Dreaming the World

Its been a chilly, windy, changeable autumn day. Earlier I went to purchase groceries at our favourite small market in the next town over. I recon the drive is about ten miles each way, and passes through tidal marshes, forests, and farm fields.

I was struck by the immense variability of the foliage. There were large areas of green, many places where the leaves and browned and withered, locales with bare trees, and, here and there, brilliant foliage. I imagine one could chart where rain fell over the summer and where it didn’t, just from the foliage.

I’ve been reading Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins. The book was publish in 1989 and still reads as contemporary. Eksteins’ thesis is that the Twentieth Century was characterized by two conflicting ideals. On one side were those nations and persons who desired the preservation of the status quo of class, race, colonies, and social norms. On the other were countries that favoured radical innovation in the arts, technology, social mores, and the sciences, and who sought liberation for individuals and colonies. In the 1910’s these two sides were exemplified by conservative Britain and an increasingly radicalized Germany, and to a lesser extent, Russia.

Eksteins uses the Ballets Russes, and particularly, The Rites of Spring, as his central metaphor. The Ballets Russes was a Russian ballet company, housed in Paris, that actively sought to bring Mahler’s “total theatre” to the stage. Their performances were innovative, primitive, hyper-sexual, rule breaking, and culture shaking. They were beloved in Germany, divided France, and were generally disliked in Britain.

The Rites of Spring was a ballet first staged in 1913, now mostly remembered for Stravinsky’s score, and the near riot that accompanied the ballet’s first performance. In the ballet, a young woman is chosen by the community to be sacrificed to the fertility gods and dances herself to death. There is stereotypical mythmaking regarding the primitive, near total disregard for how ballet was understood by the viewers, and no empathy for the girl or her community. The music and dancers movements are harsh, repetitious, and violent; it was, paradoxically, a staging of the idea of the modern and the total theatre of the avant-garde.

For Eksteins’, the distance between total theatre (or total art) and the “total warfare” of World War One is short. He explores the ways in which the Ballets Russe like spectacle of political street theatre throughout Europe in the days leading up to the war was driven by myth, longing, and a total disregard for the obvious repercussions that accompanied bad choices. Quickly, almost all voices of care or reason are silenced as virtually everyone is swept up in the mythic frenzy, as people all over the world are grabbed by a powerful daemonic architype. In each country the mood is one of necessity and almost certain victory.

Eksteirs then traces the movement of spectacle from the streets to government offices, then to the battlefield. There, horrific spectacle combined with the profound depersonalization of trench warfare resulted in a generation of lost, alienated, empty men (enter T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and a host of others) and, with the advent of the Great Depression, countries, and set the stage for the rise of Hitler in Germany.

The book reads as immensely current, as we witness the intense hatred of liberation movements being expressed by many in and out of government, and the near total disregard of the core values of others by actors on both sides. Ours, too, is a time of spectacle devoid of caring or thought. (We watch cities being bombed on live tv, between commercials, and political attacks on entire segments of our populace, as pure spectacle, devoid of human caring).

Ours, too, is a historical moment in which fantasy, myth, and wishful thinking override the need to address real existential problems. Writing from his vantage point of some thirty five years ago, Eksteins was seeing that the conflict was not over, and, imagining forward, he seemed to think it would not end easily or well.

We are, once, again, caught up in the playing out of impersonal, archetypal forces, making it difficult for individuals, communities, and countries to make caring, empathic voices heard above the tumult and hatred, but I we must try.