Alba II: City

If the sun rises and sets expressing the historicity of times and places—the dusk and the dawn in their world historical senses—then the city evokes a relational field that daybreak simultaneously illuminates and obscures. The city: a name (civic relations, i.e., those relations that define what it means to be civil: civil war, civil society) that weakly disguises the uncertainty of a word that has little conceptual force above whatever historical and geographical dawn we may specify in naming it: polis, civitates, urbs, oppidum, città, Stadt, 城市 [chéng shi]. Bologna, Freiburg, Lagos, Megiddo, Lahore, New York, Shanghai, Thebes, The City of God: what is a city? Aristotle asks: “what are the borders of the polis?” Certainly not those which lie around it, its city limits.

The question implies a problem such that to define the city requires identifying the marks that differentiate or demarcate its inhabitants in partitions. For the ancients: families, citizens, immigrants, lovers, hosts and guests, women, children, slaves, animals, automatons, machines, aristocrats and oligarchs, the demos, the priest and sovereign. And a similarly complex ranking of diverse technical abilities: prophets, sages, strategists, military personnel, scientists, productive artisans, maintenance engineers, artists and rhapsodists, rulers and representatives, translators, sophists and legislative officials, athletes and trainers, teachers, critics, rebels, outsiders, parasites or scapegoats, layabouts, police & thieves, bandits, grifters and, scraping the barrel, tyrants. These distinctions retain some force, even as cities in the twenty first century enter into formal and deceptively informal diversity, from microstates to megaregions, and differ with respect to their relative rates of growth, stagnation, decay or destruction. It is not the ranking as such that manifests the fascist histories of the twentieth century but the always implicit possibility of its manipulation and reversal.

The question is: given the diversity of the relational field, in which anyone might embody an intersection of civic types (and be at once sovereign, citizen, immigrant, parasite and thief), how can the difference be legislated between actions that harm the city and those that protect it from harm? The city today is overexposed to the point of interminable satire in the real time screens of its connective media. But each exemplary city betrays the generality of its term in its being both unlike any other and yet intrinsically connected to every other one. More seriously even than this, the world conjured by a name of a city exceeds anything that might be specified by iconic buildings and architecture, by population figures, by economic success or decline. A city is first of all a foundation, a dwelling, the first house.

A small group climbs a mountain before dawn to observe the sun rising on the eastern horizon. Far from the city limits, the dawn nonetheless rises over the city that the group has temporarily vacated. Three distinct mythopoeic ideas—those of the dawn, the world, the city—lie adjacent in becoming philosophemes but in a way that may be harder to observe elsewhere than in the poetic treatment of the mytheme that combines them. One recognises the face of the dawn in songs of foreboding sung in the voices of lovers due to part. The theme in these cases cannot easily be specified, as e.g., lovers parting, the dangerous liaison, the illicit affair and its disappointed epitaph at the end of relations, because these motifs provide the consistency of a reiterated mytheme in the service of thematising what would otherwise be difficult to capture. The same mytheme has been used for centuries as a vehicle for a poetics whose aim might have been to identify and isolate the narrowest focus for the least observable thing.

The predawn Lalit, a raag sung or played before dawn, can be distinguished by those who know the aaroh and avaroh (the sequences of ascending and descending tones respectively) from other raags. In classical theory the twelve pitches (shruti) in an octave include the seven notes (swara): sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, five of which have natural and sharp variants (shuddha and tiara). The Lalit swara emphasises re and dha (minor second and minor sixth) and includes both shuddha and tiara variants of ma but omits pa altogether, the perfect fifth. Classical music theory is helpful but until we listen to say Hariprasad Chaurasia it will be difficult to evoke the effect of the omitted fifth from the sound world produced by spontaneous improvisation deeply ingrained in dedicated practice. The flute aspires to achieve a rapport with tranquil moods associated with the hours between 3am and 6am (the so called fourth prahar of the night passage), and indeed commentators evoke morning prayer, calmness, the moods appropriate to the contemplation of a transcendent natural world. But the rhythm instruments insert more agitation into the piece after about eight minutes and the flute too develops a rapport with its accompaniment adding a growing urgency, which however rises and falls, without ever letting the sunlight play a part. By omitting pa, the perfect fifth, singers claim that they evoke the sun’s absence. The two fourths (ma shuddha and tiara) and the omitted fifth give the Lalit swara its distinctive quality. To the ear the omission of the fifth is audible as an interval—this is how you hear an absence—and mitigated by the presence of both ma shuddha and ma tiara in the same phrase (they are normally substitutable rather than contiguous as in the Lalit). The agitation, the lack of sunlight, the astringency of the shuddha with the tiara: a particular sound world.

Collections of Ragamala survive from medieval India, miniature paintings designed to illustrate the “garland of ragas” so that the scene depicted may serve to render more visible (and to explain) the complexity of the sound world created by the aaroh and avaroh of each raag variation. The Lalit Ragamala tend to depict lovers under cover of darkness as the night comes to its inevitable end. For example, one folio, the Lalit Ragini, depicts a sleeping woman and her lover, who silently departs the household after a night of passion. “Wearing many ornaments and garments,” the caption reads, “splendid, the fair mistress lies exhausted upon her bed at dawn.” There are several variations like this. In many the lover heads home to his sleeping wife as the sun begins to rise. Scholarship acknowledges the compartmentalised structure (inside and outside; night and day, mistress and wife) as typical of Malwa compositions.

But, in these illustrations, the emphasis on the diverse roles of the protagonists accentuates the conflict, the torn commitments in the situation, the exhaustion and loss, charmed as these may be: the splendid, exhausted mistress; the mortified lover; the deceived wife; the darkness whose cover will be blown in the coming day. The Lalit Ragini therefore enacts a mythopoeic or allegorical structure of the dawn to illustrate a precise intervallic formula. Having arisen at 3am and travelling miles to witness a dedicated performance one can conceive, as the first light appears, that it does so as an illustration of the performance, as its light show, challenging any residual sense that the music be charged as accessory to the early hours.

The extremely widespread theme of lovers meeting and parting at dawn has occasioned specialism in the field of comparative study in a peculiar way. Specialism in mythopoetic phenomena entails close comparison within a narrow geo-historical region (for instance Claude Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic studies of variations in Nambikwara myths). Specialism in the literary intersection of love and dawn follows a different kind of inspiration. In his great 1960s anthology on the poetry of dawn, Arthur Hatto describes this other kind of comparative study as “inspired by a universal outlook embracing all oral and literary creations within given genres throughout the world, whether historical connections be revealed or not” (Eos 5). The task of gathering in an orderly anthology and reading critically poems that are widely divergent in style and texture but entangled by the test of a common theme raises questions that have a decidedly paleontological feel: “How are the astonishing parallels at different times and places to be explained?” Since the appearance of Eos scholarship on the erotic dawn song has been largely focused on particular geo-historical formations: the Occitan Alba (an initial collection of nine); the German Tagelied; the Aubade of early modern poetics; the quasi-religious middle eastern forms; a nascent romantic aesthetics; its rediscovery in literary and artistic modernism. Even then, the inherent demands placed upon the scholar by the singularity each time of the literary text militates against any kind of generalisation.

The poet adopts the formula each time and alters it in small increments towards the estranging transactions of a peculiar poetic address. But here is the clue in the paleontological question: the poet by adopting the formula produces a work that concerns the topic hidden beneath it, a topic that remains disguised in its entangled parallels. Searching for the substance of the alba or Tagelied you invariably find that a poem concerns first of all the meaning of Tagelied itself: the diverted address to the dawn. The address is diverted in the sense that typically speech or song is divided between three entwined principals of the drama: the mistress, the lover and the watchman who announces the break of day. The focus of the address is not thus the dawn so much as it is the expression of a foreboding, as the lover wanders outwards and beyond (the objective eye of the gaya scienza) as he prepares to cross the border between the bedchamber and the world of work, between night and day.