Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

New Directions in Folklore 2 (formerly the Impromptu Journal) January 1998 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3

Something Rich and Strange: Technologies of the Sacred in Glassie and Greenaway

Liz Locke

"Folk" and "fine," like "popular"and "elite," are ideological words that folklorists use to help classify the kinds of human beings that exist in the world and the kinds of art they produce. Henry Glassie's The Spirit of Folk Art, published in 1989, purports to be a twentieth-century American's articulation of the sacred power of human expressivity, but eventually all of its conclusions favor the Romantic over the Postmodern, the "then" over the "now," "there" over "here," and "folk" over "fine."

While reading Glassie's book, stuggling to understand whatever distinctions may exist between the arts of "the folk" and those of "non-folk," I was reminded of Peter Greenaway, the British enfant terrible of non-narrative filmmaking, whom I had long considered one of few emergent mythographers of the formerly-Romantic, post-industrail West. In the context of Glassie's descriptions, Greenaway suddenly metamorphosed in my imagination into its bellwether folk artist as well.

Glassie defines the folk artist primarily by situating him or her within a traditionally Religious context; Greenaway's work defines the artist as a person whose mundane experience in the world intersects with the sacred, usually with terrifying consequences. What is the difference between these perspectives, I asked myself. Is it enough to justify separate vocabularies, separate worldviews, for their anallytically separated proponents? During his visit to Indiana University in April 1997 to talk about his new film, The Pillow Book, I suggested to Peter Greenaway that viewing his work as folk art might be worth thinking about. The overflow crowd, constituted largely of sophisticated feminist critics and seasoned film-buffs, tittered with laughter as if to say, "We all know that folk art has nothing whatever in common with the avant garde!" But Greenaway, nodding vigorously to accept the label, said, "Well, you seem to be a member of my ideal audience."

Best known to U.S. audiences as the director of The Cook, theThief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990), Greenaway's films had never been classified by anyone as folk art. Notwithstanding, my instinct to pursue the convergences between Glassie's Romanticism and Greenaway's Postmodernism led me to examine the 1991 film, Prospero's Books, in the light of this new insight, and in so doing to contrast it with a film generally interpreted as being more in line with Glassie's Romanticism than anything Greenaway has ever made, Koyaanisqatsi by Ron Fricke.

In a sense, this essay is a long-delayed response to a remark Glassie made in 1990: If a thing can be called true, or good, or beautiful, it cannot be found in the postmodern world. I disagree, but more urgently now that more of my time is spent in classrooms with college freshmen than in conversation with tenured Folklore scholars. After surviving America's 1990's brand high schools, fragmenting and dehumanizing to an extent that most of us fully fail to grasp, they have earned the right to create art in a world that Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

has not by definition precluded it as a possibility in their lives.

Postmodern Folk and the Sacred

From time to time, the set of assumptions we hold to be central to the discipline of Folklore is subjected to renewed scrutiny. One of the forms it is taking among the current generation is a look at the assumption that Folklore succeeded in 1971 in prescribing the scope of its inquiry to embrace "the artistic process in small group situations" as delineated by Dan Ben-Amos in "Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context."[el1]1 As valuable as this proposal proved in effecting a truce in the definitions wars of the 1960's, because of its necessary exclusion of inquiry into the profound effects (and affects) of mass-communication and mass-production in the West in our lifetimes, there are those of us who believe that this definition no longer encompasses lived experiences of folklore in the world we live in, nor will it suffice to do so in the next century. While it is twenty years since Alan Dundes attempted to broaden Folklore's social base to theoretically include any persons who share "some form of collective plurality," academic folklorists have stopped far short of embracing such a radical idea, preferring in practice to nod in Dundes' direction with attitudes ranging from respect for his devotion to keeping Folklore alive as its traditional subjects become sparser on the land to derision at his suggestion that "a folk group could consist of as few as two individuals."2

The ever-shifting questions of who comprises the folk and what its lore have been with us since the beginning and are unlikely to be fully answered any time soon.3 In the current environment, however, the received response has sent many of us to study cultures other than our own in the hope of finding "real folklore," i.e., artistic expression still unpolluted by industrial or electronic mediation. But for those of us who remain here the notion that the growing portion of the world's peoples whose communications occur in technologically mediated environments (e.g., television, film, the internet) are thereby excluded from the category of the folk, and by implication that our communications are thereby insufficiently artistic (or simply insufficiently valuable) to qualify as lore, has become increasingly difficult to defend. It is commendable that the academic study of folklore continues to align itself ideologically with the best, most humanistic insights and inspirations of nineteenth-century Romanticism. But why must our honorable orientation imply the perverse idea that life in Postmodernism requires that we lose our memory of all that the Romantics learned? A century and a half has elapsed since Europe's most impassioned and aristocratic Romantic, Richard Wagner, offered a provocative but overlooked response to what still remains our most crucial question. I include it here in its entirety in the hope that it will remind us that "the folk" must constitute a far more generous category than the late twentieth-century academy insists upon, and that the lore it contains is not of necessity limited to those categories laid down for us either by Ben-Amos or by those of our disciplinary lineage who were Wagner's contemporaries.

Who is then the Folk?- It is absolutely necessary that, before proceeding further, we should agree upon the answer to this weightiest of questions.

"The Folk" was from of old the inclusive term for all the units which made up the total of a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the tribe; next, the tribes united by like speech into a nation. Practically, by the Roman world-dominion which engulfed the nations, and theoretically, by the Christian religion which admitted of naught but men, i.e., no racial, but only Christian men the idea of "the People" has so far broadened out, or even evaporated, that we may either include Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

in it mankind in general, or, upon the arbitrary political hypothesis, a certain, and generally the propertyless portion of the Commonwealth. But beyond a frivolous meaning, this term has also acquired an ineradicable moral one; and because of it, in times of stir and trouble all men are eager to number themselves among the People; each one gives out that he is careful for the People's weal, and no one will permit himself to be excluded from it. Therefore in these latter days the question has been frequently broached, in the most diverse of senses: Who then is the People? In the sum total of the body politic, can a separate party, a particular fraction of the said body, claim this name for itself alone? Rather, are we not all alike "the People," from the beggar to the prince?

This question must therefore be answered according to the conclusive and world-historical sense that now lies at its root, as follows:-

The "Folk" is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective Want. To it belong, then, all of those who recognise their individual want as a collective want, or find it based thereon; ergo, all those who can hope for the stilling of their want in nothing but the stilling of a common want, and therefore spend their whole life's strength upon the stilling of their thus acknowledged common want. For only that want which urges to the uttermost, is genuine want; but this want alone is the force of true need; but a common and collective need is the only true need; only he who feels within himself a true need, has a right to its assuagement; but only the assuagement of a genuine need is necessity; and it is the Folk alone that acts according to necessity's behests, and therefore irresistibly, victoriously, and rightly as none besides.4

If we rewrite Wagner to allow for his use of the term "men" to account for us all, it is his dual conviction that "genuine want" is the defining characteristic of a collective plurality and that all who feel it and work to assuage it are agents in a profoundly moral endeavor that challenges our putatively modern sensibilities. Given these criteria for a definition of the folk, it is appropriate that we should ask: What is the Want of the post-industrial West and who are the men and women who work with their lifetimes' strength to still it? While folklorists are wisely skeptical of domination in the expressive arts as evinced by the proclivities of princes, now, when political rule is so rarely placed unquestioned into their bejeweled hands, it is time to recognize and appropriate the traditional attributes of beneficent royalty-dignity, forbearance, self-possession, and compassion-and dispense them more liberally among the world's untitled (including ourselves) instead of merely restricting the category of the folk to those who never wield any real political power. Art, when it is not locked away with the Crown Jewels but distributed as the wealth that it is, when it acts to still genuine collective Want, concatenates the worlds of the beggar and the prince today-particularly in Postmodernism's increasingly mediated environments--as it has never done before.

Footnotes to Page 1

1. Ben-Amos 1971, p. 24.

2. Dundes 1980, p. 13.

3. See Stephen Olbrys' article in the Spring 1998 issue of Folklore Forum. Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

4. From "The Art of the Future" in Prose Works [1893], Vol. I, pp. 74-5, trans. W.A. Ellis; anthologized in Ellmann and Feidelson 1965, pp. 665-6. London. Emphasis in original.

Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3 Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

New Directions in Folklore 2 (formerly the Impromptu Journal) January 1998 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3

Something Rich and Strange (Page 2)

Liz Locke

The Spirit of Folk Art and the Embodied Postmodern

In The Spirit of Folk Art, Henry Glassie combines folk- art scholarship with fine art historicism to reveal the explicit and tacit understandings, and more important, the misunderstandings reflected in them and passed on to us as descriptions of human creativity in cultural context. Having taken the rare trouble to become educated about Art (as a capitalized category, Art embraces Kandinsky and Matisse as well as storyteller Peter Flanagan and ceramicist Helen Cordero ), Glassie is also among the most empathetic practitioners of Folklore in the United States. As a kind of summation of his writing over many years of experience with folk artists and their works, The Spirit of Folk Art is, among other things, a serious and consciously crafted blow against the empires of commodity capitalism which reduce the poor, brown, and/or female traditional artist to the level of a naive imitator of what post-industrial cultures love most about themselves. In a move designed to turn art historicism against itself, his argument makes a distinction between those artistic products which may be considered "folk" by positively contrasting them with those considered "fine."

..by contrast to fine art, folk art is less formal in education; in appearance it is more abstract, in essence more spiritual, in orientation more communal. As a consequence, its practitioners are less wealthy, its history is more recursive than progressive. The ideal context for folk art is the agricultural village, prosperous enough to have material reserves, large enough to contain craft specialization, small enough to be experienced directly and to be governed by religious tradition.5

But Glassie goes on to say that folk art is properly delineable from fine art only if we allow ourselves to experience its value from the vantage of its makers. Taking some of the statements scattered throughout Glassie's elegy, we can identify some of the elements that go into characterizing a politico-aesthetic philosophy of Art. "Folk art stresses the conceptual over the sensual."6 "Folk art is the flower of religious society."7 "It is one message of folk art that creativity is not the special right of the rare individual."8 "Folk art insists upon this truth: no artist learns or works in isolation."9 Its aesthetic combines pleasure and utility, its objects lying variously closer to one end of the spectrum than the other.10 It embodies the fact of "the work of a human being at grapple with nature."11 But these attributes, seemingly so antithetical to the traditions of art production among the postmodern Euro-American "elites," are described, even by Glassie, as marks of distinction without a difference.

If you ignore the exceptions and hold to a definition derived from [...] contrastive pairs, your rigorous work will not return to you the distinction you assume between folk and fine art. Most fine art will be folk art. More important, you would be doing violence to art's reality. It is the purpose of art to be impure, to blend categories, to overturn them and erase distinctions, to disturb simple thought and move the Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

mind behind the senses into a totalizing experience.12

The book ultimately articulates a philosophy which describes the production and reception of Art, understood finally as an undivided holism of human expression, as a continuum in which the fine arts of industrial and post- industrial societies constitute our folk arts, while the folk arts of traditional, Religiously oriented societies comprise their fine arts.13 Given that each of these categories has been used by scholars as entities by which the other must be measured, Glassie's view has the peculiar virtue of enlisting the conventional distinctions which created the two categories in the first place (branded separate and unbridgeable since the Renaissance) in order to maintain folk art as a distinguishable and distinguished entity while simultaneously erasing them in the service of better understanding the universal human impulse to create art, including its "fine" forms. It is unfortunate that so inclusive a statement cannot even admit to the possibility of many of these characteristics in industrial and post-industrial societies.

Glassie is fully cognizant that cultures differ in innumerable ways, as do the individuals who constitute them, even within a single society. His bases for contrast are not artistic, per se, but rather elements that must go into any deeply negative critique of modernity: "The critical context for our appreciation of folk art is the alienation and disharmony of our own world. The physical context for the creation of folk art is the noisy crowd. The conceptual context for the understanding of folk art is religion."14

Glassie's finely tuned attention to and appreciation of the communities he has participated in and reported on for our benefit is combined with his genuine revulsion at the dehumanizing forces of late-stage capitalism. Together these have shaped his perceptions and attitudes in the same manner in which each of our interests and desires, experiences and inclinations, hopes and fears have shaped us. As a consequence of living each within separate bodies while simultaneously sharing the cultural body that is human community, we each mature to form opinions and judgments about what to accept and what to reject about our existence, what to celebrate and what to condemn, enacted within the indispensable categories of the sacred (joined occasionally with institutional Religion), meaning, work and play, genuine value and utility, ephemeral fashion, and enduring art. The difficulty arises when one's life-context and the art that springs from it are described as necessarily linear-progressive, leisured, secular, and profoundly alienated by the simple virtue of being located in the late twentieth-century post-industrial West.

Granted that as the arbiter of goodness, beauty, and truth for a planet it has all but succeeded in destroying, the ravaging Western economic model exported to the rest of the world as democracy and development has failed to maintain the integrated scenes15 which govern the traditional production of folk art. However, if Glassie is correct that culture is nowhere monolithic but inevitably embraces "some who know more [and] some who understand less, even in the tightest traditional community,"16 then it is also not monolithic in the technologically elaborate West, the world in which I live, grieve, communicate, celebrate, aspire, and create. The Spirit of Folk Art simply cannot be the whole picture for those of us who struggle against the common perception that to be a member of the American consumer class (the 99% who control 60% of the wealth17), is tantamount to being in league with the devil. We who increasingly need to see at least some of the products of our own culture appreciated as art in both intention and result, as arising from our own sense of the sacred, must appreciate Glassie for finally giving us something substantial to push against. Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

Glassie rightly teaches that one can never discover richness by simply focusing on need. He points to the tendency in folk-art scholarship to perceive its creators as the needy Other, the Common People, whose creativity is essentially an imaginal antidote for material economic privation.18 But consider Wagner's notion that in times of stir and trouble, as ours undoubtedly are, all are "eager to number themselves among the People," that vaguely defined but ineluctably moral segment of the teeming mass of humankind to whom we folklorists inevitably point when we talk about tradition and lasting value. We may then find ourselves in agreement with the old musician's declaration that the folk are always and everywhere, regardless of class or taste, those who feel a Want, who recognize their individual want as a collective one, and who spend their whole life's strength upon the stilling of it for the benefit of themselves and their fellow beings. If we assume some small measure of agreement, then the Want of the West is precisely that deep feeling of lack, the stilling of which is identified as one of the most singular and enduring characteristics of the Folk: the ability and desire to perceive and experience art as Other Folk do, as the simultaneously singular and regular interpenetration of the mundane and the sacred.

The Emergence of the Sacred in Everyday Life

In the winter of 1983, I took a walk on a snowy evening to see Koyaanisqatsi, a new film photographed by Ron Fricke with music by Philip Glass. I had heard only that the title, a Hopi word, means "life out of balance." Almost at the theater, I stopped suddenly, compelled to gaze at the stilled silhouette of a white construction crane, resting from its daytime labors, looming tall against the icy trees and small, gray buildings of downtown Boulder. It was simultaneously shocking and familiar, massively present, astonishing, uncompromising, beautiful: mysterium tremendum-as- machine, and it took my breath away.

Inside, the film's cinematography reveled in sequence after sequence- alternately sped up and slowed down-of sun gently illuminating evening horizons, billowing clouds sweeping majestically across azure skies, waves crashing and whispering into rocky, primeval harbors, all underscored by the sweet, endlessly repeating strains of Philip Glass's aural imagination. Finally, after nearly an hour, the camera caught sight of human beings. The first images were of inordinately fat, white, stupid people lounging grotesquely on a garbage-strewn New Jersey bathing beach, backgrounded by the grating sounds and inhuman gyrations of a construction crane fitted with a wrecking ball. More human images followed, more and more often those of the gentle, wise, brown, and furrowed faces of the indigenous peoples of my continent. These were interspersed with the film's now famous razor-sharp, frenetic, neon-laced, blindingly blurred sequences of street lights, traffic lights, headlights mindlessly tracing their blue and red patterns over interchanges and across bridges, across the retina, against all sense and reason, racing on and on toward an inevitable apocalypse of technological depravity. After the screen had mercifully faded to black, it relit in red with the words of a Hopi prophecy concerning the impending atomic holocaust that will be the inevitable end of a world gone mad.

Upon leaving the theater, I looked up at the magnificent, massive white machine that had so completely captured my spirit earlier in the evening and thought about this teaching that Fricke and Glass had offered to me. They had encouraged me to hate it, but not only that: I was now supposed to hate the very world that it and I occupy. I was supposed to believe that a world out of balance is one that-in contrast to a nostalgically rendered Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

simulacrum of a spiritual economy appropriated from (or rather, created for) the Simple, Common, Moral Other-deserves to be destroyed.

But who was operating the camera that photographed those lovely, mottled skies? Who had selected those pristine, empty coves? Who decided that the world was a better place before it was infested with human life, if not the human makers of that film? They had tried to dissuade me from my firmly held belief that the world is-in and of itself, without recourse to my fantasies, opinions or desires-a sacred place. They had tried to persuade me that, through their willful ignorance of the filmmakers' brand of White, New-Age spirituality, the embodied human spirits who inhabit my world are deliberately, deludedly, and deservedly careening toward doom.

This story-cum-interpretation is important because of the implications it carries for our understandings about art and the sacred in a technologically elaborate modernity. We individual humans, whether born in Dhaka, Quito, Kinshasa, or New York City, are not so powerful as to be in control of the technological environment into which we are born. We learn through our given traditions-augmented and enacted through imagination, skill, and the material resources at hand-how to shape ourselves sufficiently well in our constructed contexts to flourish in the face of hardship, to discover what it means to be human and, optimally, to apply any wisdom garnered from that discovery to the alleviation of suffering in other beings. This is precisely the process that the most institutionalized of Religions must ultimately describe as the central path by which we come into contact with the numinous, with what William James thought of as a revelatory relationship with something larger than ourselves. That which is sacred relegates our sense of self to the periphery of our own experience, however transitory or lasting, and yet does not instantiate itself by transmogrifying into the will to power.19 This is, as Glassie would undoubtedly agree, the ground of art. For those of us who accept, always with profound reservations, the context into which we were born, whether village or barrio, skyscraper or farm, true artistic expression and reception are our ways of acknowledging it, critiquing it, celebrating it, informing and reforming it, and finally, merging with it, recognizing ourselves as potent participants in a sacred world.

Here, in what Hindus and Buddhists call the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, we have left behind the long kalpas of time in which enlightenment came to human beings only through arduous ascetic practices. The world is now said to be so complex and confusing, so greedily controlled by the illusionary Lords of Materialism, that a mere glimpse into the heart of compassion is said to be sufficient to still Want, to replace suffocating desire with peace. But now, even that glimpse is enormously difficult to obtain.

People create their own relationships with the sacred and the possibility of peace. In thinking about the sacred as it attempts to manifest in the institutionalized forms of religious life, we are aware of Catholic nuns who live cloistered lives, not because they devoutly believe in their sacred marriage with the Redeemer, but because they were sexually abused as children and prefer the exclusive company of women. Outwardly, Religion is their sign, but what does it signify? We know of Buddhist teachers who abuse their sacred roles as gurus to aggrandize themselves and betray their Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

students. Why create a relationship with such a teacher? We know of Muslim prelates who would sooner kill the messenger than hear a message critical of their views. How does one reconcile such dogmatic insistence with the possibility of an individual journey toward God? We know of the kind of faith that resorts to Religion as if it were a vending machine. It promotes the expectation that if you devotedly deposit the prescribed prayers, steps, or practices, you can then simply wait for the goodies to fall out, never having to actually confront the terrifying possibility that the process could result in a permanent change in your relationship with yourself and the world. This kind of faith has nothing whatever to do with the sacred. The sacred annihilates complacency.

Hope of peace and fear of annihilation are at the root of all spiritual- materialist conceits. The Kali Yuga runs on hope and fear. But there are teachers, both within and without institutionalized Religious frameworks, who see through the illusions wrought by materialism. Some of them deliberately use illusion to bring us back, without illusions, to ourselves. Some of them are filmmakers. Some of us connect with their teachings, alone or communally, while engaging in the peculiarly twentieth-century ritual of watching light flicker on one flat wall of a darkened room. We may enter synagogues, churches, shrines, and mosques in the hope of being refreshed, removed from our anxieties, briefly freed from the domination of Want. We may enter a movie theater with the same hope. Sometimes we get, like Koyaanisqatsi, "an Ire Production," like Glassie at his best, a justifiably enraged tribute to earthy Romanticism. But sometimes what we get-without any of the paraphernalia of Religion as such-is a glimpse into the heart of the sacred. Prospero's Books, rather than pontificating on a world contaminated by our presence in it, offers us a window onto an always and already sacred, fully inhabited human world.

Footnotes Page 2

5. Glassie 1989, p. 227.

6. Ibid., p. 128

7. Ibid., p. 129.

8. Ibid., p. 88.

9. Ibid., p. 187.

10. Ibid., p. 61.

11. Ibid., p. 41.

12. Ibid., p. 227. Emphasis added.

13. Ibid. Emphasis added.

14. Ibid., p. 18.

15. Ibid., p. 128.

16. Ibid., p. 238.

17. The statistic was cited by the novelist E.L. Doctorow in a remarkable speech entitled "The Politics of God," recorded on September 30, 1997 in Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center, and broadcast by C-SPAN.

18. Glassie 1989, p. 53.

19. I am again indebted to E.L. Doctorow, op. cit. supra, this time for the Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

exact formulation of the sacred which I had been seeking

Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3 Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

New Directions in Folklore 2 (formerly the Impromptu Journal) January 1998 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3

Something Rich and Strange (Page 3)

Liz Locke

Technicians of the Sacred

Peter Greenaway was trained as a fine-art painter. Unlike Glassie's hero, William Morris, who longed from his beautiful house in an industrializing England for a return to simple virtues, natural hierarchies, and graceful economies, Greenaway does not hate the Renaissance,20 but loves it for the alchmical cauldron of change that it was. The sixteenth century saw an ex-priest, Martin Luther, utterly re-form an old and powerful theological worldview. It saw Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler, create physics and astronomies that worked another kind of magic on our place in the universe. It saw the publication of the prophecies of Michel Nostradamus, a French Jew, whose visions were grounded in ancient celestial sciences, mathematics, and medicine. It saw the pirate Francis Drake, the mystics John of the Cross and Giordano Bruno, the first chamber of commerce, the first hand grenade, the advent of the use of forks, and the plague. Much as in our own day, in which the labors of poor people create monuments to capitalism's pharaohs and technologies are mistaken for truths, it was a galaxy of worlds in collision. And yet the age contained the continuities that always and everywhere enable human beings-beggars and princes alike-to recognize themselves, enjoy themselves, challenge themselves, and adapt themselves to new environments: family and the larger community, tradition, love, work, and art.

In 1991, Greenaway finished a film called Prospero's Books and released it into the alembic of our collective Want. It tells a story about the spiritual materialism of the European sixteenth century, enacted within the dichotomous frames of political power and intrigue and, an even older one, the frame of effective magic. The story, first told by an English playwright of the times, is better known to us as The Tempest, the last of his thirty-six plays.

In the past, anonymity, one of the great cornerstone categories of Folklore, was loosely associated with the moral virtue of humility. Today we wish to know the name of the artist: named work can be evaluated in its situated context with the methods of performance theory far better than can anonymous artifacts. Today the signed work of folk art indexes a kind of pride in mastery; the life story of its maker is important as a move in protecting the artist from sentimental academic and economic oblivion. Had not William Shakespeare's friends, the community of actors who played out his dreams, gathered up his plays and had them published in 1623, you and I would not know his name. His work might have survived anonymously, and hence be of more interest to folklorists than it is, but we must be satisfied with the historical reality that the two elements of friendship and print technology coincided to preserve his name along with what are arguably the most excellent examples of verbal art in the English language. Without these two, he would be Homer. Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

Shakespeare wrote for people who had to deeply mine their visual imaginations to create the vivid scenes that his words conjured. Greenaway writes books, paints, draws, creates operas, mounts museum installations, and directs films, all with the aim of bringing his personal, manifest vision into the common view. But with fame the director's name, like Shakespeare's, is no longer a simple index of subjectivity. As is the case for many artists, the name is also an icon to marketers and consumers of Art. To some it signals a warning: stay away at all cost. This art is too cerebral, too contrived, too wearying, too difficult to understand. The artist has no anonymity to protect him from charges such as these. The autograph warns people away from Shakespeare and from Greenaway for the same reasons, and so for the same reasons they are not safe. However, for some, these singular names are not stop signs, but invitations to participate in richness and strangeness and complexity, to engage in common dreams articulated, common aspirations realized. In Glassie's terms, they combine the ideology of social responsibility, a marker of the "folk," with genius, a marker of the "fine."21

Film/Text/Breath: Magic is Mundane

Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Memorials, the most evocative pieces of sculpture that Americans have the privilege to inhabit, tells us that "art is always about something not quite familiar."22 Like anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines resting on Buddhist, Hindu, Voudon, Shinto and other shrines all over the world (called murtis in one of Glassie's culture-areas, Bangladesh), they mutely carry part of what we are for us, provide seats for the best that is in us. Thus embodied, the terrifying ineffable becomes available for communication. Other artists use words to provide temporary sites of hierophany. But like murtis and Maya Lin's Wall, words have real power only when fully inhabited, actively engaged. Embodying the transcendent in a work of art requires a willing suspension of disbelief: exactly like a religious Bangladeshi craftsman, the irreligious film director Peter Greenaway can say, "I know that I made this thing; I know that it came from my hands; and yet because it did, I can view it as arriving from outside of myself. It makes me available for communication."

Like a murti-and unlike Shakespeare's bare stage-a film provides images brought into the world not by its willing receiver but by its inspired maker. A great film, one that tells us something we didn't already know, manifests images so evocative that the visual imagination is freed up in sufficient measure for its receivers to fully devote their energy their hearts-to it, to the strange, rich best that is in them, as embodiment rather than mere vision. When I first viewed Prospero's Books in the company of friends out for an evening's entertainment, one of them felt it her duty to occasionally nudge me to determine if I was still breathing. More than once during the course of the film-as had happened once in the presence of a sleeping construction crane-I was not. As Glassie writes, "Every work of art is the same. It gathers out of the world those who understand its intentions."23

John Gielgud, a revered magus of the twentieth- century stage, wanted a chance to play the sixteenth-century magus, Prospero.24 In executing their common desire, Greenaway took text itself, the spell that is words, fitted it to Gielgud's voice and a fine Renaissance calligraphic hand, and wreaked strange new forms of technology upon it. With the help of hundreds of working artists, he interleaved and illuminated the Bard's pages, bringing them to life with what he imagines for us to be the essences contained in books. The Duke of Milan, having given over his political power in favor of intellectual absorption, will need the aid of many. Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge. Twenty-four volumes might be enough to cover the information needed-bestiaries, a herbal, cosmographies, atlases, astronomies, a book of languages, a book of utopias, a book of travelers' tales, a book of games. There may have been books whose immediate practical purpose was not fathomable-a pornography, a book of motion, a book of love, a book of colours and a book of 'Architecture and other Music'. In the event, all of the twenty-four volumes not only kept Prospero and Miranda alive, well and sane on their island but also made Prospero so powerful he could command the dead and make Neptune his servant. 25

Instead of the vague "books he furnished me from mine own library...that I prize above my Dukedom," thrown by Gonzalo into Prospero's leaky boat at the outset of the play, Greenaway gives us specific books-brilliant, living, magical embodiments of the written word-which ultimately become more integral to the story than is the magician himself. And what is magic but a technology? In some ways, magic is the antithesis of work, the accomplishment which all technologies aspire to complete. It allows a person to manipulate the resources of two worlds, the immanent and the transcendent, without the bother of pushing and pulling, grunting and sweating, but only knowing and speaking to bring them into productive convergence. In this sense, magic is the foolish dream of the intellectual, divorced from the reality of the world which always requires exertion, who confuses thinking with doing. Put into economic terms, "Magic is the baseline against which the concept of work as a cost takes shape."26 But in the aura of the emerging scientistic worldview of Shakespeare's England, magic no longer signified the possibility of a world without work. Instead, it had increasingly negative theological connotations for a people bruised and brutalized by plague and witchcraft. Magic was a technology shifting meaning.

Technologies of the word have always been imbued with magical power. They, like the plastic arts, are acts of making the invisible visible. The brushstroke of the Japanese calligrapher does not describe reality, it creates it. It brings a world into being in much the same way that speaking a spell from a grimoire is intended to do. The bija (seed) syllables of Indian mantra practice, the aum, the ah, and the hum, brought into being by the calligrapher's pen, are objects of veneration; they illustrate nothing but are everything. Gielgud's Prospero writes the words of Shakespeare in the manuscript cursive of the Italian artist, Arrighi, a fifteenth-century calligrapher-printer, upon whose style Morris based his efforts at restoring the graceful art of penmanship at his Kelmscott Press.27 As Prospero writes, his pen and voice shape his utopia and everything that happens in it. He speaks/writes/spells its characters: Miranda, Ariel, Cailiban and the rest will refrain from using their actors' voices until Prospero relinquishes his Art, his will to power, and gives them their freedom from Want.

We are caught by words, held by them. A kind one, a blessing, can save a life; a severe one, judgmental even if just, is a curse and can kill. This is technology. This is effective magic. When Shakespeare gives us the words that make a tempest, or those that make the magical masque in celebration of Miranda's engagement to Ferdinand, he doesn't just spell them out for us, Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

he situates them within their magical spheres of influence; he conjures with them. And as Shakespeare's-Gielgud's-Prospero's words literally perform, so does Michael Nyman's luminous music, and Greenaway's color saturated, magnificently framed filmic displays and video-inset overlays of high resolution HDTV, computer generation, and watercolor, all working to give voice to song, rhythm to dance, vision to text, and texture to flesh. The film- script describes Prospero's twenty-second book, A Book of Motion.

This is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where thought goes when it is finished with. It is covered in tough blue leather and, because it is always bursting open of its own volition, it is bound around with two leather straps buckled tightly at the spine. At night, it drums against the bookcase shelf and has to be held down with a brass weight. One of its sections is called 'The Dance of Nature' and here, codified and explained in animated drawings, are all the possibilities for dance in the human body. 28

How many of us have imagined that books have lives of their own, that they whisper quietly among themselves when the lights go out, that they share their ideas and dreams with one another as with us? Something happens to the heart/mind when we witness these illusions in a darkened room. When we look at a useful object freshly, whether a stoneware pitcher or a construction crane, a table or a tabernacle, it stirs us freshly when it looks back. It communicates from the heart and hands of its thaumaturgical maker-the artist is always a synthesis of technician and mystagogue-to our individual and communal experience of being in the quotidian world. It draws us in and presents us-gifts us-with its reminder that this illusion too, the one about the validity of our perceptions, our hard-won knowledge, our solid, permanent existence, will please us for a while, but then it will also end. The play of these images, briefly shaping themselves on the palimpsest that is human consciousness, reminds us-forcefully, if we are paying attention- that the serious struggle of existence is also a game, lila, the play of the gods.

Greenaway's Prospero finally drowns all of his books, just as the words of the play-Shakespeare's lila-dictate, and by dictating, perform. After Caliban is forgiven, and thus made more human, but before Ariel and his music return to the upper airs, Gielgud hesitates: two undrenched books remain in his hands. A thick book of thirty-six plays, its initial pages blank and its cover embossed with the initials W.S., and a slim volume entitled The Tempest. He finally makes his decision and throws them into the deep, where they too will undergo a sea-change.

This moment in which the humanly constructed, durable text is relinquished to the fluidly enduring element-the very element that makes up most of our mass-is the gift of four magicians, Shakespeare, Prospero, Gielgud, and Greenaway, who, together with the hordes of working artists who supported their efforts, gave us Prospero's Books. This film, like our lives, will necessarily come to an end. The social exchange that is a prerequisite for art (reception is necessarily indivisible from creation) is here not obviously realized as transacting in the marketplace, but less obviously in that permanent-ephemeral moment that religionists call the sacred. While commodity consciousness is free to founder on the reefs of capitalism run amok, time, duration, is the environment of human life; time and time passing, with its unmonumentalized moments of real understanding and insight devoid of the will to power, are the magicians' gifts. "The gift is Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

property that perishes."29

The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation. If this is the case, then the gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality. Where gifts have no public currency, therefore, where the gift as a form of property is neither recognized nor honored, our inner gifts will find themselves excluded from the very commerce which is their nourishment. Or to say the same thing from a different angle, where commerce is exclusively a traffic in merchandise, the gifted cannot enter into the give-and-take that ensures the livelihood of their spirit.30

Art is what happens in the moment that we are gifted with someone's gift, whether it expresses itself as an artifact, an idea, an insight, or an image that we could never have come up with on our own. Even in a cultural context marked by mass communication, we are not all gifted in the same moment. Gifting occurs in small groups among people who share a common Want, who acknowledge a common need, bound by similar attraction through a common cast of mind, perhaps to provide a seat for hierophany, perhaps merely to dispel the alienation that comes of knowing ourselves to be separate beings. We feel our real solidarity with the generous artist-magician in our chests, in the exhalation that always accompanies Want stilled, in the ah that issues involuntarily from thought stopped.

In other words, the time of film can become, in the hands of a great artist, sacred time. Time is film's medium, just as it is the medium of our dwindling lives. It is also the film's medium of exchange: our time is what we pay for this art with. At twenty-four frames per second, Greenaway's film is running far more slowly than the speed of the mind. We take in its devastatingly beautiful illusions through our eyes and still have time to mix them with our life stories, interpret and evaluate them, all the while barely aware that, for an instant, our breathing has stopped. Paleolithic Neanderthal communities built their ossuaries as monuments to the moment when aspiration-with all of its nuances-ceased. Today we gather up the bones of our lives on film. Regardless of the medium in which it is carried, in the presence of the real, the body shares in revelation.

We face the same disruptions here in the so-called latter days that men and women faced in Wagner's day and throughout time. Newer technologies challenge the goodness and efficacy of the older ones we have come to trust, and in so doing they challenge us to continue seeing human goodness in the world in which they serve us. They challenge us to experience ourselves as more fluid than we thought, more fragile and more flexible than we thought, in order to locate and describe ourselves to ourselves, to somehow fix our being in the flux of time. As Glassie wrote, "It is the purpose of art [...] to disturb simple thought and move the mind beyond the senses into a totalizing experience."31

Prospero's books are not, however, merely fixed in optical imagination. Not satisfied with illusions however compelling, Greenaway physically manufactured them. They actually exist.32 You could pick them up, smell their leather covers, smudge their brass clasps with a greasy finger. To make them tangible was his choice, based in his respect for lived reality, the one in which our human being necessarily makes its home. The powerful illusions spawned from them as his gift-to make mirrors for us, seats for the sacred and strange that is in us-do not negate the world from which they arose.

Greenaway is a profoundly moral man and not a Religious one; his enacted vision of the sacrality of lived experience is in no way reductionist.29 As it Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

works to bridge the chasm between the body and the mind, the flesh and the text, his film expands us beyond mere dogma to connect us with the world in which we actually live-whether characterized as "traditional" or "technologically complex"-or it is not art. The folk never wholly abandon the old technologies of the sacred in favor of newer ones. All are adapted, incorporated, and remembered in the technologies of each member of the cultural body who chooses to appreciate, appropriate, and inhabit them. And while the distinctions between the folk and the fine may continue to delude us when our anxieties seek to overwhelm us with nostalgia, they must finally dissolve when the sacred rides out and into our next breath.

Footnotes Page 3

20. "Morris hated the Renaissance. The Mackail biography states that around 1873 Morris rejected a proposal to visit Rome with these words: "Do you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel?" Anderson 1969, p. 182.

21. Henry Glassie (lecture, October 1, 1996), Bloomington, IN

22. "Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision," POV, PBS in December 1996.

23. Glassie 1989, p. 68.

24. Greenaway 1991, p. 9

25. Ibid., pp. 9-12

26. Gell 1992, p. 58

27. Anderson 1969, pp. 121 and 194.

28. Greenaway 1991, p. 24.

29. Hyde 1979, p. 8.

30. Ibid., p. xiv.

31. Glassie 1989, loc. cit., footnote 12, supra.

32 Steinmetz and Greenaway 1995, p. 113

33 From Greenaway's remarks on an earlier version of this essay, imparted to me by filmmaker Bari Pearlman of NYC, who took the trouble to ask about his reaction to it.

Works Cited

Anderson, Donald M. (1969) The Art of Written Forms: The Theory and Practice of Calligraphy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Ben-Amos, Dan. "Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context" in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, no. 331, pp. 3-15. (1971) Austin: The American Folklore Society.

Doctorow, E.L. (1997) "The Politics of God," delivered at B'nai B'rith International on September 30, 1997 in Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center, broadcast by C SPAN on December 26 and 27, 1997.

Dundes, Alan. (1980) "Who Are the Folk?" in Interpreting Folklore, pp. 1-19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Originally published in Frontiers of Folklore, ed. William Bascom, 1977. Boulder: Westview Press. Newfolk NDiF: Something Rich and Strange

Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (1965) The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gell, Alfred. (1992) "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology" in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, pp. 40-63. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Glassie, Henry H. (1989) The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Harry N. Adams, Inc.

Greenaway, Peter. (1991) Prospero's Books: A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The film-script. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

Hyde, Lewis. (1979) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books.

Steinmetz, Leon and Peter Greenaway. (1995) The World of Peter Greenaway. Boston and Tokyo: Journey Editions.[el1]20

Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 2 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Page 3 Newfolk: Liz Locke

New Directions in Folklore Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive

Liz Locke, Ph.D.

Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Studies Programs 2130 Arapahoe Ave. Naropa University/Naropa College Boulder, CO 80302 [email protected]

Liz Locke received her Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Naropa University. Her passions include feminist classics (ancient Graeco-Roman mythology in translation); comparative myth and myth theory; literary theory; film studies; American popular culture and folklore; and diversity education.

Bibliography

"Don't Dream It, Be It": The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Cultural Performance(article) Something Rich and Strange: Technologies of the Sacred in Glassie and Greenaway (article)

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