The suit that Dylan Thomas was wearing in the days before his death in New York in 1953. Dylan was on his fourth lecture tour of America at the time. Jorge Fick, the owner of the suit, was an American abstract painter who was storing his clothes in the Chelsea Hotel, the same hotel in which Dylan was staying. Dylan is said to have borrowed the suit because, characteristically, he had run out of clean clothes.

Jorge was sharing an apartment with Paul Kagol, one of a group of poetry students. Jorge was working on the subway at the time. It was Paul who actually loaned the suit to Thomas.

Jorge Fick and his friends in New York in the early fifties were all students at the famous Black Mountain College where they were studying poetry under Charles Olsen. Jorge was a painter who was also very interested in poetry. The painters all congregated at the Cedar Street Bar and the poets at Dylan’s favourite pub, the White Horse Tavern, but the groups often moved between the two pubs.

Over fifty years later, Jorge Fick’s widow, Judy Perlman, contacted the Dylan Thomas Centre and kindly offered the suit as a donation to the Centre’s Dylan Thomas Collection.

Dylan Thomas (1 of 3) B&W Film with Richard Burton

Dylan Thomas – A friend of Sgt Pepper

Kane on Friday – Leftover Wife – Interview With Widow of Dylan Thomas

(bad audio) Dylan Thomas -: Rock and Roll Poet – Documentary

Arena – Dylan Thomas From Grave to Cradle (BBC 2003) – Part 1

Richard Burton reads ‘Elegy’ (for his father) by Dylan Thomas

When we review modern poetry as part of our own general culture, we find the same tendency to despair. Near the time of his death, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote a poem called ELEGY. He did not actually put it together himself, so we cannot be too sure of the exact order of the stanzas. But the way it is given before is probably the right order. The poem is by a fellow human being of our generation. He is not an insect on the head of a pin, but shares the same flesh and blood as we do, a man in real despair.

Dylan Thomas: Elegy (English)

 
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died 
The darkest way, and did not turn away, 
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride 

On that darkest day.  Oh, forever may 
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed 
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow 

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost 
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though 
Above all he longed for his mother's breast 

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground 
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed. 
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found, 

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed, 
In the muted house, one minute before 
Noon, and night, and light.  The rivers of the dead 

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw 
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea. 
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind, 

I am not too proud to cry that He and he 
Will never never go out of my mind. 
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,  

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died 
Hating his God, but what he was was plain: 
An old kind man brave in his burning pride. 

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned. 
Even as a baby he had never cried; 
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound. 

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide. 
Here among the light of the lording sky 
An old blind man is with me where I go 

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye 
On whom a world of ills came down like snow. 
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres' 

Last sound, the world going out without a breath: 
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears, 
And caught between two nights, blindness and death. 

O deepest wound of all that he should die 
On that darkest day.  Oh, he could hide 
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

_____________

In the Festival Hall in London, in one of the higher galleries in the rear corridor, there is a bronze of Dylan Thomas. Anyone who can look at it without compassion is dead. There he faces you with a cigarette at the side of his mouth, the very cigarette hung in despair. It is not good enough to take a man like this or any of the others and smash them as though we have no responsibility for them. This is sensitivity crying out in darkness. But it is not mere emotion; the problem is not on this level at all. These men were not producing an art for art’s sake, or emotion for emotion’s sake. These things are a strong message coming out of their own worldview.

These are many means for killing men, as men, today. They all operate in the same direction: no truth, no morality. You do not have to go to art galleries or listen to the more sophisticated music to be influenced by their message. The common media of cinema and television will do it effectively for you.

MODERN CINEMA, THE MASS MEDIA AND THE BEATLES

We usually divide cinema and television programs into two classes–good and bad. The term “good” as used here means “technically good” and does not refer to morals. The “good” pictures are the serious ones, the artistic ones, the ones with good shots. The “bad” are simply escapist, romantic, only for entertainment. But if we examine them with care, we notice them with care, we notice that the “good” pictures are actually the worst pictures. The escapist film may be horrible in its own way, but the so-called “good” pictures have almost all been developed by men holding the modern philosophy of no certain truth and no certain distinction between right and wrong. This does not imply they have ceased to be men of integrity, but it does mean that the films they produce are tools for teaching their beliefs. Three outstanding modern film producers are Fellini and Antonioni of Italy, and Bergman of Sweden. Of these three producers, Bergman has given the clearest expression perhaps of the contemporary despair. He has said that he deliberately developed the flow of his pictures, that is, the whole body of his movies rather than just individual films, in order to teach existentialism.

His existentialist films led up to  but do not include the film THE SILENCE. This film was a statement of utter nihilism. Man, in this picture, did not even have the hope of authenticating himself by an act of the will. THE SILENCE was a series of snapshots with immoral and pornographic themes. The camera just took them without any comment. “Click, click, click, cut!” That is all there is. Life is like that: unrelated, having no meaning as well as no morals.

In passing, it should be noted that Bergman’s presentation in THE SILENCE was related to the “Black Writers” (nihilistic writers), the antistatement novel which was best shown perhaps in Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD. These, too, were just a series of snapshots without any comment as to meaning or morals.

Such writers and directors have had a large impact upon the mass media, and so the force of the monolithic world-view of our age presses in on every side.

The 1960’s was the time of many powerful philosophic films. The posters advertising Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in the London Underground were inescapable as they told the message of that film: “Murder without guilt;love without meaning.” The mass of people may not enter an art museum, may never read a serious book. If you were to explain the drift of modern thought to them, they might not be able to understand it; but this does not mean that they are not influenced by the things they see and hear–including the cinema and what is considered “good,” nonescapist television.

No great illustration could be found of the way these concepts were carried to the masses than “pop” music and especially the work of the BEATLES. The Beatles moved through several stages, including the concept of the drug and psychedelic approach. The psychedelic began with their records REVOLVER, STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER, AND PENNY LANE. This was developed with great expertness in their record SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND in which psychedelic music, with open statements concering drugtaking, was knowingly presented as a religious answer. The religious form was the same vague panthemism which predominates much of the new mystical thought today. One indeed does not have to understand in a clear way the modern monolithic thought in order to be infiltrated by it. SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND was an ideal example of the manipulating power of the new forms of “total art.” This concept of total art increases the infiltrating power of the message involved. This is used in the Theatre of the Absurd, the Marshall McLuhan type of television program, the new cinema and the new dance with someone like Merce Cunningham. The Beatles used this in SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND by making the whole record one unit so the whole is to be listened to as a unit and makes one thrust, rather than the songs being only something individually. In this record the words, the syntax, the music, and the unity of the way the individual songs were arranged form a unity of infiltration.

Those were the days of the ferment of the 1960’s. Two things must be said about their results in the 1980’s. First, we do not understand the 1980’s if we do not understand that our culture went through these conscious wrestlings and expressions of the 1960’s. Second, most people do not understandably think of all this now, but the results are very much still at work in our culture.

Our culture is largely marked by relativism and ultimate meaninglessness, and when many in the 1960’s “join the system” they do so because they have nothing worth fighting for. For most, that was ended by the 1970’s. It is significant that when  SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND wa made a Broadway play (1974, Beacon Theater) it no longer had the ferment; it was “camp” and nostalia–a museum piece of a bygone time.

_______________

The Cinema gives, if anything, an even more powerful presentation of the new framework of thinking. It pictures life as a tragic joke, with no exit for man. As Francis Schaeffer has written: “The gifted cinema producers of today—Bergman, Fellini, Antonini, Slesinger, the avant-garde cinema men in Paris, or the Double Neos in Italy, all have basically the same message.” The message is that man is trapped in a meaningless void. He is thrown up by chance in a universe without meaning. In some of the earlier efforts by some of these film makers, there was an attempt to show that man could try to create his own meaning. For example, you can escape the void in which you are trapped by going into the world of dreams. But the trouble with this is that you then have no way to prove it. To use the terms of Schaeffer, you have either content without meaning (the real world) or meaning without content (the dream world). So, again, there is no genuine gain in this attempt by man to create meaning. This was brilliantly shown in the film entitled Juliet of the Spirits.

This is the way Schaeffer puts it: “A student in Manchester [England] told me that he was going to see Juliet of the Spirits for the third time to try to work out what was real and what was fantasy in the film. I had not seen it then but I saw it later in a small art theatre in London. Had I seen it before I would have told him not to bother. One could go ten thousand times and never figure it out. It is deliberately made to prevent the viewer from distinguishing between objective reality and fantasy. There are no categories. One does not know what is real, or illusion, or psychological or insanity.” Another film that may be compared with this is Belle de Jour. As another commentator describes it: “Most audiences will not find anything visually shocking about Belle de Jour. They will find instead a cumulative mystery: What is really happening and what is not? The film continues—switching back and forth between Severine’s real and fantasy worlds so smoothly that after a while it becomes impossible to say which is which. There is no way of knowing—and this seems to be the point of the film with which Bunuel says he is winding up his 40 year career. Fantasy, he seems to be saying, is nothing but the human dimension of reality that makes life tolerable, and sometimes even fun.” Another way of expressing the new framework of thought is seen in the film entitled The Silence, by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. It is just a series of snapshots with immoral and pornographic themes. The camera just clicks away, as it were, recording a series of unrelated and non-moral events. The message is that human life is nothing more than this: a series of unrelated events (because there is no God, and no plan governing all things) having no moral significance (because there are no absolutes). The message of another famous modern film—Antonini’s Blow Up—was summed up in the following advertisement which appeared in the London subways: “Murder without guilt; Love without meaning.” How could one better express the new framework of thinking?

Television

We must again point out that what we describe in these lessons does not appear in everything that is popular with people today. What we are describing in these studies is, for the most part, the leading group of modern artists—those who see most clearly the logical conclusion to which we must come if we begin with the basic ideas assumed as true in our society and culture. Because these artists are most fully held in the grip of “the spirit of the times,” they are the ones who best enable us to see the issue most clearly. At the same time, however, it would be a great mistake to think that these things are isolated within a small circle. No, the fact is that the message of such artists as these is more and more general in our society.

Again, to illustrate, we quote Francis Schaeffer.

“People often ask which is better—American or BBC Television. What do you want—to be entertained to death, or to be killed with wisely planted blows? That seems to be the alternative. BBC is better in the sense that it is more serious, but it is overwhelmingly on the side of the twentieth-century mentality [new framework thinking].” He continues: “The really dangerous thing is that our people are being taught this twentieth-century mentality without being able to understand what is happening to them. This is why this mentality has penetrated into the lower cultural levels as well as among intellectuals…We usually divide cinema and television programmes into two classes—good and bad. The term ‘good’ as used here means ‘technically good’ and does not refer to morals. The ‘good’ pictures are the serious ones, the artistic ones; the ones with good shots. The ‘bad’ are simply escapist, romantic, only for entertainment. But if we examine them with care we will notice that the ‘good’ pictures are actually the worst pictures. The escapist film may be horrible in some ways, but the so-called ‘good’ pictures of recent years have almost all been developed by men holding the modern philosophy of meaninglessness. This does not imply that they have ceased to be men of integrity, but it does mean that the films they produce are tools for teaching their beliefs…Such writers and directors are controlling.