Que Sera, Sera is the Refrain

What happens makes the world--to paraphrase Creeley. We live in it, on it, floating in a space we seldom stop to consider. We're time-travelers, passengers on the space-ship earth as it careens through the void in its various orbits, wheels inside wheels inside wheels, spinning off into nowhere. Somewhere is here, is now, is present. Presence. All that we have.

For some reason, it occurred to me to name my latest cocktail concoction Que Sera. The phrase, Que sera, sera apparently is not grammatical Spanish, but showed up in English as early as 400 years ago, in Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. The song we know was written by the Jay Livingston and Ray Evans team, and debuted in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956], directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The 1956 production was in fact a re-make of Hitchcock's earlier effort, from 1934, made in Britain, which starred Peter Lorre, among others. I've never seen the earlier film, which I think makes my appreciation of the 1956 version cleaner. One of the advantages of using original screenplay material is that one isn't tempted to compare a former literary or cinematic version with the latter. But writers and directors can often make superior versions of earlier narratives. A lot of classic fictional stories were adapted during the Silent Era of motion pictures, which were clearly inferior films. But the plot-line of Hitchcock's original 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much wasn't changed very much from its first incarnation. The effect of different actors, and technically advanced procedures, obviously helped. But it's still classic Hitchcock, with his symbolic queues and little tricks and tropes, familiar to anyone who's seen any of his work.

In a penultimate scene from the movie, Doris Day sings the song at a foreign embassy where her son Hank is believed to be held, and she sings it louder and louder, hoping that Hank will hear her. The drama of the scene (and the song) is heightened by the pathos and agony the Day character (Jo McKenna), who is desperate to have Hank back, is feeling.

The song, billed in the movie as Whatever Will Be, Will Be, was a big hit on the charts. It reached #2 on the Billboard list, and became Day's theme-song for her own television sitcom, The Doris Day Show [1968-1973]. Day tended to play herself in her film roles--not that that was an aesthetic mistake, she was enormously popular during the 1950's and 1960's, scoring in a succession of corny romantic comedies, with Rock Hudson, among others, solidifying the familiar "perky but down-to-earth level-headed American matron" profile to perfection. Her performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much is the only role of hers I ever admired. Elsewise, I usually found her an insufferable fake. I remember the late American novelist John Updike once claimed that she was the big fantasy sex symbol of his life, so go figure.

Music figures as a primary theme in the film. Hitchcock had commissioned the writing of a special concert piece for full orchestra and chorus by composer Arthur Benjamin, for the original version in 1934, to be performed in the movie at the Albert Hall. The piece, known as the Storm Clouds Cantata, includes a conclusive dramatic highpoint punctuated by a big cymbal crash, which provides the "covering sound" for the assassination (by pistol) attempt at the Hall.

Also, as is typical of Hitchcock, the movie is filled with mysteriously vivid scenes which, though well-integrated into the plot-line, nevertheless have psychological reverberations which evoke other peculiar, troubling emotions. When the French spy Louis Bernard is slain in the marketplace of Marrakesh, he turns to Doctor McKenna (played by Jimmy Stewart) to speak his dying words which form the recipe for the subsequent action of the story. Disguised as a native Moroccan, Bernard has dark make-up on his face. In the course of filming, it was discovered that this dark application wouldn't "rub off" the way Hitchcock had planned it, so an alternative method of having Stewart's hands covered in white grease was worked out. In the movie, as Bernard slumps to the ground, dying, his face slides out of Stewart's hands, as the make-up is "rubbed off"--a classic touch. The metaphor of disguise and identity is brilliantly staged.

And yet the audience never really finds out the details of the the secret plot--there's no political sub-text, simple terrorism and intrigue. There's a plan to kill a foreign European diplomat in London, but we never discover who the perpetrators represent, or why they want him dead. For Hitchcock, never the political man, this is of no importance. Life is mysterious, events happen seemingly without purpose, violent events occur and the unexpected is always just around the corner. Things are not what they seem, and as often as not, they may turn out badly. Suspicion, danger, foreboding, deception--these are the preoccupations of his art.

Hitchcock designed his productions first visually, on story-board diagrams. This might seem a completely predictable and sensible approach to staging a visually unfolding medium, yet few directors in history have relied so relentlessly on it as Hitchcock, primarily because it was so important to his vision of what movies meant.

For Hitchcock, actors were like ciphers moved about on a game-board. It was more important, for instance, that we should see the relationship of Farley Granger and Robert Walker in the absorbing Strangers on a Train [1951] as being random and opportunistic, than that we should care about who these two figures are as individuals. The meaning of a scene, or an interaction amongst characters, was its literal content, not the extraneous sentiments we might attach to the actors, their emotive subtleties, of their physical attractiveness.

When I was a boy, my grade-school teachers often complained to my parents that I was easily distracted from class lessons, and spent time looking out the window or doodling at my desk, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Kids these days are usually identified as having learning "disabilities" at a very young age, and then are force-fed psycho-active drugs to make them docile and tractable. The modern "classroom" concept is commonly regarded as a sensible setting for the indoctrination of children and the inculcation of knowledge. But I've always thought it an alienating and unnatural situation, in which originality and imaginative response are thwarted in favor of controlled behavior and a phony "order." Theories of propaganda usually begin with the discipline of attention, then move on to repetition and dogged insistence to complete the business of making good little Nazis. Even as early as the 1st grade, I could see how some of the kids would become obedient soldiers in the social collective. Then, I secretly envied them their success and reward; after all, official authority endorsed their behavior, and held them up as models to be emulated.

As a creative writer, your best ideas often come by way of undirected, or random, meditation. One's mental attention wanders freely over the vast fund of recorded experience, and new combinations or inventions may occur without any deliberate origination. "Idea" people are different from problem solvers. Some people work best from strict programs, or from meticulously designed directions or procedures. Others may simply be sword carriers, or truck drivers.

But there are lower depths to Hitchcock's movie. The McKennas are a typical American middle class family of the 1950's. When the Moroccan inspector attempts to jerk them around, McKenna (Jimmy Stewart) pulls his best indignant "ugly" American imitation, "now you just hold on, there, mister, we're American citizens!" The McKennas, unwilling to let the wheels of justice and law turn inexorably, set out to London straightaway to solve the mystery of their son's disappearance themselves. Rather than accepting their fate as an act of god, or as the determined outcome of chance or providence, they take matters into their own hands, and thwart the forces of chaos and terror almost single-handedly. Jo's symbolic scream at the moment of truth, in the split-second interregnum before the clash of the cymbals, is the power of the individual human (voice) to alter event and intervene on behalf of order and peace. In Hitchcock's version, human beings can alter the course of their lives, and of history. This is not the passive capitulation of "Que sera, sera" but a rejection of determinism. Whatever will be may be the lyrical refrain of the music, but the story Hitchcock tells is not the Eastern one of passive submission, but the Western notion of a mastery over fate, of American know-how and deliberate problem-solving.        

This diversion has taken me pretty far afield of my original post--to describe another cocktail recipe. Inventing cocktails requires the free floating variance of chance and intuition. What might work in combination? Taste can be like a dance. What will happen if you mix A with B, then add a dash of C? How do you stretch the limits of your imaginative taste buds? Some people go their whole lives having tried, perhaps, only two or three cocktail recipes. I've probably mixed as many as a thousand different variations. Some people think of life as a determined outcome, "what will be, will be" and never give a thought to living or doing anything unexpected. For them, Que sera, sera seems a kind of deep wisdom. Pity them. Life is so much more than that!

Herewith, another variation off the shelf of booze: The Que sera, by proportion:

   

4 Parts white rum

1 part herbsaint (or Pernod)

1 part ginger liqueur

1/2 part vanilla almond syrup

Juice of 1 sweet lime

Shaken lightly and served up.

A guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do. A girl, on the other hand, can do just what she wants.

The Paradigm That Wore Out Its Welcome

Aerial view of Fukushima meltdown and explosion

Environmental problems are society's problems. Ultimately, society must address problems which arise from the consumption of resource, and of man's continuing expansion within this biosphere. We don't know if there are any other biospheres in the universe with similar characteristics, but it appears that given our natural limits, and the extent of present scientific knowledge, our planet is the only part of the universe where we can live, and over which we have any control.

Most of the the world's problems now are the result of overpopulation. The holding capacity of the earth for the human species is already well beyond practical limits. There is no question that in the short term humankind could continue to increase its numbers, and to spread out over more of the earth's surface for several more decades. People could "subsist"--that is, live on the edge of survival, in many areas that are considered marginal for habitation. We have the technology, and the earth's resources still exist in sufficient capacity to support such expansion.

The open question about that potential, however, is whether such a scenario is either desirable or necessary. If we accept as a given that human population will continue to grow, without any attempts to impose limits, then there are certain consequent factors in that equation. Given a human population growth constant, we will use up the available resources that exist on the planet--and many, many times faster--than if our demand (a growing population) were not accepted as a constant.

Right now, we know the earth is quickly running out of oil, natural gas, potable water, food, arable land. There's quite a bit of coal on the earth, but we haven't figured out how to utilize it in such a way that it doesn't create more problems than its vastly expanded use can justify. Nuclear fissionable materials also appear now to present far greater risks than their continued (or expanded) use could justify.

The Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster has shown, once again, that humankind does not have sufficient control over nuclear power, to guarantee that such accidents will not happen in the future. The technology for constructing and running nuclear plants clearly is still not up to the task of making them "fail-safe"--in the phrase made famous by the Eugene Burdick novel, and the movie that was made based on it.

What the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster shows is that the probable risk is greater than any possible re-definition of "need" that might be introduced into the decision-making process that society must go through to decide whether such projects are feasible. The equation is so heavily weighted on the harm side, that no amount of "demand" could possibly outweigh it.

What we now know is that the area inside the danger zone surrounding the Fukushima plant will not be usable for the foreseeable future. Initially, the Japanese authorities declared that the area of uninhabitability was only a 50 mile radius around the plant. But recent news reports and disclosures have revealed that the danger area is much larger, perhaps as much as 150 miles. No human habitation, no agricultural use, no recreational use--no use of any kind will be safe for as long as the radioactive material persists in that zone. It is likely that several tens of thousands of those already exposed within this 150 mile radius will have significant health issues for the rest of their lives.

The implication of the Fukushima disaster is that nuclear plants are too dangerous for human use, too dangerous for any kind of life at all. They're too dangerous because there is no presently known method for making them truly safe. Nuclear fuel of the kind our technology is designed to use, is too hot to handle. It's too poisonous, too unwieldy, too dirty. Aside from the long term unresolved issues of disposition of the dirty waste it produces, we don't have the technology to handle it safely enough to justify the risks it presents. The Fukushima plant failed because of a tsunami, which was caused by a major earthquake. Natural disasters are bad enough, and the dangers posed by safety failures have been largely discounted by those whose interest lies in promoting their use. But nuclear plants are relatively short-lived anyway. As presently constructed, they only have a life of 25-50 years. But once a site is "decommissioned" it presents a whole new set of unresolvable problems. A nuclear facility can't just be closed, dismantled and the land returned to other uses. The whole plant becomes a permanent fixture on the landscape, since there is no practical way to "dispose" of its contaminated parts. We know, now, that you can't simply "bury" nuclear waste, because there is literally no way to contain it permanently, and nuclear waste lives on as active poison for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The more of it you produce, the worse the problem gets. And the technology of "storage" is as problematic as the flawed technology of initial use. If the initial safety concerns of running nuclear plants weren't bad enough, the elephant in the room is the disposition of the "waste" that is constantly growing--and that elephant can't be ignored, or kept in a corner, forever. There is presently a stalemate regarding the ultimate solution to the waste problem, but that's not a waiting game we can win.

In 1985, I and my family spent a year living in Misawa, Japan. Misawa is in the Aomori Prefecture, up near the northeast corner of the main island, right underneath Hokkaido. At that time, there weren't any nuclear plants within a nearby radius of jeopardy. But in 1989, the Tomari Nuclear Plant was commissioned, on the western edge of Hokkaido, and in 2005 the Higashidori Nuclear Plant, up near the northeastern tip of Aomori Prefecture, was brought on board. If we were living in Misawa today, we'd be well within the possible danger zone of a nuclear accident at the Higashidori Plant. Since the Fukushima accident, Japanese scientists have raised concerns about the proximity of the Higashidori Plant near known earthquake faults. Japan is probably the most earthquake prone country in the world, as its land mass lies right at the edge of the tectonic plates of the Western Pacific. In California, we have the same geological condition, as the whole West Coast of the U.S. rides along the eastern edge of the Pacific tectonic plates. Right now, the nearest nuclear power plant to where we live in the Bay Area is the Diablo Canyon facility, about 200 miles away from this spot, as the crow flies. But it's little comfort to anyone living even this close to such a facility, knowing the problems a melt-down or explosion would cause. Nuclear power plant failures have devastating consequences hundreds of miles away, as Chernobyl demonstrated, and their effects literally last centuries. At this point, we really don't have any accurate data on the long-range effects of such catastrophes, but our best speculations are dire. For the millions of people who live within close proximity to such facilities, the probability of such accidents is disquieting, to say the least. As our investment in nuclear energy evolves, it seems not just likely, but inevitable, that there will be more "Fukushima" accidents in the future, with terrible consequences for humankind.

If nuclear plants are too dangerous, then they must be abandoned.

As recently as 2010, members of the Congress, and others in positions of authority and influence in this country, were again, after a hiatus of some years following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, openly suggesting a resumption of our investment in the construction of new nuclear facilities. For those of us who remembered (after only 25 years) what the Chernobyl disaster told us about nuclear power plant feasibility, these discussions were like a haunting echo. Public opinion had turned resolutely away from nuclear power as an option, after the Soviet debacle, but here, once more, the energy companies and their friends were again attempting to seduce the public into considering the possibility of building more nuclear plants, as a way of meeting the growing power demands of the 21st Century. Nuclear plants could now be built more securely, and in the end everyone "knew" that we had no choice, that demand would eventually force society to reconsider nuclear power as the genie in the bottle.

Yet it seems clear that nuclear energy is something we don't want to "play with" for the time being. The proliferation of nuclear weapons appears to be on a track that we can't control, since it can be conducted mostly in secret. It seems entirely likely that any modern nation can build nuclear bombs, because the technology is well known. But nuclear power generation is another matter.

A great to-do is being made over Iran's supposed intention secretly to build a nuclear bomb, with which it could threaten its neighbors (presumably Israel), and fend off external threats to its autonomy. Iran insists it just wants--indeed, has the sovereign right--to exploit nuclear power for its own "peaceful" uses. The possibility is being treated as if just wanting to build nuclear plants was a harmless, innocent, and defensible option. After all, nuclear power plants are already online in most of the world.

Again, nuclear power is only one problem the world faces. Why do we keep turning to nuclear energy, as a last resort for the generation of power? The modern world runs on energy. Lots of energy. And that need is a beast that demands to be fed. But the increasing levels of consumption are not sustainable. Accepting the notion that the growth of population is a constant is the first part of the energy bargain. The other part is the assumption of the necessity for an increasingly power-rich culture.

Throughout most of the post-War period, there's been an underlying assumption that the prosperity that the West enjoyed could, should, and would be exported to the rest of the world. In other words, the profligate over-indulgence of energy-use in Europe and America and Japan, ought to be copied and followed throughout the world. No one questioned whether having vastly increased power usage on the planet was really a good idea. Of course it was a good idea, because it made life so much more convenient! But the prosperity paradigm that was made out of the industrial revolution, the factory system, and the technological advances of the last two centuries, was built without regard for limits. The notion of more and more growth, both of population and economic systems, went mostly unquestioned. If one house and one car were good, then why not two houses, two cars? If one child could grow up to become rich and prosperous, why not two, or four, or six children? More consumers meant growth, and growth was always good, in economic terms.

But unlimited growth and unlimited exploitation can't proceed indefinitely. There are limits, and we're finding them. One of those limits should be not using nuclear power generation. If the world doesn't contain enough "clean" energy, then perhaps it's time to consider the demand side of the equation. If a nation cannot provide sufficient fresh water, food, power and other necessities, for itself, then perhaps the answer is to slow the demand.

Supply side economics posits a condition in which there is always more population, more resource, and more room to grow. But the "supply" side is finite, not unlimited. Humankind can't simply invent and discover and create more supply. What science tells us is that the earth is an entropic entity; it's a cooling ball. The sun too is a cooling ball, but it's going to take it a good deal longer than life on earth will ever live, to see it burn itself out. In the meantime, humankind will long since have used up all the "available" sources of energy on this planet.

If all this sounds apocalyptic, perhaps it's because we're complacent. The U.S. is now a net exporter of petroleum. Newt Gingrich's complaints about the Obama Administration's performance on the question of domestic energy policy notwithstanding, we've been reminded that demand always drives policy, not the other way around. The reason we're using less energy than we produce is that our economy must be slowing down, and that's exactly what's happening. The "Third World" grew up and decided to replicate the industrial paradigm we thought belonged exclusively to The West.

If the U.S. is to lead again, in anything, it shouldn't be in energy consumption per capita, because increasing energy use is a recipe for disaster. Building more nuclear power plants is a disaster. Burning more petroleum, burning more coal, burning more of anything is a disaster. If we want to measure the quality of life, we could start by reducing demand, which means in supply side terms, reducing population. China is leading the way with its one-child family policies. People will say that overpopulation will self-modulate once we solve the "other problems" the world has. But population is THE PROBLEM now. Solve that one, and you move the equation in the right direction. We can't build a world on the excess consumption formula, and then hope it will moderate its demand later; we won't ever get to reduced demand, if we allow the world to turn into a burning ant-hill first.

The most intelligent thing America can do now is show the way through quality of life--to lead by example. That needn't mean surrendering any of our self-defense, or capitulating on trade, or any of those nightmare consequences. A healthy society is one where we aren't all sitting on our butts, surrounded by gadgets, overwhelmed by commodities, and spending the world's energy at the fastest possible rate. Living a healthy life is actually cheaper than living sick. Walking to the corner store is cheaper for you, cheaper for society, cleaner, more relaxing, and less wasteful. Cheap portability, as an end in itself, is really pretty stupid. But the deeper implications of use don't necessarily revolve around rich use. The real culprit is demand, and how we respond to demands, both necessary and artificial. By constantly encouraging over-use and cheap consumption, as a spur to growth, we make nightmares come true. An 8-lane highway can handle more cars than a 6-lane highway, but every time you add an extra two lanes, you encourage more growth along the entire course of the thoroughfare.

Would it make sense to continue to encourage growth around the Greater Bay Area, if that necessarily meant that we'd need to bring on an additional half-dozen more nuclear power plants within a 50 mile radius of San Francisco? How stupid would that be? And yet, using demand as a generator of regional power development makes such eventualities inevitable, as long as the constant growth paradigm goes unquestioned.

The fewer people there are in the world, the richer we all are, not just in what the earth's bounty can provide, but in terms of the way we live. Having two children is materially better than having six, no matter how rich you are in other ways. As animals competing in a Darwinian universe, our sex drives and our natural tendency to increase were hard-wired into our bodies. We're constructed to reproduce. Our natural life-span in a pre-"civilized" condition is just long enough to enable us to accomplish that. People aren't generally designed to live more than about 35 years. But humankind has tipped the balance of its sustainability so far in the direction of artificial exploitation, that we've reproduced far beyond our means. We're eating the planet alive.

The advantages to society of rapid, uncontrolled growth are temporary, and mostly confined to those who stand to benefit initially from the ramping up. Landowners, developers, the building trades, the residual tax benefits--they initially pump some capital into the economy, but the costs that result to the environment, and to the quality of life, quickly make those gains look like cheap sacrifices to greed. As we chew up open space, and tie up more water and resources to feed the growth monster, all of society loses. The rich can wall themselves off in remote places or secure facilities, but that disequilibrium is only a temporary phenomenon.

We can moderate that drive, or suffer the consequences brought on by the efficient manipulation of the odds. We still have a choice. Nuclear power isn't the answer--it never was. The answer was in weaning ourselves off the over-indulgence in unnecessary growth. Because real prosperity doesn't come from growth. Anyone who tells you that is living a lie.

View of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

The Gallic Spirit of Francis Poulenc

Milhaud, Cocteau and Poulenc in later years

Ned Rorem remarks somewhere in his voluminous Diaries--I've skip-read large parts of them--that what most attracted him to French music was its "light" sunny surfaces, seamlessly constructed out of clear, distinct sounds. None of that dark, foreboding, Germanic ratiocination, none of that macabre Russian eccentricity, none of that saccharine Italian excess. As Saint-Saens succeeded Berlioz, the Neo-Classicists succeeded Debussy. The new wave of French music after WWI wanted clarity and directness, and they could be mischievous too, and playful, and tart. Though Les Six--the group of six young French composers circa 1920 (Poulenc, Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Durey and Tailleferre)--had congregated around Cocteau--their real spiritual inspiration was of course Satie, who had proposed the association.

Their attitude had something of the anti-intellectual about it, too--in reaction to the atonal rationality of Schoenberg, and Stravinsky's often jagged enjambed compositional style. Though their actual period of "collaboration" was brief--only a few months--the moniker has had a persuasive historical attraction, since its members went on to have their several meaningful careers, going their separate ways over the decades. It was their initial interests which unites them in the critical imagination: Their interest in a music of conviction, rather than the hovering mists and tendrils of Impressionism (Debussy or Ravel); their interest in jazz; their interest in street music--of parades and circuses and carnivals--and the music of the popular theater and dance-halls; in foreign folk rhythms and children's music. These were revolutionary ideas in 1920, the year the group existed. These attitudes shocked the musical establishment, already reeling from the scandal of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and as they would shortly be by George antheil's Ballet Mecanique (1924). The changes wrought by the coming technical innovations of the 20th Century would be expressed through the irreverent provocations and fearless experimentation of the post-WWI period, and Le Six were an integral part of that trend.

I have always been intrigued by the music of Darius Milhaud, but I must confess to saving a special place in my heart for Francis Poulenc, whose whole oeuvre has always seemed to me to possess a grace and energy and freshness which is unsurpassed in the history of 20th Century music.

The Young Poulenc

Francis Poulenc was born into a wealthy family, the Poulenc of Rhone-Poulenc, the big pharmaceutical corporation. His father Emile was the second generation director of the chemical firm--one of whose products was the psycho-active drug Thorazine. As a consequence of this prosperous condition, the young Francis never had to work to make a living, and could devote himself to musical composition, which he began to do while still a teenager, becoming a familiar in the Parisian avant garde literary and cultural scene. Some of his first compositions were settings of poems by Apollinaire. Though he followed a course of musical training by studying formal composition, he was purportedly a self-taught musicien, and as a competent keyboard performer, many of his early works are for that instrument. For nearly a hundred years, his Trois Mouvements Perpetuals [1919]--written before he was 20--have been concert hall favorites. Their pure limpid lyricism is characteristic both of the French folk idiom (like Severac, Chabrier and Fauré) from which they derive, and of the wistful innocence of Satie's miniatures. Among my personal favorites from his early period are the Concert Champetre[1928], the third movement of which here has saved me many times from a brooding melancholy too trivial to mention.

Poulenc is described in some accounts as a spoiled hedonist who could seldom rouse himself sufficiently to complete compositions once begun. Frankly homosexual (which he referred to as his "Parisien" side), Poulenc had been raised a Catholic, and the moral conflict this brought about in his personal affairs touched his musical soul deeply. The successive deaths of friends and lovers during the 1920's and 1930's eventually led to his decision to compose liturgical works--perhaps an improbable development in one whose early iconoclasm had been so spirited. In 1936 he visited the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, and apparently had an epiphany. The strong works of his middle period for me--Dialogues des Carmelites [1953] and the Gloria [1961] (listening to this one on YouTube takes several segments)--are the direct expression of a devout, strongly emotional mind, finding salvation in its amazement at universal joy, coming through the fire of intense dilemma, of a resignation to redeem the blandishments of fleshly attraction. On a Sunday morning, the Gloria will make you feel like going on a picnic, which after all is perhaps what religion should be about in the end.

In later age

It was inevitable perhaps that Poulenc would eventually be inspired to write a musical setting to a child's story, and this is precisely what happened one day at the composer's country house in 1940. Francis was busy composing a serious piece at the keyboard, when one of his little cousins, named Sophie, grew impatient with him, and peremptorily strode over to the piano and placed her copy of Babar the Elephant on the music stand, upside-down, demanding that he "play" it. Poulenc at once began to improvise a set of interpretations for the narrative of the little elephant, and thus was born the musical version we now know. Composed on the keyboard, it was eventually set for full orchestra. The obvious comparison is with Prokofiev'sPeter and the Wolf, but the two suites are quite different in approach and effect. This version with voice-over by Jacques Brel--one, two, three--is pleasant enough, especially if you already are familiar with the tale, since this performance is in French. My favorite in English is by Peter Ustinov.

The cover of the first edition of the first Babar book

As may be apparent from the photographs here, Poulenc had a very gamey French visage, with an enormous fin for a nose, rather sadly lascivious eyes, and largish ears. A favorite of caricaturists, he was famously, and more than once, the subject of Cocteau's napkin-pencil.

Cocteau caricature

And a later one

Perhaps if you have a face like this, you let your art do your talking for you. Poulenc's art is the trick of putting disparate moods and methods into close proximity, and making it all hang together. Occasionally, his work can sound like spoof, as in the "morse code" movements of hisSonata for 4 Hands [1918], sandwiched between which is the sweetest little entre'act you ever heard.

What is a life devoted to the creation of beauty and excitement through the medium of music, undistracted by worldly cares or barren necessity? We may be unsuccessful in love, or bent over the wheel of labor, or scattered across a panoply of distraction(s). Ultimately, as Cyril Connolly famously said once, "The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence." And the truism is of course applicable to all the other arts. The deeper irony is that we don't know how or when we're likely to create anything even resembling something called a "masterpiece." It's as likely to occur when we least expect it, like running into an old friend of many years back on the street. A flood of feeling and reclaimed memory sweep over one, altering the very landscape of the present moment. Had Poulenc never written anything again as enchanting as Trois Mouvements Perpetuals, his immortality might well be secured. Writers write, and pin-ball champions clickety-click.

Composers tinker with combinations of notes or tap their feet to a catchy rhythm, and before you know it a little magic is conjured into being. Who knows where in the mind such things are born? As we move forward in time, the heroes of our youth recede inexorably into smaller and tinier versions of themselves. We live in the present but dwell in the past. What is the linkage between sequences of sounds that establishes a pattern that seems just right, instead of merely random and flat? I can only say that when I hear a piece like Poulenc's Suite for Piano in C Major [1920], I am transported; I am floating among white billowy clouds, my heart dances and I daydream about the days of wine and roses, of the morning I stepped into a Paris street on my first morning in the City of Light, the day I first read James Schuyler's The Crystal Lithium, or the afternoon when, wading for the first time the rushing rapids of the Madison River in Montana, I hooked into a lively Rainbow who nearly dragged me in over my head, or the evening when I first saw Chinatown, with its unutterably sad denouement to Jerry Goldsmith's score.

The composition of beautiful melodies has always seemed to me a divine inspiration. A beautiful melody is like being tickled--it feels just a little too good, it can't be endured for long, either you cry out in an excess of sensation, or melt. In my experience, such shivers of oracular possession are elusive, and fleeting.

The poet William Stafford insisted that every writer (or poet) should spend a certain amount of time every day before a typewriter, attempting to summon the muse. Sometimes--often, certainly--she wouldn't appear, and one would wait an hour or two in vain, punching out scraps and phrases of pointless meandering speculative blather. But occasionally, luckily, one would hit upon a summary line or a thread of argument, and one knew the wraith of seduction had snuck in and touched you with the wand.

Professional writers and composers of course don't write out whole works in one smooth run. You salvage or snatch phrases or bits and pieces of work--fragments--and later revisit them, or try to incorporate these into a larger design. They may become seeds, germinating into variable elaborations, or they may resist tinkering, and remain undigestible.

Poulenc died at only 64, exactly my own age, in 1963, of a heart attack. In 1963 I was a 10th grader at Silverado Junior High School in Napa, California. 64 feels very young to me, in the body I now occupy. And yet a school-mate I once knew and loved then, fell dead on a mountain trail last year, unexpectedly, alone--presumably of an unexpected heart attack. At any point in our lives, chance may visit us with a little tap on the shoulder, summoning us to another appointment, one we hadn't anticipated. Art may serve as a kind of reminder of the pathos of that eventuality, the immediacy of our awareness of mortality--its joy and sadness. It's a wake-up call we periodically need. That's sort of what I feel with this piece of Poulenc's: Mélancolie[1940]. It's only a little supper music riff, perhaps. Maybe you have to be in the right mood.

Poulenc's music strikes me as the perfect embodiment of the best of French culture in the 20th Century. A clear eye, an immediacy and frankness, joy and sadness and boredom in equal measure, and a worldliness that is the distillate of centuries of feeling, born along on successive generations of youth and age. What do we possess, what do we perpetuate, unless it is music such as this? Poulenc's music often seems like pastiche, in that its rapid and unanticipated changes of mood and manner suggest a chaotic jumbling of unassembled parts. But with familiarity, these longer works begin to seem more natural and predictable in their progression of loud and soft, strict and slack, lyrical and vacant, fast and ponderous, sweet or sour.

As with many 20th Century composers, Poulenc liked to break rules. Starting with a standard form, such as the piano concerto, he would alternate fee-fie-fo-fum base thumps with a rhumba chatter, then slip effortlessly into a murmuring legato under a yearning melody, only to splice in a fluttering, querulous interrogative by the woodwinds. Just this kind of hijinks is indulged in the Concerto for Two Pianos [1932], which concludes with an echoing, crystalline skim over a dreamy winter landscape. Then, with perfect poker-faced equanimity, he evokes the young Mozart (or a 20th Century incarnation of him) in the touching second movement. But even here, his nervous mind can't linger for long, as he segues into soothing orchestral schmaltz, sounding as much like a B movie score as a serious concert piece, before slipping back into ersatz Mozart or Haydn. Perhaps I'm a dry orchestral aficionado, but I find such pieces of bright brittle gesticulating to be as irresistible as New Orleans praline candy.

In a light moment

For me, Poulenc is like a glass of prosecco, light, sweet, ingratiating, just a little corny at times, leavened with anxiety and a frisson of regret. The perfect alembic of the Gallic spirit.

Encore: the Toccata [1928].

Poulenc's Tomb

What I Saw in Utah [A Concretion]

Disappearing. reappearing poinT

No Exit

No Exit

Men die every day for the lack of what is in poems.

If I say so, birds tip over. These beautiful first editions

Under bright glass in cases are like blocks of ice that

Won’t melt. Men die every day while these books

Gather dust. Why don’t we just burn them?

Tonight the moon is so bright you could read

A book by its light. You know what you can do

With your goddamn romantic moon. The moon

Won’t melt, it’s not a round slice of stinking French

Cheese, either. If I say so, the moon melts. Words

In a poem aren’t just words, but a poem. One two

Three four. This is a poem for Jack Spicer. One

Way to tell is to test it. Maybe I have the formula

Backwards. If I say so, birds tip over. Every day,

Books get tossed into dumpsters because there are

Too many of them. Toss out the birds and bring back

The moon, I say. You know what you can do with your

Goddamn first editions. This poem is dedicated to

No one.

Stalking the Wild Ass-Burgers

When Conservative ikon Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency in 1980, he appointed James G. Watt as his Secretary of the Interior. The Republican strategy, since the mid-1960's, has consistently been to undermine Federal agencies, by appointing avowed enemies of departments they occupy, who use their power to "eat the host from the inside out"--and then use the record of the agency's "failure" as "proof" that "government doesn't work."

Watt, like the administration that hired him, "hit the ground running." He immediately set about turning over Federal lands for mining, timber harvest, oil & gas development. He fought attempts to create new national parks, and even resisted private donations for preservation! Before his appointment, Watt had created the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an organization designed to promote and defend the rights and privileges of extractive industries and private owners on public and private lands. Watt was, in effect, the wolf invited into the hen-house, to feast on his former opponents. It would be as if the U.S. were to hire a Muslim Al-Quaeda terrorist to run our domestic security programs. Watt himself, always the loose cannon, eventually was fired by making intemperate comments about affirmative action. For those of us who wanted to be rid of him, it was like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. It didn't matter what strategy you had to employ, as long as the culprit was nailed.

I was reminded of Watt this week, reading about the embarrassment suffered by California Fish & Game's head Daniel Richards, who posted a picture of himself posing--Hemingway-style--over his fresh-kill mountain lion on a dude ranch in Idaho, grinning from ear to ear with pride and ghoulish delight. Richards was appointed by former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The "Governator" was using the same tactic as Reagan had two decades before, to appoint an avowed enemy of conservation and wildlife preservation, to a position of trust, to an office whose primary purpose was diametrically opposed to his views. It was Mr. Watt all over again.

Have you ever met one of these gun-happy "wild-life management" types in the flesh? They're really brave souls. They like to stalk their prey in little bands, mowing down helpless mountain lions with high-calibre rifles from a safe distance. Dude ranches are their playgrounds, and they get off pumping lead into "targets." They look on nature as a game-board in which humankind gets to "control" animal populations through eradication or sport.

Once upon a time, the North American Continent was full of game, and it existed in a fine ecological balance within the context of it geographical limits. The native indian populations respected its resources, for the most part, and might have gone on doing so for centuries, had not the Europeans come to lay claim to this bounty. As populations have exploded, humankind has pushed much of the wild kingdom into extinction, and many of the surviving populations are endangered. Corporate energy and extraction industries oppose all preservation and regulation, and they've teamed up with the hyped-up hunters and gun-freaks to hold the line against animal rights activists and "tree-huggers."

Watt said he wanted to open up all the Federal and private lands to exploitation, "mine more, drill more, cut more timber." He always grinned when he said this, openly defying his enemies, provoking them with cheek. "Screw you," he always seemed to be saying. Discussing his theory of environmental management before the Congress, he testified "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations."

As an environmental steward, Mr. Richards is shoulder to shoulder with James Watt. Comrades-in-arms in the struggle to ravage the earth in the most efficient manner, for the benefit of corporate shareholders and hysterical gun-nuts. State legislators have called for Richards's head, as well they might. But Richards, true to his type, is standing firm: "my activity . . . [to hunt mountain lions in Idaho] . . . is none of your business." Richards isn't stupid; he knows his constituency admires his crack-brained tenacity in defying public indignation. It's just what they like about him. Preservation of wild-life?--to hell with it! Shoot the bastards!

Beside the beautiful wild feline he has just killed, Richards looks like a pipsqueak. He might as well be jacking off in a skin parlor, or stumbling around in a padded cell. There's nothing admirable, or noble, or dignified about what he's done. He's just another pathetic jerk playing with a dangerous toy, perpetrating sanctified mischief at the world's expense, an environmental terrorist getting his jollies by offing endangered species.