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THE SONGWRITER AS POET:
IAN MCCULLOCH AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRADITION
Kristin F. Smith
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Chapter 8: Transience and Resilience
Everything changes, always. The world goes on, and our individual lives do not. We all grapple with these basic contradictions, some of us more eloquently than others. The Pre-Raphaelites were very eloquent. So is Ian McCulloch.
How do we live in the 'now' without being overwhelmed by foreboding of the future? More to the point, how do we find peace in love, pleasure in success, satisfaction in achievement? All are ours for only a brief space. For the Holman Hunts among us, the answer is obvious: unquestioning faith in God and a firm expectation of Heaven. Those who come to the issue with more uncertainty and less didacticism probably speak for the vast majority of their fellow humans. The struggle to reconcile what we know with what we want to believe, what we feel with what we fear, yields some of the best works of both McCulloch and Rossetti.
An early McCulloch work, Turquoise Days, puts it bluntly: "the smell of the fields never lasts" [IM; Turquoise Days; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]. "Fields", as any farmer can testify, represent the essence of transience. They are sown and nurtured, their crops grow and flourish, and they are harvested and plowed under - all within a season. We may also note the Biblical reference [Genesis 27], in which "the smell of the fields" proves illusory and deceptive.
Thus, man lives a brief existence in a mutable and untrustworthy world, and must find what joy he can in that. The artist who takes on this theme has a difficult row to hoe, and the tendency is to get sanctimonious. McCulloch does not. Foregoing any poetically elevated talk about the meaning and purpose of life, he opts instead for a simple, moving declaration of what it means to be human:
"It's not for glory
It's not for honour
Just something someone said
It's not for love
It's not for war
Just hands clasped together" [IM; Turquoise Days; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
This is somewhat reminiscent of Yeats' poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death [Note 6]. We base our lives not around grand concepts, but prosaic details ("Just something someone said") and our own private feelings. We have each other, McCulloch notes, advising a combination of the love world and carpe diem, in a pair of painterly, very Pre-Raphaelitic images:
"Put your faith in those crimson nights
Set sail in those turquoise days" [IM; Turquoise Days; HEAVEN UP HERE; 1981]
This first brings to mind - given McCulloch's penchant for sea-faring imagery - the old mariners' adage: 'red sky at night, sailor's delight; red in the morning, sailor take warning'. It seems he is recommending the best conditions for hitting the seas of life. "Crimson nights" also suggests the erotic romanticism of the love world, and those beautiful, clear "turquoise days" are there to be seized upon. We must put our faith in Love and lift anchor.
CANDLELAND, McCulloch's 1989 watershed album, speaks powerfully of growing older, of opportunities missed, and of the resilience of the human spirit in a world where human life is ephemeral. In Bloom puts life's impermanence in metaphorical terms:
"Rice fields
Feet soaking
Minefields
Here's hoping
-------------------
So soon
Vanishing days
Perfume
Of dead bouquets...." [IM; In Bloom; CANDLELAND; 1989]
This series of strong, suggestive images encapsulates a human life: we wade through the muck, hoping to avoid disaster, and "so soon" we reach the end, left with only distant memories of the time we were "in bloom". (For Americans of a certain age, these images call up particular memories of a war half a world away which shaped and scarred our lives. It seems improbable that McCulloch, who was born in 1959, had this in mind. Good poetry takes on a life of its own and yields a diversity of meanings.)
CANDLELAND does not end in futility. The album's last song, Start Again, holds out the promise of hope and renewal:
"One day
I'll come around
Wonder when
I'll turn around
And start again" [IM; Start Again; CANDLELAND; 1989]
The human spirit, McCulloch tells us, is resilient. Even within our limited time, we can still "start again".
Nothing Lasts Forever [1997] stands as McCulloch's definitive statement on change, Fate and life's transience. A more personal exploration of ideas developed in The Killing Moon [1984], it replaces the abstract with the particular; the world at large with the self; the mind with the heart. A vibrantly romantic song, Nothing Lasts Forever is conversely bleak in outlook, as though by its very richness McCulloch seeks to convey the pain of inevitable loss.
The song opens upon the Poet's declaration that: "I want it now". What he wants is every good thing he can wrest from life. Vague hopes of better tomorrows do not suffice: "I need to live in dreams today". Foremost among these dreams is the Beloved. In one of McCulloch's strongest statements on love, the Poet lays it all on the line:
"I'd walk to you through rings of fire
But never let you know the way I feel
Under skin is where I hide
A love that always gets me on my knees" [IM; Nothing Lasts Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
This requires no further exposition, and the Poet moves on, compressing into one phrase all of life's other desirables: "Don't tell me that my ship is coming in". He seeks what he knows he can never attain ("more than I can get"), as though the act of seeking may somehow allay his certain knowledge that all will be taken in the end. He is, he tells us:
"Just trying to, trying to, trying to
Forget
Nothing ever lasts forever...." [IM; Nothing Lasts Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
McCulloch does not undercut the power of his song by offering solutions - for there are none. He holds out instead the idea of consolation; for his listeners, a richly beautiful song. For the Poet, a conclusion harking back to Ocean Rain:
"All the shadows and the pain
Are coming to you ...." [IM; Nothing Lasts Forever; EVERGREEN; 1997]
Rossetti knew, better than most, that "nothing lasts forever", and he understood resilience. We see this in those gorgeous watercolors of the 1850s - the medieval lovers and the lovingly-rendered scenes from La Vita Nuova. Each is by its very substance -- delicate color upon paper - a testament to the fragility of beauty, life and art. Rossetti tended to treat watercolor paints like oils, and he developed his own techniques. These little paintings are intricate, crafted. It is as if he is saying, 'I know this cannot last, but it is beautiful, and precious to me, and I will take care with it'.
This 'be here now' quality luminates his innumerable pencil drawings of Lizzie Siddal. Done one after another (biographers have said 'obsessively'), they capture fleeting moments of time: Lizzie curled up in a chair; Lizzie standing beside an easel; Lizzie reading a book. These drawings comprise some of Rossetti's finest work, and their bitter-sweet poignancy calls to us across the years.
Beata Beatrix [1864] is Nothing Lasts Forever rendered in oils on canvas. This painting stands as Rossetti's masterpiece and defines Pre-Raphaelite 'feeling'.
It is the climactic scene from Dante's La Vita Nuova. Beatrice sits on a balcony overlooking Florence; we see in the background a vague cityscape, and a bridge spanning the Arno. A red bird, the color of Love, and the counterpart of the white dove of the Annunciation, drops a poppy into her opened hands. On the street below, Dante and the god Love pass one another for the last time. A sundial shows the hour of nine. Beatrice's eyes are closed, her face upturned, her body trembling with a tension both sexual and devout. It is the moment in La Vita Nuova when, as Dante tells us, "the Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself" [DGR's translation; 1861].
The painting works on several levels. It is a memorial to Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti. It is an interpretation of a key episode from Dante. And it is a statement of Rossetti's core beliefs about the undying power of love, beauty and art.
The autobiographical elements are clear. We need only substitute London for Florence, the Thames for the Arno and, for the Ponte Vecchio, Blackfriars Bridge, which the Rossettis could see from their flat in Chatham Place. Even the poppy, traditional symbol of sleep and death -- and peace -- takes on special significance; Lizzie Siddal Rossetti died of opiate poisoning.
But the painting's true meaning lies below the surface. We must not overlook this Dantean subtext, because it was central to Rossetti. Dante does not relate the circumstances of Beatrice's death. He makes a big show of not doing so, citing three reasons, none of which holds water. In fact, Beatrice does not 'die' - particularly not in Rossetti's painting. She is 'rapt up' to Heaven. Behind those closed eyelids she is seeing a new reality, and we are witnessing that revelation.
Evelyn Waugh pronounced Beata Beatrix "the most purely devotional and spiritual work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire" [Waugh]. This grand accolade seems at first startling, if not over the top. But it gets to the heart of Beata Beatrix -- and of Rossetti's female portraiture in general. The painting serves as a bridge between our world of ordinary perception and higher realities where, for Rossetti, Love and Beauty reign. Beata Beatrix is about that, not death.
Like McCulloch, Rossetti offers no solutions, only consolation - the beauty of his painting. And all these years later, that painting is still very beautiful.
Note 6: The relevant lines are:
"My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds" [William Butler Yeats; An Irish Airman Foresees His Death] Back to text
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An Annotated Discography: Works by Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant, Electrafixion and Glide (off-site link)
Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion: Album Reviews (off-site link)
The Bunnymen Concert Log: A comprehensive, annotated listing of concert dates, venues and set lists for Echo and the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch and Electrafixion (off-site link)
Bunnymen.info - The (Unofficial) News Source (off-site link, run by Charles Pham)
Aldems' Political Quotations: Apt and Otherwise
BlindFool and Scruffy Dog: Dilettantes-at-Large
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