6. What Mozart and Mike Tyson Have in Common
Everybody loves the play “Amadeus”, but I don’t. First of all, the story of Antonio Salieri recognizing the genius of Mozart, and being the only one to do so in a world full of mooks who wouldn’t know genius if it hit them with too many notes, and deciding to spend a lifetime to destroy true genius—that’s not only historically untrue, as far as earth history is concerned, it’s not even emotionally or epistemologically true, as far as earth humanity understands it. Ruskin and I love the grotesque in art, but you can go too far with grotesque, and that's for my final installment tomorrow, but for now, all's I'll say is that "Amadeus" is, for me, the dramatic equivalent of this thing Ruskin goes batshit crazy about:
I am fairly good at perceiving talent or even genius in a protégée, one of those superserious students I described in my last posting. Some of them have overtaken me. When they do, I experience, of course, what I like to call “The Nausea”, the overwhelming desire to congratulate and vomit on a friend who just got a prize or publication. But the need to hurl quickly subsides, replaced by an inner need to “get the hell to work” and an outer need to do everything I can to spread the word about that genius. I think this is also enthusiasm.
I also think the author of Amadeus mis-assesses Mozart as somebody incapable of growth, or growing up. You can hear self-discovery in every Kochel number, and dramatically in his operas, which are, like Kitty Kelly biographies and baby animal videos on YouTube, idiotic and riveting. Take the ridiculous plot of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”: two guys try to prove their girlfriend is truer than the other’s by pretending to go to war and returning in the disguise of two foreigners out to woo one another’s girls. But the goof pretense of “going to war” doesn’t sit well with the girls: war is serious business, and their boys will probably die. Mozart, himself a dopey guy, almost runs headlong into his own satire, and only through the creation of a light, goofy, playful conceit, does he come to darkness, to seriousness, to some of the saddest music and feeling I’ve found in art, arrived at through a stupid plot point. I used to think this scene, and the farcical final garden pardon of the Contessa at the end of Marriage of Figaro, were unearned emotional moments; I now think these are places that show that fools rush in in order to become wiser men.
Click here to watch sad girlfriends say goodbye to stupid boyfriends.
How can we observe beauty, then choose, as those Italians do in Mozart’s operas and Forster’s novels, to pass it by? Hazlitt described the quality of Titian’s painting in his essay “On Gusto” (“gusto” being the 19th century word for “enthusiasm”), “Not only do Titian’s heads seem to think—his bodies seem to feel.” Says Marianne Moore, on the subject, “Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”
Now consider the boxer. I know, I know: ick. Blood, sweat, tears, shiny shorts. But a boxer always says he’s going to win. Mike Tyson said, “I try to catch my opponent on the tip of his nose because I try to punch the bone into his brain.” Oh, Michael. It’s Christmas time, and that was just a beautiful Christmas story you just told the children.
But this kind of swagger is saddled with an odd-duck humility. Because boxers speak of losing as if they aren’t losses. The very best boxers only win about half their fights. Winning doesn’t seem to be the point, really. Since there’s little money to be won in amateur boxing (and amateur boxing is most boxing), the difference between winning and losing is pretty much the difference between eight bruises and nine. Success and failure aren’t terribly different. Boxing seems to be an effort to redeem failure—and therefore pain. After all, you can still learn a lot by doing a geometry proof incorrectly. They shouldn’t call that sport “boxing”. They should call that sport, “aporia”. Or “writing poetry”.
Failure in success, success in failure: Here’s a line from a capsule review in the New Yorker, regarding “Little Miss Sunshine”, written by David Denby: “A charming…family comedy about a winner-take-society—America—that is driving its citizens crazy.” That movie is a satire. Satire, an aspect of the discursive mode, is one of the many modes I am afraid poets have walked away from over the centuries, abandoned to fiction in that terrible revolution (and subsequently abandoned to nonfiction, and they aren’t taking very good care of it either), and poetry needs to reclaim them, because how can the sparkly lyrical poems and the grand epics survive without the binding grasses of enthusiastic love for daily life. Where are the poems that resemble the crazy crap going on in the old church capitals?
Learning to celebrate the ordinary—in myself, in my work—is a task perhaps hardest, because who doesn’t want to be extraordinary? But the common species of flora and fauna are the most pervasive, and finding ways to see daily life as the incredible thing it is, that is the most important task, too. Marianne Moore, I think, says so in her essays, in her liner notes to boxer Muhammed Ali’s spoken word album, and here:
"....Your dress, a magnificent square
cathedral tower of uniform
and at the same time diverse appearance—a
species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm
of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels?
Whetted to brilliance
by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity,
these things are rich instruments with which to experiment.
But why dissect destiny with instruments
more highly specialized than the components of destiny
itself?"
-Marianne Moore, from "Those Various Scalpels"
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