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| Photo by Daniel Belli, credit 1 below |
Last year, I spent a lot of time wondering what to make of an otherworldly performance that’s hit all three of Bridgeport’s art centers -- scenes from a non-conventional opera called Thunder, Perfect Mind staged by NON:Op Open Opera Works.
I first saw a scene from it at the Zhou B. Arts Center
performed by 6 young women, all delicate in white. Three of them were seated on chairs mounted
high on the walls, playing stringed instruments. Underneath, on the floor, the other 3 women
seemed to play another set of strings, strung from the ground to the ceiling
like a great terrestrial harp.
The performance was beautiful, but hard to grasp, like
something spoken in a language being invented while you watched, just past the
limits of your intuition.
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| Photo by Ron Wachholz, credit 2 below |
For I am the first and the last…
the whore and the holy one…
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| Photo by Brittany Tepper, credit 3 below |
Thunder, Perfect Mind is titled from an ancient Gnostic text that had been dug up from the Egyptian desert in the 1940s. It was part of a whole lost library that had been buried in giant clay jars for some 1,800 years. Even after the jars were found, the Nag Hammadi texts were jammed up in intrigues over ownership for decades before they started to filter out into the world. They were just becoming available to Coptic language scholars in the 1970s, and then to the public in English translation in the 1980s. That’s when Christopher Preissing first read some of them, when he was still in school.
Preissing was a graduate music composition student, writing a dissertation on
the history of opera. He was studying its
conventions so he could test them later. He would step outside the traditions of
composition, explore expressive notations, subvert the way social hierarchies had
been worked into the seating arrangements and the theater itself.
The Gnostic scriptures also held a counter cultural
appeal. For almost 2 thousand years, the
Gnostics were known mostly from the wild accounts early Christian Church Fathers
gave of their beliefs.
Those accounts were
always suspect, the Fathers were using them to establish an orthodox church by
defining it against degenerate heresies.
Though as the Nag Hammadi texts became available, some of the Fathers’ most
outrageous accounts, of Bible stories turned on their heads, of the Biblical
God willfully blasphemed, turned out to be pretty accurate.
The library is also diverse, it presents a whole range of
lost possibilities, of paths not taken, rediscovered in an age when people are
suspicious orthodox authorities and how they assert the truth. Preissing found himself drawn to the hymn
called Thunder, Perfect Mind in
particular because it evoked a feminine voice, and it read like a riddle. The divine speaker describes herself in impossibilities
and paradox.
I am the mother
of my father and the sister of my husband -- he is my offspring.
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| Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 4 below |
In 1992, he got a grant to make an opera from it. Even after the first performances, he has
never entirely stopped working on it. It
has continued to grow in scope and dimension as scenes are elaborated in public
practice sessions around town. Today, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the opera, is a site
specific immersive performance for a 12 member chorus, percussionists, street
performers, orchestral musicians and 2 sopranos, one of whom is an aerialist
who will descend through the heavenly spheres to earth, and re-ascend
into the divine fullness in the end.
In the shock of more recent history, ancient squabbles over
divine metaphysics and the esoterica of avant-garde opera may sound beside the
point.
1800 years ago, a Gnostic would say that is the point: that the so called real
world isn’t actually real. That the
powers of this world aren’t just ignorant of reality, they’re constitutionally
incapable of understanding it, they sense it vaguely when they spot a true spirit
in other people, then they’re jealous of it, they persecute it. But those rare souls who have that spark of
the divine spirit can be restored to the divine wholeness by remembering where
they came from.
Modern people are less interested in escape to transcendence
in general, and the Gnostic answer in particular is elitist and radically
anti-cosmic, dismissing the material world we live in as a disastrous mistake.
But Gnosticism arose in a world that had compelling
parallels to the world we live in now. The
latter centuries of the Hellenistic-Roman era are sometimes called an age of
anxiety, menaced by threats of barbarian invasions, plagues, even financial
catastrophes. But they were also an era of
unprecedented cultural ferment and change.
Like in our own era, change was disorienting to navigate for the
individual person, and the Gnostics expressed the crisis of dislocation in a startling
way. But they also show that human
instinct for hope.
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| Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 5 below |
Gnosticism was a trend of thinking, not a church with clear
boundaries, and the so called Gnostics were enthusiastic speculators about the
origins of the world and the human condition in it. Some of their accounts focus on the story of
Sophia, or Divine Wisdom.
They start with the perfect divine Wholeness, or indescribable
Depths, whose qualities begin to emanate outward in pairs, male and
female. Sophia is part of the last pair.
She sins, she falls from grace, she launches a whole chain of catastrophe.
The exact nature of her sin is some form of
willfulness. She wants to create on her
own, without her consort, or else she wants to contemplate the original Depths
without permission. She becomes pregnant,
like the emanations before her, except she gives birth to a monstrosity, an
abortion. A divine Limit gets summoned
up, and Sophia’s abortion is cast out to the other side of it.
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| Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 6 below |
It has various names, Sophia’s abortion, sometimes it’s just
called the Demiurge. But outside, in the
dark, it’s scared, it’s alone, it doesn’t know where it came from. It creates the material world to comfort
itself. It creates a whole host of
celestial powers, to serve as its minions – they rule the spheres of the planets
and stars, they make mischief in the sphere below the moon. The Demiurge declares itself God and feels
powerful. But it’s never really
confident in that feeling.
The Demiurge creates mankind out of filth, and breathes life
into it, gives it a Soul. But our souls are
just an animating principle, our appetites, our lower passions, our perceptions
of the material world. We’d have no access
to the divine realm at all except that Sophia, from some divine purgatory where
she waits for her own redemption, scatters some of her light into humanity.
The human Spirit is a divine shard that’s embedded in us,
it’s alien to our world, and we’re born in a condition of flesh-bound
forgetfulness. But when we hear the
truth about where we really came from, our spirit responds, it remembers. It knows.
The Gnostics didn’t believe that all people have that divine
shard. Or else we don’t have it in equal
quantities. In some people, the spiritual principle is so weak or absent they
are essentially just animate creatures, slaves to their material natures. Some are in an intermediate condition,
they’ve got enough spirit to be reasonable, to exert their will, they’re
soulful creatures, but not truly spiritual. The Gnostics are an elect minority of truly Spiritual beings.
These Gnostics were a great irritant to those Orthodox
Fathers who were trying to build a church where everybody could participate
just by faith in something they didn’t understand. And that Gnostic Spirit is a strong
rhetorical device. Because if you don’t
recognize the truth when you hear it, it’s probably not your fault, and you
won’t be convinced by arguments, you’re just not equipped to know.
Meanwhile, down here in the cosmos, the Demiurge and his
demons do have some vague perception of that spiritual element. They recognize it in Eve and her
daughters. They know they don’t have it,
and they’re jealous, they chase her, they rape her trying to get it, they persecute
her wherever they catch a glimpse of it.
Preissing’s opera tells the story of Sophia and Eve like a
double answer to the identity riddle posed by the hymn, Thunder, Perfect Mind. The
production starts with Sophia, setting out for redemption. She descends to
earth, through the spheres of the planets, accumulating worldly qualities like
heavy clothing.
Preissing’s Eve has wandered from the countryside into a big
city, looking for adventure, but she’s quickly lost. She wanders disoriented, she’s abused and
assaulted, she sinks deeper and deeper into confusion, shame and fear. When they meet, Sophia will relay her message,
she’ll tell Eve of her true nature, remind her who she really is. Sophia will re-ascend into heaven,
restored. Eve will stay behind.
In the opera, the results of their encounter, the nature of any
transformation is left open ended, which is fitting for a terrestrial
production. So is the urban setting of
Eve’s travails. The urban condition has
been one of the great themes of modern life; it is also a link into that ancient
world where Gnosticism emerged.
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| Photo by Takashi Hososhima, credit 7 below |
When Alexander the Great conquered the Persians in 331 BC,
he said he was after more than glory, he wanted to integrate the known world –
East and West – into a single cosmopolitan culture. And he achieved that, he laid the ground for
a new kind of empire, one built from a network of cities whose residents would
be citizens of the world. That condition
exerted a dramatic psychic change.
The world had seen big empires before. The great empires of the Near East, the
Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians all helped lay the ground for imperial
rule that wouldn’t just exploit conquered territories, siphoning off tribute
and slaves. Over centuries, they’d begun
to build the bonds of trade, establish roads and postal systems.
In the west, Greek traders had been settling in foreign
ports for centuries. After Alexander’s
conquests, they emigrated in much larger numbers, forming a leadership class in
cities across the empire. The Greek
language became a lingua franca spoken across the realm. The Greeks also
brought a common currency and cultural institutions like the gymnasia, which
acted as secondary schools, teaching Greek literature and philosophy.
Some speculate that the alphabet the Greeks had adapted from
the Pheonecians was a more versatile way of writing that helped them to develop
new ways of thinking, especially abstract thinking, that they now brought with
them across the empire. Others have
ventured that it was the dislocations of conquest itself that nudged ancient
peoples to develop a capacity for thinking in universal terms.
Traditional cults had worked to guarantee the safety and
integrity of small societies. But once
the town walls were razed, the local king deposed, the people sent into exile,
their gods were either discredited, or else they were set loose from their
parochial roles. Exiles, soldiers and
traders brought their gods along on their travels, and picked up new ones along
the way. People from all walks of life, cut
adrift from all variety of old traditions, would appeal to universal gods as
personal saviors.
A host of religious philosophies pushed abstract thinking to
its limits, imagining a sphere of divine perfection so entirely transcendent
from the earthly realm it was virtually indescribable. The rational man might perceive it through
the logos (“the Word” in the Gospel of John), a rational principle that
mediates between the two realms, penetrating the cosmos, giving it shape and
coherence, and resonating through the human mind.
At any rate, travel, trade and communication were all a lot
easier in the new era. The results were stimulating,
but profoundly disorienting. Geo-political
boundaries were opening up, the population was more mobile, ideas that had been
floated among philosophers a few centuries earlier seemed to penetrate further
and more deeply into the populace, including a whole new concept of the
universe.
It’s said that ancient peoples saw Heaven fitting over the
earthly plain like a dome, regal but not all that distant, and there were clear
axes for communication with the gods who dwelled in it. The Ptolemaic universe exploded the dome, replacing
it with a much vaster construction of planetary spheres and a realm of stars much
further away. The divine powers they
expressed seemed indifferent to the passion and strife of the terrestrial
sphere, maybe even hostile.
In the 1950s, the historian Eric Dodds evoked the anxiety of
the age in a record of questions posed to an oracle – he says oracles had surged
as the world became more changeable. “Am
I to become a beggar?” one record reads.
“Will I be sold as a slave?” “Am
I under a spell?” “Are you God? Or is someone else God?”
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| Gustav Caillebot, Paris Street, Rainy Day |
The great scholar Hans Jonas thought Gnosticism expressed a
spiritual condition of profound pessimism.
It reminded him of the existential alienation current in his own era. In
fact, here in Chicago while Jonas was studying the Gnostics, a whole school of
sociology was writing lyrically about the experience of urban life, and the
psychic changes it affects on modern people.
The Chicago scholars would observe that in the modern city,
life takes on a certain superficial quality, as people brush shoulders with uncountable
numbers of strangers on the street each day, they each size each other up, read
each other in an instant based on hints of dress and demeanor. That pageant itself becomes fascinating and invigorating,
there are whole genres of painting and literature spent observing it.
Each person traveling it can realize potentials that would
be suppressed or ignored in small town life, because tradition and social
conventions are much weaker in the big city than they are in the small
town. Those potentials express in good
ways and bad ones: there are more artists, realizing their creative potential,
and more juvenile delinquents, unrestrained by disapproving elders.
“In a small community it is the normal man, the man without
eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed,” Robert Parks wrote
in the 1920s. “The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it.”
So the urban world is larger, in a wonderful sense, but more
dangerous. It is much harder to pick a
course through the infinite variety and find meaning in it, much easier to
skate through life on that distracting surface, oblivious to things that really
matter. It is easier to get lost. This is the landscape Eve wanders in the scenes
from Thunder, Perfect Mind -- a maze
of urban streets, flickering with images and false idols -- sinking deeper into
distraction and despair.
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| Photo by Scott Johnson, credit 9 below |
As cities were overtaken by empire, the citizen becomes a
cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. He
is still part of the whole, but as it becomes more vast, he is reduced to
insignificance. He can still participate
in it, sync up his rational capacities with that principle evident in the
cosmic order. But his actions matter
only to himself, he is like an actor playing a part on a stage. “A role played is substituted for a function
performed,” Jonas writes. He may play it
well, or play it badly. Either way, it
makes no impact on the stars.
For Parks, the sociologist in Chicago, the modern city is
also a whole, more than the sum of its parts, more than a meeting place of
individuals. It is a state of mind, he
writes, a body of customs and traditions, and the sentiments that inhere in
them. Where Jonas ties the psychic
change of the ancient city to the dislocations of empire, Parks attributes the effect
of the modern one to the mechanisms of urban life itself.
He believes those mechanisms are organic, tied to “the vital
processes of the people who compose it.” But since the city is also a center of trade
and industry, they include the rationalizing tendencies of industrial society,
especially the division of labor, the tendency to specialize. They make the urban person more dependent on
other people in a sense – where he performs one part of a process, he relies on
others to complete most things.
But the nature of the connection has changed. In a village, people are bound together by
complex emotional connections – ‘bonds of sympathy’ is Parks’ term. In the city, these are replaced by simpler,
rationalized relations based on common interest. Bonds of interest are more volatile than the
other, more complicated kind. They can
be adjusted more easily as situations change, but they also leave individuals
more vulnerable to being dismissed if they are not particularly useful, or at
all annoying.
Every small town has its oddballs, Parks observes. The peculiar character, who might not command
the highest respect, but who is tolerated, looked after, maybe even with some affection.
He’s an oddball, but he’s our oddball. In the city he might find his way into the
right circles and become an exceptional artist, or a billionaire entrepreneur.
Or he might just never find his function at all, and drop out from the
bottom of the machine.
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| George Bellows, The Cliff Dwellers |
Jonas believed that the material world the Gnostics wanted
to escape was rational, in a demonic way.
It was a world defined by law and order, but it was “rigid and inimical
order, tyrannical and evil law.” It was “devoid
of meaning and goodness,” it was “alien to the purposes of man and to his inner
essence.” Like existentialists in his
own era, the Gnostics wanted to defy this tyranny, to be true to their inner
essence, to live authentically.
Modern people seem to have more or less continued on the
trajectory that extends the logical principle to further and further ends. The rational, instrumental pursuit of
interests reigns supreme. It’s helped us
accomplish amazing things. It’s made our
horizons much larger, but it’s made individuals smaller, it’s made the powers
of this world, in government and in business, powerful to the extreme.
We still have a sense, like the Gnostics, that their powers
don’t rule the whole of reality. We know
that there is some inner voice that we have, maybe not expressed in all people in
the same way, but it is the link to some more authentic existence. And when we hear it in music, for instance,
or see it in art, we recognize it – or we hope we will.
I don’t think it’s accidental that when we’re talking about
“authentic” experience we’re less likely to call on the spirit, we’re more
likely to say something’s got soul. We
really mean that lower element. Not the airy,
the distant, the detached, but the embodied person, connected to passions,
deeply embedded in the material world and its sympathies.
It’s as if that logical principle has become too ascendant. We’ve pursued the good things it has to
offer, we’ve learned to detach ourselves, to be objective, so we can see a
bigger picture than what’s visible from where we stand embedded in our
parochial lives. We’ve learned to
recognize that the kind of social judgment and outright bigotry that thrive in
small societies ruled by sympathies are corruptions to root out.
But pursued to its ends, rational detachment becomes
dangerous and proud, ignorant of that field of goods outside its reach.
I think that authentic reality is something we make up
amongst ourselves. It’s a kind of music,
or a subtle language that is constantly being invented and elaborated among the
people speaking it. The process of
making up the language is most obvious in art.
I think that’s what Preissing, and Deirdre Harrison and the young musicians
in white were all doing that night at the Zhou B. Center.
But it is something that goes on all the time, whether we’re
conversing easily with people who seem most like us, or whether we’ve got to
stretch to understand how they can be so backward, or annoying, to recognize
them as being essentially like us. We
have that capacity to know.
For more information about NON:op Open Opera Works visit www.nonopera.org. For more information about Thunder, Perfect Mind visit http://www.nonopera.org/WP2/
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| Photo from Hubble Space Telescope, credit 11 below |
Photo Credits:
1. By Daniel Delli (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
2. By Ron Wachholz, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Ear Taxi Festival, Harold Washington Library, 2016
3. By Brittany Tepper, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at the Chicago Loop Alliance
4. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon, 2016
5. By NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
6. ESA/Hubble [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
7. By Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan (Day 4: Stars #1) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
9. By Scott Johnson, performance from Thunder, Perfect Mind at Feed Salon
11. By NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
