Dream: I was in, for example, D., occupied by, for instance,
the Nazis, and we were being taken out daily to be executed. My turn was to be
the following day. I had been resigned to my mortality: but now, somewhere near
the M. Z. shopping centre, I started to feel rebellious. I would do my best to
escape, rather than submit. I would head north. I would hide in bogs and
sewers. Even an extra day of life was worth fighting for.
Can science ever be too pedantic? Or, say, finance? Or
furniture building?
What I do is exactly what I need to do (and can do).
Top of the Lake.
The pleasure of just seeing – New Zealand, for example. I am being given an
edited version? Someone else’s? But when would this not be the case? I know, I
know, there are differences, there is
nothing but differences.
Glazunov Symphony 4 cond. Mravinsky. More by the Leningrad
Symphony Orchestra.
E.g. Vadim Salmanov, Symphony 2 – a sudden new world. In a
recording: conditions of composition and of performance (e.g. the audience –
the people you don’t hear, apart from coughs and applause – you hear their silence). (Later: the people are silent.)
The time we went to Erasmus’s church. – Back to illud tempus. – Visions of vast brick
churches in the lowlands of Europe. – 1666. - What did 1666 gather? In terms of
dread and knowledge and vague but intense longing.
Music – metaphor: Debussy’s ‘Waves’ could be a dance of the
fairies, or a walk in a windy day, or young love, or (the woodwind is sometimes
oriental) a scene from Japanese feudal history. Ainigma. – Seeing as, and hearing as. (Kandinsky.) The wind versus
waves: some skirmish in the fields of Lombardy. (Verdi.)
Blue – girl with blue skirt has just gone by – very blue,
like the robe of the Madonna in some Paolo della Francesca – so Italian art is
essentially a way of keeping cool in a hot climate. (Not an echo: a
complement.)
In heaven, would they have memories of heaven? (‘Do you
remember that… day?... when we… did what, exactly?) ‘Of course not! There is no
time!’
Toscanini’s Debussy is outstanding. - His Haffner symphony
is boring (as it is under most conductors) until the silverfire of the finale.
Cortot’s Debussy – not good, too stolid. Debussy plays
Debussy (piano rolls?) – outstanding.
