Читать книгу Outlook - Charles William Johns - Страница 7

Was it really by chance that Georges Bizet completed his first draft of Carmen in the summer of 1874? Did the summer not make it so?! Georges could smell the oranges of Seville from his study just outside of Paris, perhaps even deeper primordial callings from the Chinese grapefruit of South-East Asia (the Oriental tones of the ‘other’ in Carmen). Yet the Parisian suburbs of the 19th century, along with Bizet’s decision to never write religious music again (1858), filled his scents of Spain with wine, tobacco, blood and lust. Georges used his eyes and ears as eagerly as he would his nose, tracing the iron piping of the Parisian sewage system, spanning miles and miles, until one could hear the scurrying of rats. But then a few meters farther and his senses would enter the marketplace: the sound of a woman’s heels, the new dresses being worn; beauty parading itself through the advent of the sewing machine and the new mechanical shoe makers.

But the world just beyond Western Europe, this was what Bizet could sense too. Bizet, sitting in his study, let the whole world in; the exotic, the mystery, the fantasy, the danger, the travelling, the sexual licence. A middle eastern woman somewhere in a dank tavern, with her veils, jewels, bronzed beauty and alluring dancing, the gypsies, the fishermen. On returning back to France from across the Mediterranean Sea via a leaping mullet his senses continue. He is stunned by the many chunks of grass and soil that shoot out from the ground due to a kicking bull in distress slain by a sudden estocada (the thrust of the bullfighter’s sword). All this in one moment, one breath; the un-approximated distance and presence of experience. Between the satellite image and the microscope, man was never endowed with the capacity to know how close or how far he was in relation to the universe, he would never be able to measure it but only ever be able to record it.

The two main characters in Carmen are stuck so intimately together that they cannot discern where one begins and where one ends, but the outside is always calling; Don Jose draws back from his embrace, he hears the trumpets calling the soldiers back to work . . . everyone sooner or later hears the trumpets.

Bizet’s experience was never articulated, only perhaps expressed in the rising and falling of his notes. Influence may be charted, documented and historicized but inspiration is impossible to pin down. Our Western civilization has the profoundly banal ability to quantify the purely qualitative experience of life, into galleries, museums, the paraphernalia of a culture that is always one step behind true experience.

In the ‘real’ world Bizet died without true recognition, with an abscess in the windpipe, preoccupied by bouts of mental depression, doomed to become one of those indifferent, static objects included in the grand museum of life. We should remember the leaping mullet, the estocada, and if you cannot remember, take a listen on your record player for yourself.