Owl and Bača/Griffiths' *when the time comes*
The painting of Owl, protagonist of *when the time comes*, is by violist/painter Chiu Chen Liu.
In Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Johann Peter Hebel’s “Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” he says (paraphrasing) every turn in the action is motivated by a death.
I like that, but I drill down further. For me every turn, for example, in Trevor Bača/Paul Griffiths' *when the time comes*, is in the light of an obeisance to a primal scene. A memento mori is just one example of such.
In *when the time comes* that obeisance is everywhere and nowhere.
An obesiance that is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
The brilliance of Trevor Bača's magical music is in that it resounds with a firm acknowledgement that it is in counterpoint with the sound of one hand clapping.
East-West resonances: see my bits about Tristan chord/dominant 7 chord (inversions of one another) as the Western yin/yang.
Somewhere in Albert Salomon's collected writings, likely in the essay on Weber, the point is made that Kafka and such are in a space that is extremely introverted, a moment of anomalous introversion caused by the rising irrationality (a singularity, a zero in the denominator) running up to the first world war. (We are again in a phase of untenable irrationality.) To me, that degree of introversion is normal and right; to an extrovert it will seem weird. Walter Benjamin & I are in that Kafka space and to us the extroverts seem very strange. Joy Zinoman & Nancy Robinette's treatment brillantly crosses the spectrum of Schiller typologies, or Yeats A Vision typologies -- flickers between points of view.
Aurum Potable -- the joke on the world is swallowed whole.
A separate issue -- someone close to the production found Chiu Chen Liu's image both charming and unsettling, saying that for him, "unsettling is a good thing". I suppose that unsettling quality is in that Chiu Chen has the owl inside the window looking out at the moon. This like those unsettling images, painted by analysands, of trees whose brances dip down, back into the earth with the roots.