Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

A famous saying is “The truth will set you free but first it will make you miserable.” And so it is, often, when something has blocked our path to a life in worth and dignity - a life in the spirit common to us all. Near the end of the story in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes the transformative moment. The third spirit has shown Scrooge the abode of a lately deceased man, the cold attitude of those collecting his belongings, and the grieving family of a dead child for whom he cared not. This prompts Scrooge to undergo his dark night of the soul:

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.  "Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"  Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.  "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"  The Spirit was immovable as ever.  Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.  "Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.  The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.  "No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"  The finger still was there.  "Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!"  For the first time the hand appeared to shake.  "Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!"  The kind hand trembled.  "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"  In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.  Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost. [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave IV: “The Last of the Spirits”.]

Scrooge has just confronted himself as he is; and the misery he has inflicted on himself and others. Here is Dickens’ account of Scrooge’s awakening – his rebirth, which follows immediately after his dark night.

YES! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!  "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!"  He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.  "They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here--I am here--the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!"  His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.  "I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"  He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.  "There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace. "There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!"  Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!  "I don't know what day of the month it is!" said Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!"  He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!  Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious! [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave V: “The End of It”.]

* * * * * * * * 

We see the same two-step progression from dark night to rebirth in Hugo’s Les Misérables. Valjean has just received the bishop’s forgiveness, along with his valuable candlestick and silverware. Instead of being freed, Valjean is at first disoriented.

Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him. He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less. Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood. These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they had recurred to him. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Second – The Fall, Chapter XIII, “Little Gervais”.]

But then, Valjean encounters a child, Little Gervais. He robs and threatens the boy. The boy flees, in fear, and then after a short time:  

Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first taken.  In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling, shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"  Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he had wept in nineteen years.  When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen, quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I buy your soul. I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good God."  This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. . . . When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean Valjean recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror. It was because,--strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only in the situation in which he found himself,--in stealing the money from that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.  . . . This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by him.  His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. . . . Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.  As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed. He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise.  How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept? Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning, saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Second – The Fall, Chapter XIII, “Little Gervais”.]

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Clocking in at eighty minutes or more, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection” (1894), is epic in length but once you understand the symphony, you realize that every phrase is necessary. Mahler was assessing life: its meaning and its great questions. Most important for us as Humanists is the question: how are we to approach life so that we may live in the most meaningful and productive way. For us, the answer to that question can be heard symbolically in this music. Mahler wrote program notes for each movement, which I reproduce below, inserting the timing points from the linked performance that correspond to the related portion of the note.

• Movement 1: Allegro maestoso: “We stand by the coffin of a person well loved. His whole life, his struggles, his passions, his sufferings, and his accomplishments on earth once more for the last time pass before us. And now, in this solemn and deeply stirring moment, when the confusions and distractions of everyday life are lifted like a hood from our eyes, a voice of awe-inspiring solemnity chills our heart – a voice that, blinded in the mirage of everyday life, we usually ignore: ‘What next? What is life and what is death? Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all nothing but a huge, frightening joke? Will we live on eternally? Do our life and death have no meaning?’ We must answer these questions in some way if we are to go on living – indeed, if we are to go on dying! He into whose life this call has once sounded must give an answer. And this answer I give in the final movement.”
• Movement 2: Andante moderato: “A memory, a ray of sunlight, pure and cloudless, out of the departed’s life. You must surely have had the experience of burying someone dear to you, and then, perhaps, on the way back, some long-forgotten hour of shared happiness suddenly rose before your inner eye, sending, as it were, a sunbeam into your soul – not overcast by any shadow – and you almost forgot what had just taken place.”
• Movement 3: In ruhig fliessender Bewegung: “When you awaken from that blissful dream and are forced to return to this tangled life of ours, it may easily happen that this surge of life ceaselessly in motion, never resting, never comprehensible, suddenly seems eerie, like the billowing of dancing figures in a brightly lit ballroom that you gaze into from outside in the dark – and from a distance so great that you can no longer hear the music. Then the turning and twisting movement of the couples seems senseless. You must imagine that, to one who has lost his identity and his happiness, the world looks like this - distorted and crazy, as if reflected in a concave mirror. Life then becomes meaningless. Utter disgust for every form of existence and evolution seizes him in an iron grip, and he cries out in a scream of anguish.”
• Movement 4: “Urlicht”: Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht: “The moving voice of naïve faith sounds in our ears. ‘I am from God and will return to God. The dear God will give me a light, will light me to eternal blessed life!” That will be delightful, should I wake after my death to another life. I perceive another message: that spiritual rebirth is in life here and now – spiritual life in which fear is put aside and we move forward in the light that is perpetual within our lifetime, if we can only see it. This is the lesson of the remainder of the symphony, as follows.
• Movement 5: Im Tempo des Scherzo; Langsam; Maestoso; Allegro energico; Langsam; ‘der grosse Appell”; Langsam misterioso; mit Aufschwung, aber nicht eilen; Langsam: “Once more we must confront terrifying questions. The movement starts with the same dreadful scream of anguish that ended the Scherzo. The voice of the Caller is heard. The end of every living thing has come, the last judgment is at hand, and the horror of the day of days has come upon us. The earth trembles (5:45); the last trump sounds (6:44); the grave burst open; all the creatures struggle out of the ground, moaning and trembling (6:55). Now they march in a mighty procession (7:01): rich and poor, peasants and kings, the whole church with bishops and popes. All have the same fear, all cry and tremble alike because, in the eyes of God, there are no just men. The cry for mercy and forgiveness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually more terrible. Our senses desert us; all consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches (10:44). The trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out (11:36). Finally, after all have left their empty graves and the earth lies silent and deserted, there comes only the long-drawn note of the bird of death (19:57). Even it finally dies (20:18 – 21:43). What happens now is far from expected: Everything has ceased to exist. The gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts is then heard (21:43). Soft and simple, the words gently swell up: ‘Rise again, yes, rise again thou wilt!’ Then the glory of God comes into sight (24:18). A wondrous light strikes us to the heart (25:06). All is quiet and blissful (25:08). Lo and behold: There is no judgment, no sinners, no just men, no great and no small; there is no punishment and no reward (27:59, 29:56). A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge (29:14) and illuminates our existence (35:00).”

Great recordings of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2:

• New York Philharmonic Orchestra (Walter) in 1958;
• Vienna State Opera Orchestra (Scherchen) in 1958;
• Philharmonia Orchestra (Klemperer) in 1963;
• London Symphony Orchestra (Solti) in 1964;
• Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Klemperer) in 1965;
• Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Kubelik) in 1968;
• Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Mehta) in 1975 ***;
• Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Abbado) in 1976;
• City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Rattle) in 1986;
• London Symphony Orchestra (Bernstein), if only to watch Lennie conduct;
• Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Haitink) in 2009;
• London Philharmonic Orchestra (Jurowski) in 2011;
• Philharmonia Orchestra (Zander) in 2012; and
• Philharmonia Orchestra (Rouvali) in 2023.

Other works:

• Rued Langgaard, Symphony No. 16, “Syndflod of Sol” (Sun Deluge), BVN 417 (1950-1951) (approx. 22’)
• Giya Kancheli, Styx, for viola, mixed choir and orchestra (1999) (approx. 34-40’), evokes a transformation from darkness into light.
• Alastair White, WOAD (2021) (approx. 86’), a minimalist fashion opera and “performance piece of a long poem by the composer that takes its impetus from the Scottish folk tale of Tam Lin, who is transformed into various creatures and objects by the Queen of the Fairies”
• Nikolai Korndorf, Triptych (1998) (approx. 21’): the three movements are “Lament”, “Response” and “Glorification”.
• Edward Gregson, String Quartet No. 1 (2014) (approx. 27’): the composer describes the work as a journey from darkness into light.
• Mieczysław Karłowicz, Symphony in E minor, Op. 7, "Rebirth" (Odrodzenie) (1902) (approx. 41-42’)
• Anthony Iannoccone, Symphony No. 3, “Night Rivers” (1992) (approx. 19-20’), after Walt Whitman’s poem, “The Sleepers”

The symphonic metal group Apocalyptica incorporates a cello into their music, transforming both the instrument and the genre. Their repeated switches from one mode of playing into another are also intriguing. Here are links to their releases, their playlists, and some videos.

Albums:

• Alice Coltrane, “Transfiguration” (1978) (82’) “reveals in total the ambitious and profound free jazz and universal musical frontiers Ms. Coltrane was able to explore in both small and larger groups.”
• Blaer, “Yellow” (2020) (56’): “. . . Nydegger creates minimal but carefully conceived compositionsl structures and explores fresh musical notions of how to reinvent the ‘jazz’ band.”
• Blaer, “Out of Silence” (2017) (59’): “Hypnotic piano patterns are the body and stomach discipline of the lead musician, but they also allow for eruptive moments, which is sorely necessary over such distances. The result is an entertaining complete work . . .”
• Anthony Romaniuk, “Bells” (2020) (78’): Romaniuk’s style of play transforms these piano pieces.
• Matthew Shipp, “New Orbit” (2001) (39’) is “an album that manages to merge the accessibility and raw appeal of Pastoral Composure with adventurous new textures that go beyond anything he has produced in the past.”
• Cykada, “Metamorphosis” (2023) (36’) “is a complete reinvention of their sound which sees them embrace almost more harder-edged, rock influences while still side-stepping any definitive tags or descriptions someone with a pen might try to impose.”
• James Brandon Lewis Quartet, “Transfiguration” (2024) (56’): “The title track, an exploration of 12-tone music, pulsates with a polyrhythmic feel and a modal sense of urgency, exhibiting a grandiose theme statement, a tour-de-force tenor discourse, and agile accompaniment.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

In Les Miserables, Valjean is reborn when he accepts and embraces the generosity and forgiveness of another man.

From the dark side: Javert’s rejection of salvation, set to the same music.

Visual Arts

• Farid de la Ossa, Male Rebirth
• Farid de la Ossa, Female Rebirth

Film and Stage

• A Christmas Carol (see also this great version), Dickens’ classic story
• Mostly Martha: a talented but reclusive chef finds human connection through her newly orphaned eight-year-old niece.