncif et le lieu-commun.” “et qu'après les poncifs classiques, il y a eu des poncifs romantiques.”

 

6.      In the original “Mais la césure, la césure! On viole la césure!!” and “Horreur! Ne pas respecter l'alternance des rimes!”

 

7.      In the French “tombé en enfance,” “légitime mais mal avisée,” “la méthode puérile du naturalisme,” “on ne peut accorder sérieusement qu'une valeur de protestation.”  Moréas exempts Zola who was miraculously “saved by his wonderful writer’s instinct” (“sauvé par un merveilleux instinct d'écrivain”).

 

8.      In the original “un simple point de départ extrêmement succinct”  “l'art ne saurait chercher en l'objectif.”

 

9.      “Les littératures décadentes se révèlent essentiellement coriaces, filandreuses, timorées et serviles.”

 

10.   “Nous avons déjà proposé la dénomination de Symbolisme comme la seule capable de désigner raisonnablement la tendance actuelle de l'esprit créateur en art.”

 

11.   “ennemie de "l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective" “le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la conception de l'Idée en soi.” “L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures.”

 

12.   “des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales”

 

13.   I left “sinueuse” as “sinuous” to preserve its oddity.  The entire passage in French: Pour la traduction exacte de sa synthèse, il faut au symbolisme un style archétype et complexe : d'impollués vocables, la période qui s'arcboute alternant avec la période aux défaillances ondulées, les pléonasmes significatifs, les mystérieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme ; enfin la bonne langue – instaurée et modernisée – la bonne et luxuriante et fringante langue française d'avant les Vaugelas et les Boileau-Despréaux, la langue de François Rabelais et de Philippe de Commines, de Villon, de Rutebœuf et de tant d'autres écrivains libres et dardant le terme acut du langage, tels des toxotes de Thrace leurs flèches sinueuses.

 

14.   “Tantôt de mythiques phantasmes évoqués, depuis l'antique Démogorgôn jusques à Bélial, depuis les Kabires jusques aux Nigromans, apparaissent fastueusement atournés sur le roc de Caliban ou par la forêt de Titania aux modes mixolydiens des barbitons et des octocordes.”

 

15.   “Le désordre apparent, la démence éclatante, l'emphase passionnée sont la vérité même de la poésie lyrique. Tomber dans l'excès des figures et de la couleur, le mal n'est pas grand et ce n'est pas par là que périra notre littérature.”   

 

16.   “l'alexandrin à arrêts multiples et mobiles ; l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – résolus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes.”es sommes.”

The Comic World of Flip the Frog

 

    Long recognized as one of the greatest animators of American film during a time when movie theaters typically showed a program including cartoon, newsreel, and perhaps other short subjects as well as one or two feature films, Ub Iwerks created a marvelous comic world within the conventions of his form.  Doubtless best-known for his work with Disney – they had worked together since both were teenagers -- he was the first artist to draw Mickey Mouse and went on to make significant contributions to many Disney cartoons, as well as drawing for Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Columbia’s Screen Gems. [1]  Yet he resented Disney’s dominance and for a time headed his own studio making Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper features among others in which he was able to develop his own vision during an era when animated shorts were made to appeal not to children alone, but to audiences of all ages.

     Flip the Frog first appeared in Fiddlesticks (1930), the first color animation with sound.  The sound is significant as many cartoons of the period foregrounded music while neglecting plot.  The Disney studio had produced a number of Silly Symphonies shorts providing fanciful visual accompaniment to pieces of music and for this series, Iwerks produced Autumn and Springtime. [1]

     Flip appears on the initial title holding a single-stringed instrument, a buoyant troubadour with a huge smile.  On the soundtrack one hears Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, to become familiar to many several decades later as the theme music for the Alfred Hitchcock television show.   The sinister tone of this melody may seem discordant, its solemnity and melancholy the opposite pole of the vivacious frog.  In fact, the macabre occupies a significant space in the cartoons of the era, those by Ub Iwerks among them, yet it is always a comic, fundamentally joyous fear like that evoked in celebrations for Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead as well as in the devils and death figures that often feature in Carnival celebrations. 

     More froglike than he will become in later cartoons in spite of four-fingered cartoon white gloves, a smart bowtie, and a few buttons on his ventral side, Flip leaps from one sylvan lily pad to another and then begins dancing like a trouper with theatrical high spirits.  He grins and faces the audience; his ebullience becomes the viewer’s.  He punctuates his movements with an odd squawk, more like a duck than a frog, eventually dancing atop the shell of an annoyed turtle who ejects him into the water.   

     Temporarily shaken, he soon resumes his merry dance until he comes upon a scene to rival Breughel’s peasant festivals: a group of small animals, mostly insects, but including mice and other creatures, several of whom are drinking while many play musical instruments.  There is, in fact, a sort of symphony orchestra in these woods which Flip enthusiastically joins.  They play the local version, one can only assume, of the music of the spheres, the dance of earthly life.   Upon his arrival, Flip seizes center stage on a stump and bows with every ego’s vainglory, then dancing with abandon until a second hint of the sinister aspect of life appears.    Ready for anything, Flip climbs a line that suddenly appears next to him only to discover that it descends from the web of a threatening spider from whom he retreats in fear and, a moment later, resumes his vaudeville-style dance.  The music varies, but the frog is always euphoric, sometimes closing his eyes in bliss.  When he takes a bow, all the animals, including the once malevolent-looking spider, unite in appreciative applause. 

     A piano has now appeared on the stump-stage and Flip begins to play along with a mouse violinist (who resembles the earliest Mickeys).  They play for a time in harmony but before long Flip has taken a direction of his own, picking out “Ach du Lieber Augustine” until the mouse bops him with his violin.  Though briefly interrupted by a tobacco spitting bird above, they resume playing to such effect that not only they but the piano and itself bench as well are soon capering in a chorus line.  The music takes a sad turn and before long all are weeping at the tragic spectacle of life which had earlier seemed so worthy of exuberant affirmation.  

     Flip loses himself in delicious melancholy, miming violin movements until the annoyed piano kicks him.  This drives the frog into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style performance aggressively banging the piano keys with fists and feet until the instrument explodes into the air and a rain of ivories descends on the bemused frog. 

     The film then depicts a harmonious world in which all sentient beings are united in celebration to the rhythms of time.  This melodious affirmation is punctuated by reminders of aggression and suffering.  The turtle’s hostility, the spider’s predatory threat, the mouse’s rivalry, even the piano’s frustration provide the counterweight to the choral singing, producing a tense energetic dialectic of disorder and order.  The collapsed piano of the conclusion represents the dissolution of familiar reality into chaos.  This bipolar opposition structures the life of Flip the Frog and the lives of his viewers as well.

     While all of Iwerks cartoons are meant to be funny, the malevolent aspect of life is foregrounded in many as well as in those from other studios. [2]  The embrace of life and flight from death are both reflected as clearly as in the pairs of benevolent and malevolent aspects of deity in Hinduism.  Indeed, in  the fifth Flip the Frog cartoon, The Cuckoo Murder Case, the cat is out of the bag and mortality itself is Flip’s antagonist. 

     For the opening credits sequence Flip has acquired a pair of shorts as well as white gloves and plays a kind of ragtime piano behind the title card.  Though his tune is sprightly, this story highlights the mixture of comedy and horror that characterizes so many cartoons of the period.  A sleepy cuckoo occupies a clock in a shabby home.  The bird is humanized; it is so sleepy it must be repeatedly poked by the clock to call out the hour.  Death itself enters as a robed skeleton and shoots the cuckoo bird whereupon Flip as a private detective is summoned by the clock itself to investigate. [3]

     Once more, the entire world is animated, acting as a great orchestral company cooperating in producing the grand pageant of phenomenal events.  Flip’s car pauses to tiptoe through a puddle.  Storm clouds and lightning flashes are playing portentous games in the sky.  The very house grimaces menacingly as the frog approaches, but, when he tries to retreat, an irresistible karmic wind drives him back toward it.  A crew of police arrives as well while Flip is sneaking about the house.  Eventually Flip comes upon the robed skeleton representing mortality studying the book of life on a table with an hourglass.  He stamps “out” on a page bearing the cuckoo’s name, then turns the page to reveal that Flip is next on his list.  Flip makes a mad dash to escape, overturning furniture and finally dives through a set of double doors into what looks like a great abyss.  Surely he has made his appointment in Samarra, though he is resurrected for a good many later features. 

      In Spooks (1932) Iwerks avoided that sort of conclusive denouement.  During a storm a less frog-like Flip approaches a remote house occupied by sinister skeletal characters similar to the one in The Cuckoo Murder Case.  A band of such figures then plays a danse macabre like those depicted in art as well as enacted in village rituals and court masques from the fifteenth century on. [4]  Oblivious to his danger, Flip happily dances in the arms of a female skeleton until she falls to pieces, signifying the transience of love.  At this point his host assumes a wicked expression and clearly plots to add a frog skeleton  to his collection.  The cuckoo even reappears in skeletal form.  When it is time to go to bed, Flip asks for the bathroom and is directed to a dark space where he is ambushed.  He next appears tied to a table as his host sharpens a knife.  Flip manages to take off, smashing his antagonists’ bones on every side until he lands out of doors on the back of his trusty horse.  He apparently makes his escape but, just when he feels he is in the clear, his mount suddenly turns to bones at which point he leaps off and dashes into the distance.  For the moment, he has successfully dodged death, but the viewer knows that his victory is only temporary.

     Flip lives in a world that pulses with life.  All creatures enthusiastically participate in the rhythmic celebration of their own existence, so brimming with the elemental joy of life that they sing and sway.  Flip’s irrepressible optimism is temporarily jolted by conflicts arising from appetite and ego, but he rapidly recovers.  Like his viewers, he is pursued by death, but he reacts as though engaged in a playful game until either a sudden descent when he is swallowed by darkness or a narrow escape.  Just as the makers of medieval cathedrals designed them to emphasize the supernal promise of salvation yet included frightening representations of death and of demons, sometimes including actual bones in the crypt, the movie audience, basically there for a good time, is not allowed to forget conflict, aggression, and the ultimate dissolution of the flesh.  In fact, by playing with the fearful recognition of frailty and in the end of mortality, though it may amount to whistling in the dark, the doughty frog may be a role model for his viewers, whose specters are formed not by the cartoonist’s pen, but by pain, suffering, illness, and violence. 

 

 

 1.      The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, which included a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, "became the King of Jazz."

2.      Notable examples include Iwerks’ film for Disney The Skeleton Dance (1929) and the Fleischer Studio’s I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 1932 in which Betty Boop appears with Louis Armstrong.

3.      An indication of the adult audience for such cartoons is the telephone’s frustrated "damn!" in the detective office says when it fails to wake up Flip.  In later films he tries to peep on a showering young woman and then to run out on a hotel bill (in Room Runners 1932), while in A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip smokes opium. 

4.      Similarly jocular presentations of death not only influence practices for Mardi Gras and All Souls Day, but also countless comedy horror movies.  Many critics think Whale’s sequel Bride of Frankenstein superior to the original film primarily because added considerable humor.

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.