The Cool Web : A Robert Graves Oratorio

Tag: The Cool Web

The Cool Web itself

There’s a cool web of language winds us in..
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear..
we grow sea-green at last and coldly die
in brininess and volubility..

The idea of language as a cool web; a way of keeping the intensity of life at bay, is a fascinating one. It stems, of course, from the many ideas surrounding the power of words and the way they interact with what they name.

According to Wikipedia, A true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God..

Hellenistic Judaism emphasized the divine nature of logos, later adopted by the Gospel of John.

The ancient Jews considered God’s true name so potent that its invocation conferred upon the speaker tremendous power over His creations. To prevent abuse of this power, as well as to avert blasphemy, the name of God was always taboo.

According to practises in folklore, knowing someone’s, or something’s, true name gives the person who knows the true name power over them. This effect is used in many tales, such as in the German fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin – within Rumpelstiltskin and all its variants, the girl can free herself from the power of a supernatural helper who demands her child by learning its name.

Bilbo Baggins, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, uses a great deal of trickery to keep the dragon, Smaug, from learning his name; even the sheltered hobbit realises that revealing his name would be very foolish.

Likewise, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea canon, and specifically in her seminal short story The Rule of Names, power over dragons, and additionally, men, is conferred by the use of a true name.

The opposite is true in popular culture, too.

Saying the name of a powerful being can give the named person power over the speaker- in the Candyman films, saying his name five times in a mirror causes him to appear; Voldemort has a similar unfortunate habit; and the actors’ superstition about quoting from a certain Scottish play during rehearsals has its origins in the same idea.

I’m not even using any illustrations of them, for Health and Safety reasons.

So, in what is a distant cousin of this line of belief, as the children of the Cool Web learn language, they gain control over excessive fear and excessive emotion; they learn not to feel too much.

The whole of modern therapy is based on the same principle; talk about it, whatever it is, and you will be healed.

Shakespeare, in a play based somewhere around Luton, as I recall, says the same thing:

What, man! Ne’er pull your hat upon your brows.

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak.

Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.

But Graves does not see this process as purely beneficial; it may save us from madness, but it also shields us from actual living. Spelling everything away dilutes the whole experience of reality. And volubility winds us in, like a winding-sheet…like a corpse.

What would Graves have thought of our own cool web, I wonder? The ceaseless rain of words that thunders on our brains, day and night, so much that words and experience- our own and other people’s – are both devalued and diluted, until our emotions freeze and our heads explode and we grow sea-green at last and coldly die in brininess and volubility..

August 26, 2014
The hot scent of the summer rose

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is..

How hot the scent is of the summer rose..

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by

The hot scent of the summer rose; sensual delight seen by Robert Graves in this first verse of The Cool Web as a sensation as overwhelming in its intensity as heat or terror.

The black sky, the drums, the soldiers, the dread, recur so often in the imagery of Graves’ youthful poetry that they have woven themselves into the narrative of the oratorio, and it is easy to see how they relate to the terror of the war, but the rose is different.

In classical and popular culture, the rose is the symbol of romantic love, both the longing for, and the object of it.

But it also appears in many religions – particularly in Sufi mysticism – as a symbol of the longing for divine love, and also of the beauty of a human soul grown to perfection.

For these reasons, the cultivation of geometrical rose gardens has a long history in Iran and surrounding lands. In the lyric ghazal, it is the beauty of the rose that provokes the longing song of the nightingale.

Hazrat Inayat, in Volume 10 of The Sufi message, expresses it thus:

“Just as the rose consists of many petals held together, so the person who attains to the unfoldment of the soul begins to show many different qualities.

The qualities emit fragrance in the form of a spiritual personality.

The rose has a beautiful structure, and the personality which proves the unfoldment of the soul has also a fine structure, in manner, in dealing with others, in speech, in action.

The atmosphere of a spiritual being pervades the air like the perfume of a rose.”

Mandalas, which express the human aspiration towards wholeness and coherence – i.e. a spiritually complete soul, have existed in Eastern religion and philosophy for centuries, and are echoed in Christianity by the medieval r ose window.

In much the same way the centre of Eastern mandalas depict the “godhead” or divine aspect of the world, so do rose windows; typically Christ or the Virgin and Christ are found in the central rosette.

In eastern philosophy, there are many paths to reach the divine, and these are represented by “gates” at the cardinal points of the mandala. By the same token, saints depicted in the petals of a rose window can be seen as intermediaries (or paths) to Christ.

The basis of many churches is geometry and proportion. Numbers had a metaphysical significance, and were thought to have occult power.

In a rose window every space is defined by another smaller geometric figure – a trefoil, a quatrefoil, rosette, or spherical triangle. Even the glasswork itself adds to this hidden geometry which defines the exact placement of every major feature of the rose window – relating to the radial elements, concentric divisions, and all to the centre.

Circles, squares, triangles, stars, and, of course, the 12 major divisions typically found in rose windows all point to the finite and infinite, earth and heaven, or matter and spirit.

In Christian iconography the rose has a common association with the Virgin Mary,

and is also associated with sacrifice and death; it is a direct symbol of the five wounds of Christ; the red rose was eventually adopted as a symbol of the blood of the Christian martyrs.

Here the rose is associated with St Valentine – later ironically to be responsible for the giving of countless thousands of red roses – as a martyr.

Graves picks up on this association in The Dying Knight and the Fauns as the blood of the fallen hero soaks into the woodland ground, turning the innocent daisies into roses.

The idea of a rose as a symbol of the completed soul is an abstract one for most ordinary mortals to hang on to; much more poignant for most of us is the rose as redolent of the power and fragility of earthly beauty, earthly love, and the heat and glory of life itself, to be longed for and feared in equal measure.

Feared especially for a soldier; for the stronger your passion for a lover, or for the beauty of the world, the more agonising it is to die.

The roses in Graves’ Garden in The Morning before the Battle are withered by the chill wind of death; they contain all these meanings.

I knew it walking yesterday at noon
Down a deserted garden full of flowers.
…Carelessly sang, pinned roses on my breast,
Reached for a cherry-bunch—and then, then, Death
Blew through the garden from the North and East
And blighted every beauty with chill breath.

So perhaps the rose of The Cool Web, with its cruel scent, contains them all too.

“Roses of Picardy” was one of the most famous songs of the First World War and is still frequently recorded today. Picardy was a historical province of France; the area which contained the Somme battlefields.

Hayden Wood related that as he was going home one night on the top of a London bus the melody came to him. He jumped off and wrote down the refrain on an old envelope while standing under a street lamp.

British soldiers sang his song as they enlisted for the Front in France and Flanders. During the war itself, the song sold at a rate of 50,000 copies of the sheet music per month; after the war, the singing of it helped soldiers who were suffering from shell-shock to regain their powers of speech.

If it is true that we unconsciously retain a collective knowledge of the past and its symbolism, no wonder Roses of Picardy held such meaning for the young men on the Western Front, and their anxious sweethearts at home.

August 25, 2014
Drum

Drums are the most visceral of instruments. Tuned to our own heartbeats, shaking our blood, they are as immediate as sex.

From the earliest of times they have been as central to sacred ritual as to mindless frenzy, as essential to rigid military discipline as to dance; to victory celebrations as to funerals; wonderful, exhilarating, terrifying drums.

We almost certainly began by using ourselves as drums; clapping and hitting the chest and knees with open hands. This was very varied rhythmically, but it must have been difficult to get above a certain volume without inflicting pain; and so we created what must have been one of the first musical instruments.

The original drum was probably an animal hide stretched over a hollow log which was held in place by wooden or metal pins and twine.

We are not the only animals that use clapping;

Macaque monkeys drum objects in a rhythmic way to show social dominance and this has been shown to be processed in a similar way in their brains to vocalizations suggesting an evolutionary origin to drumming as part of social communication.

Other primates make drumming sounds by chest beating or hand clapping,and rodents such as kangaroo rats also make similar sounds using their paws on the ground. (Wikipedia: and all subsequent quotes)

Drums made with alligator skins have been found in Neolithic cultures located in China, dating to a period of 5500–2350 BC.

Bronze Dong Son drums are were fabricated by the Bronze Age Dong Son culture of northern Vietnam. They include the ornate Ngoc Lu drum.

Drums are used not only for their musical qualities, but also as a means of communication over great distances in all cultures. The talking drums of Africa are used to imitate the tone patterns of spoken language. Throughout Sri Lankan history drums have been used for communication between the state and the community, and Sri Lankan drums have a history stretching back over 2500 years.

Most cultures practice drumming as a spiritual or religious passage and interpret drummed rhythm similarly to spoken language or prayer. As a discipline, drumming concentrates on training the body to punctuate, convey and interpret musical rhythmic intention to an audience and to the performer.

The Cool Web by Robert Graves uses drums to express terror; and in particular, the terror of war.

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by…

Drums have been used in all areas of military life throughout history.

During pre-Columbian warfare, Aztec nations were known to have used drums to send signals to the battling warriors. The Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious scriptures in the world, contain several references to the use of Dundhubi (war drum). Arya tribes charged into battle to the beating of the war drum and chanting of a hymn that appears in Book VI of the Rig Veda and also the Atharva Veda where it is referred to as the “Hymn to the battle drum”.

Chinese troops used tàigǔ drums to motivate troops, to help set a marching pace, and to call out orders or announcements. For example, during a war between Qi and Lu in 684 BC, the effect of drum on soldier’s morale is employed to change the result of a major battle.

Fife-and-drum corps of Swiss mercenary foot soldiers also used drums. They used an early version of the snare drum carried over the player’s right shoulder, suspended by a strap (typically played with one hand using traditional grip). It is to this instrument that the English word “drum” was first used.

I couldn’t find any images of the one handed drum – but these are early Swiss mercenary drummers using later snare drums:

Similarly, during the English Civil War rope-tension drums would be carried by junior officers as a means to relay commands from senior officers over the noise of battle. These were also hung over the shoulder of the drummer and typically played with two drum sticks. Different regiments and companies would have distinctive and unique drum beats only they recognized.

Children were used to play the drums in the heat of battle, presumably because they were expendable; they must have been easy targets, even in the din of battle, and, as they relayed commands, they were worth taking out.

Drummer boy in Union Army

child soldier in the US civil war

André Estienne was a drummer with Napoleon Bonaparte’s army at the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole in 1796, where he led his battalion across a river while holding his drum over his head, and on reaching the far bank, beat the “charge”. This led to the capture of the bridge and the rout of the Austrian army.

On 28 November at the Second Battle of Cawnpore, 15-year-old Thomas Flynn, a drummer with the 64th Regiment of Foot, was awarded the Victoria Cross. “During a charge on the enemy’s guns, Drummer Flynn, although wounded himself, engaged in a hand-to-hand encounter with two of the rebel artillerymen”. He remains the youngest recipient of the medal.

Thirteen year old Charles King was the youngest soldier killed in the entire American Civil War (1861-1865). Charles enlisted in the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry with the reluctant permission of his father at the age of 12 years, 5 months and 9 days. On September 17, 1862 at the Battle of Antietam or Battle of Sharpsburg he was mortally wounded near or in the area of the East Woods, carried from the field and died three days later.

Drummer boy in US Civil War

The use of drums beyond the parade ground declined rapidly as the 19th century progressed, being replaced by the bugle in the signalling role, although it was often the drummers who were required to play them.

The most notorious use of drums was in recruitment. There was nothing like a brilliantly red uniform on a handsome soldier beating a drum in a drizzly grey village marketplace to bring in the young men..

1812 recruiting officer – with his drummer

The Cambridge Intelligencer (August 3, 1793)

By the Late Mr. Scott, the Quaker.

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace and glitt’ring arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To fight and fall in foreign lands.

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravaged plains,
And burning towns and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widow’s tears, and orphans moans,
And all that Misery’s hand bestows,
To fill a catalogue of woes.

July 25, 2014