The Unanswered Question is a musical work by American composer Charles Ives. Originally paired with Central Park in the Dark as Two Contemplations in 1908. The Unanswered Question was revived by Ives in 1930--1935. As with many of Ives' works, it was largely unknown until much later in his life, and was not performed until 1946.
Against a background of slow, quiet strings representing "The Silence of the Druids", a solo trumpet poses "The Perennial Question of Existence", to which a woodwind quartet of "Fighting Answerers" tries vainly to provide an answer, growing more frustrated and dissonant until they give up. The three groups of instruments perform in independent tempos and are placed separately on the stage—the strings offstage.
---The Sphinx is drowsy,
The wings are furled;
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
"Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?--
I awaited the seer,
While they slumbered and slept;--
"The fate of the man-child;
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Daedalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking,
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep?
"Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.
"The waves, unashamed,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.
"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence,
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,--
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
"The babe by its mother
Lies bathed in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,--
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.
"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.
"Outspoke the great mother,
Beholding his fear;--
At the sound of her accents
Cold shuddered the sphere:--
'Who has drugged my boy's cup?
Who has mixed my boy's bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
Has turned the man-child's head?'"
I heard a poet answer,
Aloud and cheerfully,
"Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fad in the light of
Their meaning sublime.
"The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trace him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.
"Profounder, profounder,
Man's spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,--for new heavens
He spurneth the old.
"Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
And the joy that is sweetest
Lurks in stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?--
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
"Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flied;
And under pain, pleasure,--
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.
"Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits!
Thy sight is growing blear;
Rue, myrrh, and cummin for the Sphinx--
Her muddy eyes to clear!"--
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,--
Said, "Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.
"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see they proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply."
Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave;
She stood Monadnoc's head.
Through a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame:
"Who telleth one of my meanings,
Is master of all I am."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Sphinx"
6 comments:
The tired old adjective "evocative" is all I can summon up as a response to Ive's brief orchestral tone poem at this early hour.
I think it very deep –– "primordial "comes to mind. the trumpet attempts to awaken consciousness of being, I suspect. The woodwind not the gabblng of Man's inherent resistance to Awareness –– a desire to remain comfortably asleep in the face of the Incessant Challenges which for the basis of both animal and human existence.
Ives really was a New Englan Original. He belongs with Hawthorne, Emerson, and other mystics and poets of Concord, and Emily Dickinson, and later Robert Frost. Why the climate both mental and meteorological
that characterized the region we know as New England should have produced such a remarkable concentration of artistic talent and men of genius must remain a mystery.
Speculation and tenable theories would probably strike too many today as "RACISTIC," probably supportive of a belief in WHITE SUPREMACY, –– or even ANTI-SEMITIC (God forbid!), so in the interests of the rigidly enforced standards of institutionlized hypocrisy that have gained a stranglehold on the nation today we must eschew such notions and keep them to ourselves, mustn't we?
Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave;
She stood Monadnoc's head.
These closing lines from Emerson's poem about the Sphinx show an exuberant, wildly imaginative, almost expressionistic side to the usual sober, rational, commonsensical, quasi-austere character we usually expect from Emerson:
Despite being Italian on my mother's side of the family, I too have staunch New England roots from my father whose family members arrived here shortly after the Mayflower, and were among the earliest English people from Cornwall who were instrumental in founding and settling what-was-to-become the State of Maine. Later some of them became sea captains and grew rich commanding clipper ships in the China Trade. One married an Indian squaw, so I have Native-American blood in my veins. ;-)
What awesome power it is to find
The beauty to which most are blind.
Hidden in each grain of sand ––
The rocks and trees that dot the land ––
The rushing cataracts and streams
Where dancing fish help feed our dreams
The sweetness in a lover's eyes
Gives hope that makes our spirits rise.
These things that make sweet memories
Bring solace when atrocities
Threaten our peace of mind
The poignant scenes from times long past
Preserve the joys that did not last.
~ FreeThinke
_______ A Backward Glance _______
I gaze now in perpetual wonderment, grief
And sorrow at the jagged, rotting stump
Of the once-vital, arcing grandeur
Of the dear and familiar tree
That gave me shade and comfort,
While all around me weeds, thorns
Strange, stunted saplings, and bitter fruit
Litter the parched stony soil
Beneath a pitiless, gray wintery sky.
~ FreeThinke
_________ A Simile Suggested ________
Once so fresh, so pure, so white, so chaste ––
Pristine glory –– virginal –– Divine ––
Cannot help, once in this world of waste,
But lose appeal as it loses its shine.
Life, a ceaseless process, wears us down,
Sullies and defiles us from the creche,
Layering grime on all who wear a crown,
Till the fields, or pick the flowers fresh.
Rulers and the slaves who do their bidding
Nature treats without a hint of favor
Of cruel equality there is no ridding ––
Lives once faded start to lose their savor.
And so, the way of piles of grimy snow
Eventually, must every mortal go.
~ FreeThinke
______ A WOODLAND ODYSSEY ______
Alone I walk down shady woodland paths.
Bright sunshine filtered through the trees
Dapples the ground beneath my questing feet.
Here at last I am alone with God.
Farther on a little pool catches
And reflects the filtered light which beckons
Kindly like a White Witch of the Wood.
I feel a thrill without a trace of fear.
I cannot stop myself from moving closer
Toward the Edge to see the Tadpoles swimming
In myriad stages of development.
I feel a wish to be part of their world.
The pool is a Mirror enabling me to see
Myself more clearly in a tranquil light;
Also an Eye that opens the mysteries of
The Universe to peace-filled understanding.
~ FreeThinke (c. 1960)
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