Makropoulos on Makropulos

The only problem with

Janacek's Makropulos Affair

is that it is not the original.

In fact, Janáček

took the opera and made it

as much about him as it was about

me,

Elina Makropoulos,

just as some crazy blogger

might take my story

and make it as much about her

as it is about

me,

Elina Makropoulos.

This past week, I decided to reread the play that some might claim 

was my origin, and I want to comment on it,

for a line or two or three,

or more.

I think it is unfair to the playwright that the opera appears to get produced

far more than his play does.  And the play, quite frankly, is very good,

and very timely, indeed.

The author, Karel Čapek

(and I've made it a point to represent his name correctly -- it appears that his last name,

if represented and pronounced correctly, would sound like "chapik" more or less.)

was, in no uncertain terms, a visionary.  His play about me

 reminds me of some of the details that I had forgotten,

and even misrepresented, here in my blog.  So, to begin, 

I would like to correct them:

In both the opera and the play it appears the actual origin of my 

perpetual eternal state of youth is explained as this:

my father was the alchemist for Emperor Rudolf II

of Greece, and the Emperor wanted a formula for

eternal life.  My father obliged.  The Emperor demanded, though,

that my father try the formula out on me, and he did. I was in a coma for

a week, and then woke up and that was that.  I was altered, and began to experience the comings and goings of every dear person that I ever loved. 

Now, according to Janáček's

libretto, I ran off with the formula, and began my operatic career.  It appears to me

that the opera is a bit more deliberate in making me want eternal life.

 

And of course: why wouldn't one want

eternal life?   This, of course, was the question that intrigued my dear

Mr. Čapek.  The poor man, after all, was nearly a cripple 

all of his life, and hopelessly in love with a woman who perhaps 

he also even feared.  Lucky for him, he did marry her, in his 40's,

and I sincerely hope he found some kind of joy with her before he died,

so young, right on the brink of the Second World War.

And why wouldn't one want eternal life?  For a time,

I adored it, and I adored the different men who fell

at my feet.  In a nutshell, everyone thought 

I was pretty "hot."  And the beauty of experiencing life

and love more and more in a body that does not age

is that one gains a knowledge and certainty

that shines in the eyes, and makes one's ever-youthful body

all the more attractive.  Yes, for a time, one 

Elina Makropoulos had the time

of her endless life -- men fell at my feet;

women, too, and occasionally I suffered

the side-effect called pregnancy 

and children.  So there are bastards

aplenty

that might be credited to me.

To keep them from being able to find me,

I kept on changing my name.  Always

E.M.,

but a different name every fifty years

or so, to defray suspicion.  Dear Mr. Čapek's play

spills the beans, so to speak, telling the tale of a century's old property suit

that only I know the solution of.

(As of right now I realize that it is pretty wrong to claim my name is

Emilia Marty, the name I had in 1922, but instead just 

admit it is Elina Makropoulos, 

which is the most honest I can be short of 

giving the name of this crazy bitch who claims

she is me, and who also feels she has lived

for an eternity, and I will also tell you:

she is right.  This woman who claims my name has lived forever,

and will live forever, as will I,

in these words I write here.)

 

antaryamin

 

 But what does one lose if one lives forever?

One loses one's humanity.

Emilia Marty is not a nice woman, but men

do overlook it because she is beautiful; they fall

in love with her, but she does not care.

 

(Rather, I should say "I" -- it is so disorienting to speak 

of one's self in the Third Person.

But one does it on Facebook,

so I will continue to do so

here.)

She is a bit like the robots in Čapek's other visionary play:

R.U.R.  Ah, now that's a masterpiece, a play

worth producing today, a play about robots; in fact, Čapek coined the term

"robot."  His robots in R.U.R. are manufactured

to make human life easier -- 

and they are manufactured in absolute

human form, some even manufactured in the likeness

of beloved humans.  One such robot is made to look

as beautiful as the beautiful Helen, only for her creator to realize:

 "She's half asleep!  How can she be beautiful

if she does not know how to love?  It makes me shudder to look

at her -- I've created a cripple!"

That line from R.U.R. could be very easily moved to the Makropulos Case,

where  the eternal Emila/Elena is about as human as a robot, 

indeed -- in her drudging trudge through eternity,

she - or should I say I - loses her capacity

to love.  Each day and each love

is as dry and stale as sawdust.

Only her singing retains a trace of love,

as it wells up from a heart

that has ached a thousand times --

This strikes me as so relevant to humanity's condition today:

here we are so mechanized, and so reliant on machines,

we have lost our hearts.  As we march toward

the looming spectre of the cyborg and the Singularity,

one might say of this,  what Čapek's character Domin says of the robots:

"They say they're on a higher evolutionary plane

than man.  More intelligent, stronger.  Man is just 

their parasite . . .!"  In so-called First World Countries today,

we humans have become so wedded to our technology

that we have lost our sense of community, and with it

our hearts.  As we strive, with our medical advancements,

towards trying to attain eternal life, we overlook the importance

of love and the momentary pleasure.  

Do humans really want to be eternal?  And here I must quote

myself, Elina Makropulos, in the play dubbed by my name:

"People never get better.  Nothing changes, nothing.

Nothing matters, nothing happens.  

Shootings, earthquakes, the end of the world -- nothing!

You're here, and I'm somewhere far, far away, three hundred years away!

If only you knew how easy your lives are!"

(And why, you may ask, would a 425 year old woman

damned to eternal life,

say your lives are easy?)

 

"You're close to things.  Everything means something! 

Everything has value in the few short years of life,

so of course you live it to the full. . . . 

Fools, you're so happy!  It's disgusting to see you so happy!

And all because of the stupid accident that you'll soon be dead!

. . . . Everyone, everyone believes in something. 

What a life, you fools!  What a wonderful life!"

We try so hard to exceed ourselves, to become eternal,

but perhaps, dear friends, we've reached

our limits.  Perhaps, dear friends,

as the world seems to crumble around us,

and technology looms, threatening the end of humanity,

we need to embrace that one thing

that makes us human:

we are living, dying entities

who can find meaning in the short space of time

during which we inhabit this wonderful place

called earth.  And the greatest meaning we can 

find is the meaning the robots found at the end

of Mr. Čapek's R.U.R. , in a world where it appears

robots have overpowered all:

 

"Friends, life will not vanish, love will endure!

From love comes life, naked and tiny, taking root

in the wilderness.  Houses and machines will disintegrate.

The names of the great will whither like leaves.

Only love will bloom in the emptiness, 

casting the seeds of life to the wind."

 

And Makropoulos will live forever,

because at this stage of her life,

this stage of life she has attained 

after gaining the knowledge of the preciousness of death,

she has nothing left to embody

except that love that promises eternal life.

localonlineflowershops

Time passes in the blink of an eye when you're as old as I am.

No, I haven't posted in a while. And the Blooger world has passed me by. This new technology sometimes baffles me, though I must confess to loving it, too.

Much has happened to me, some of which I may share at some time. The challenging part of being my age is that I've known so many men, and generally, I've learned the types. There are really very few male types. But every now and then one comes along that baffles me, even scares me in his originality. And that is what I've been involved with, until I realized that if I really wanted to live until I was finished living, I really might want to get out of his life. Or get him out of mine. I hope I did it soon enough.

Yes, some people call me a risk taker. I went to a counselor who called me that, and then her conclusion after talking to me for about an hour was that I am an alcoholic. That Twentieth Century; it really was a century of hang-ups. Anything that was done in excess became an illness. One has to understand, though, the anyone who does things in excess is just being human in high gear. And unfortunately, some can't handle it. Indeed, no one can handle it if you push it too high - everyone reaches their limits. A Romanian friend made the comment to me just the other day that we strive to reach our inadequacies. We strive to find our limits. And when we find them, well we try to break through them.

When I was child, oh way too long ago, I was terrifically shy. Everything was a limit for me. You'd think I wouldn't remember that far back, but I do. Because I am still always already that terribly shy fearful child. And whenever I feel myself settling back into my fearful self, I do something else to exceed my limits. The thing is - at 424 years old, well, your outermost limit keeps becoming more extreme and extraordinary.

But I do have my limits.

Like aging children. We are really just aging children. For a period of time, we play the game of society - society is, after all, nothing but a game. The child inside of us learns to play it; some of us learn to play it better than others, because we're a little more keyed in to the folks who are setting the rules. But as we get older, well, the game gets a bit boring. This is why older people become so absolutely childish. They just resort back to their essential selves, the selves they were born with.

Mankind too gets bored with playing the game; this is why we have revolutions. We're due for a big one. Read my blogs about The Grid to see why this is an important topic to me.

Among humans, though, there are some people, who for one reason or another, recognize early on that it's all a game. They decide they will keep their childish selves alive, and take out their social selves whenever they need it. These are some of the most intelligent people around, and the most interesting. But they can also be the most dangerous. Childish impulses can be hurtful, especially when the child was reprimanded with pain. This produces mean abusive adults. You have to watch out for them; they look for people who keep the childish innocence in their eyes, and take the rules of the game very seriously. These are the people who are easily fooled.

I say these things largely because this is what I feel like talking about right now. But also, I look back at my post about Michael Jackson. He was an old soul, too, you know. As a soul, he had become so old that he was just always a child. This can be good and this can be bad. People like this sometimes get confused, and think they can play certain childish games that one really can't play when they've grown out of their childish body.

Yes, that's one of the benefits of just not having died. My body has remained my own; I'm very aware of the stages of its aging. And it is aging, now; it has been, for hundreds of years, aged rather slowly, but it's becoming a little more noticeable these days. In this body, and having never left the earth, I know what I can safely get away with. Michael kept coming back, kept getting new bodies, and he kept forgetting that bodies have this problem with growing up.

I still have so much to share, but I am getting weary. I performed Turandot at the Met tonight, and even though I love singing Turandot, and this bass Ramey is not bad for an old man, well, I am exhausted. But I'll be back, sooner rather than later.

the beginning of the end of my stories

I tend to feel that humans are a bit like cats. As T.S. Elliot helps us see, cats all have that jellicle name, that name that captures their essence and is their true name. Humans rarely name their cats by their jellicle name, because, quite frankly, we don't take the time to get to know them before we name them. Same with kids.

Makropoulos is really just a character in a story that was originally written by Karol Capek, in a play called "The Makropoulos Case." This was later made an opera by Leos Janacek, which of course I have sung in many times. I like singing my own story. The last time I saw it - yes, literally saw it from a seat in the audience - was at the English National Opera, sometime in the 1990's. It struck me than, as I watched someone up there performing the character that is me, that I have become somewhat frozen in time, and yet, look how the theatre itself has changed! My own changes have not been external. I've just continued to gather information, through novels and essays and poetry and plays and newspapers and magazines, and radio and television and movies and now the internet. And whether I like it or not, that information is all related to a similar modest theme, that being the meaning of life. Of my life? Yes, in a way. But I think I realized very early on that my own life is of very little consequence in the larger scheme of things, though I can make it meaningful for myself, and I've tried to do that. The real challenge has been to make it meaningful in a way that it's also meaningful for others.

This blog is my most recent attempt to make my life meaningful, or to capture all the meaning I've gathered over my 424 years, and to put it into some logical sequence. Yes, that's right, I've been around for at least 424 years - or at least those are the years I remember. I remember, for instance, Shakespeare. He was a skinny little runt of a man, not much to look at. But pompous and confident - and that was what made women fall for him. He thought all women loved him, and to be true, I did for a time. But he was sloppy, way too sloppy for me, both in and out of bed. And, as you might imagine, he talked way too much, and treated his wife like crap. But I'm here to tell you now that he did create most of those plays, though the actual language was often the product of a game he played with some of the other actors, like Burbage and Alleyn. Sometimes Ben Jonson came along for the fun of it, though most of the wordsmiths were actors. And there was a woman - not Shakespeare's sister, as Virginia Woolf imagined - but a woman nonetheless. Her name was Liza, as I recall, though everyone called her Val. I never really asked why.

But that was way too long ago to dwell on it. I am here, now, in 2009. A most trepidatious year. Everyone seems to be frightened - of the economy, of the weather, of the earth, of themselves. I do feel I've come to an end, perhaps an end of my life, perhaps an end of life as we know it, perhaps just an end, packed with all the hopefulness of a new beginning. Everything I see seems to be aware of the endings around us, and the changes that come with them.

I could make myself miserable thinking about endings, and - quite frankly - sometimes I do. However, I force myself to be more optimistic. There is a new beginning beyond the ending, even if that beginning is the beginning of an eternal, sweet, silence. It's something, and if nothing exists, than silence is something. It has form and dimension, when cast against the platform of nothing.

But I diverge. . . . I must tell you of a dream I had, about six years ago, and that marked, for me, the beginning of the beginning . I don't know if I can truly categorize it as a dream, except for the fact that it happened at night. What it really was was a voice, and it wasn't the first time I had hear this voice. Let me tell you.

I heard it first around 1984, when I was living in my grandmother's house, shortly after her death. My father's death preceded hers by a few years. I was always a bit of a loner, but a pleasant one. And dating back to my childhood, I had this horrible tendency to have premonitions or visions. Dead people would appear in my dreams and give me messages for the living. When this voice came to me in the 80's, my premonitions had subsided a little. But there I was, sleeping in my grandmother's bed, when a voice ripped me out of my slumber with one statement: "we are entering a new era."

The statement itself did not appall me. I was about to go off to begin my M.A., so I figured it was pretty much a personal message, though I really did find the voice to be quite creepy. It did not come from me. It came from outside of me. It hovered over me, like a protective mother over her child. Its tone was deep and cavernous.

I'll honestly tell you that, until I heard the voice again, in 2004, I hadn't thought that much about it. But then I heard it again. This time, I was in New York State, and it was the first weeks of my new job there. I was comfortable for the most part, and vere excited about the new position. And I was sleeping.

Suddenly, during the early morning hours, a voice - the same voice - ripped me from my sleep. The voice was deep, as I said, and it sounded terrifically hollow. It also seemed to be straining to produce itself, as if it needed ana apparatus, with a throat, to creat the sound it needed to make. The sound, too, seemed to be coming out of a skeleton, like ti was pushing itself through an impossible aparatus, in order to b e able to speak and make words.

What was shocking, though, was the news it gave:

"Jesus will come as the scholar on the four days of the grid."

I woke up, right away, and wrote it down, then went back to sleep, hoping it would continue, and tell me, for instance, what the grid is, or who Jesus would be. It said nothing more.

I went to a psychic and explained the message to him. He said it was probably personal. The Jesus it referred to is the Jesus in me. OK, fine, that works (I thought.)

I forgot the message for a little while, but not long. It was just too odd of a message, and the voice that bore it was so urgent. Whenever I try to explain that voice, I think about it this way: it was a compulsion to speak. But to speak requires an apparatus. So somehow the compulsion to speak found some form of semi-physical apparatus, and the words tore through it, as they might through a skull or a boney aperture. Thus, the voice itself is hollow, almost the negative image of a voice.

Anyway, I eventually found myself thinking about the message again, and especially a couple of its key words: the Grid and/or the Age of the Grid. Jesus. The scholar.

It seems the term "the grid" has been in popular usage for a little while, and, in particular,it has come to refer to electronic media, We have companies called "National Grid," and the phone service is on a grid. Grids surround us.; they help us make life manageable.

And then there is the matter of Jesus, an image who many people on this planet feel they have a personal relationship with. But do they really know him? What's he like? Will he like candy or ice cream? Will he be a person at all? Or many? Or just an impulse?

And then there's the matter of scholarship. Sophia Knowledge. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is the most important thing a human can work towards.

Ever since I received that message, I've been pursuing its meaning. I have some ideas. I'll share them with you later. I hope you enjoy them, but alway remember: they are fictions. Even I am a fiction, and a product of fiction.

Thanks for stopping by --