The Immortal Act
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
— W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
A few nights ago I attended a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: four programmatic violin concertos, interspersed with a derivative set of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, played by a lovely New Orleans-based string quartet. The stage in the church, lit almost entirely by candlelight (battery-powered, of course), was aglow with warm gold, vibrant flickers in the shadows arranged like flower petals against the pale Sheetrock.
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When the Spring concerto began, and the iconic first notes burst through the air, it was hard not to smile, and as the performance went on, to contain tears. There is audible joy but also tragedy in the strings, apart from its narrative intentions, the soloist’s face twitching in the crescendo, crumbling in the somber whining of the minor chords. Music is and will remain a catharsis for me, a massage for the soul. Between the notes, I was overcome by the notion that music is a shared thread that unites our spirits across time and space. What Vivaldi felt as he purportedly wrote his poetry he then translated into a language without words that is made palpable by sound, deftly communicated and immediately comprehensible by anyone who cares to listen.
Understanding the magnitude of this benefits from no such ease. Is it true, then, that we can become immortal through music — or more specifically, art? Do the productions of our creativity fossilize us, as they are buried under the sediment of history, agitated by cultural erosion, social strife, economic instability, geopolitical conflict, shifting fads — time — moving upturned toward the topsoil and dredged from antiquity, only to live another life in the hearts and minds of new generations? For millennia we have searched for a fountain of youth in boiled flesh and frequented brothels, bad toupées, hidden birth certificates, lotions and hair dye and neurotoxins, draining our authenticity only to die in vain of ever reversing the forward hands of time.
So then, a pivotal Hobson’s choice. The immortal act is to offer oneself to the world, without company, naked and crippled by shame. Such is the artistic process, the makings of a legacy. And if legacy is ultimately what survives death, so too can we.
