“Socrate”

I’ve been listening to Erik Satie’s symphonic work—yes, I think it is something we would call a symphonic work—a piece he called Socrate. It is sort of an opera, though not really an opera exactly. It is a hybrid piece that I think he actually called a symphonic drama. Anyway, it is about Socrates. Satie took some bits of dialogue from a number of different spots in the Platonic corpus and then strung them together into a kind of sung dialogue with a musical composition in the background.

The problem with it is that I don’t really like listening to it. I feel bad about that fact because I consider myself very much an Erik Satie guy, and I love—as so many people do, and in this I am just a very normal and obvious person—the Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes, and the Sarabandes. When I think of Satie’s music, I think of almost a kind of striding left hand, though an oddly off-tempo one—definitely not Fats Waller, though, on the other hand, probably more Fats Waller than anything in the typical classical repertoire. And then the right hand is bouncing around off the stride in the left and hitting surprising and often delightful complex harmonies and dissonances. There is sadness in the music. There is melancholy in the unusual and sometimes mournful sounds, and yet that melancholy always strikes me as the melancholy you actually want to be in. Melancholy as a desired state. Melancholy as something that feels true and so is also fun. Or at least funny, definitely amusing. Delightful.

I also think of Plato’s Phaedrus as a melancholy dialogue. We begin the discussion as a young man named Phaedrus bumps into Socrates outside the city walls. They make their way to the river Ilissus and settle there together. This is an unusual place for Socrates to be, since he is a man of the marketplace, a creature of the city. Socrates and Phaedrus talk for a bit about the breeze and the water and the old myths, and the chorus of the cicadas, and about Boreas and Orithyia—and the rationalizing story that she was blown over the rocks to her death. Then, of course, Socrates and Phaedrus get into the business of discussing more serious matters of rhetoric and love and truth.

But it is the section where Socrates and Phaedrus are dallying outside the city walls, in the melancholy realm of nature and her tragedies, that Satie chose to use for the middle section of his symphonic drama. And then it cuts to the end, to the passages in the Phaedo where we hear of the last moments and the death of Socrates.

Okay, now here are a few stories about Erik Satie. In the late nineteenth century, he decided he was going to be the Velvet Gentleman. He purchased seven identical velvet suits and wore them continuously. Once, the painter Francis Jourdain asked him to change before a dress rehearsal. Satie went home and changed into a different, exactly identical velvet suit. Or there are the stories about his umbrellas. He was always carrying an umbrella, but he would protect the umbrella from getting wet, often hiding it under his coat during rainstorms. What he actually disliked was the sun, which he called his personal enemy. He once turned down a commission because the payment was too large. Stravinsky had turned down the exact same commission because the payment was too small.

There are many more such stories.

Some of them remind me of the stories hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Platonic dialogues. These are stories of Socrates, the actual living man, the very strange and charismatic but also incomprehensible and quixotic figure. This is a man who would stop in the middle of the street and remain transfixed by the powers of the beyond. He was a man given to superhuman acts of endurance and stamina, but also to strange reveries and to being guided about by his personal daimon.

Wouldn’t this Socrates have been so much better captured by one of those striding, melancholic pieces—the Gymnopédies or the Gnossiennes? Instead, Satie went in the opposite direction. He created music and a vocal arrangement that are cold and minimal and that, as Satie himself explained, were meant to evoke a sense of purity and the “whiteness” of the classical age. So purified that Stravinsky himself—not just me!—called the music “metrically boring.”

I suppose the next thought takes me into the place I find most troubling of all. I like to think of Satie’s eccentricity, both in his music and in his behavior, as the sign of a man accepting and reveling in the absurdity that is fundamental to life. But it is probably more honest to admit that Satie was not well. He was at war with aspects of life that he didn’t understand and that tortured him. He was trying to find answers, or maybe ways to protect himself, or routes through the absurdity into something simple, true, reliable, absolute.

Or sometimes he was, and sometimes he wasn’t. Maybe his jokes, musical and behavioral, were, like all jokes, at least partly a way to protect his own sincerity. And then he saw in Socrates another person unabashedly in search of the truth. He could hide behind that figure to create a work that strips almost everything away, including the play and the cleverness and the wit and everything else that might smack of performance and of pandering and of playing to the crowd. Satie, through Socrates, had finally become pure.

And then, a few years later, just before he died, Satie wrote the ballet Relâche. The music is so ridiculously, playfully Satie that you could call it goofy. There’s a film included as part of the ballet in which Satie himself appears, jumping around like a maniac with Francis Picabia and then firing a cannon directly at the audience. So, go figure.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.