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Thematic Images for the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack:
"Romantic 'Total Revolution'
& The Sixties Second American Revolution"
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"The Dance of Albion" or "The Glad Day"
William Blake's color engraving (ca. 1793) of the dancing youth Albion ("Eternal Man" or "Fallen Man") symbolizes not only a revolutionary "politically awakened England" but also "spiritual rebirth."
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William Blake & Friedrich Schiller: Poet-Comrades In Arms
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"Thus Arm in Arm with thee I dare defy my century into the lists." ~Friedrich Schiller
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William Blake (11/28/1757 - 8/12/1827) in England and Friedrich Schiller 11/10/ 1759 - 5/9/1805) in Germany were contemporaries and had a common vision of the fundamental role of "Art" (and aesthetics) in society and its revolutionary potential for absolute human emancipation. Blake and Schiller were representative of the 18th- and 19th-century Romantic generation of poets, artist and writers who saw the French Revolution heralding of a "new age" of liberty and peace. Yet, with the dashing of this hope with its failure, they sought to reframe the political idea of revolution into a deeper ideal, which Schiller called "total revolution."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson & Walt Whitman: American Romantic visionaries of democracy, with their imaginal 19th-century "Party of Idealists," which in the 1960s became the imaginal "Party of Eros."
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“No one,” Emerson wrote in 1840, “can converse much with the different classes of society in New England without remarking the process of revolution” even as “the spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some difference." Prof. Cornel West has depicted Emerson as founding a radically new philosophical tradition that “evades” all strains of antebellum philosophy. Lawrence Buell, one of Emerson's most influential interpreters, has argued for the transnational revolutionist as the crucial framework in which Emerson's genius can be most fully appreciated: “Emerson is almost always at his most interesting when striving to free his mind from parochial entanglements of whatever sort.”
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Romanticizing Revolution?
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​The Gypsy Scholar anticipates—just by the very title of his musical essay series: "Romantic Total Revolution" (based upon the literary idiom "Romantic Revolution”)—that he will probably be accused of "romanticizing" the idea of revolution (the term "romanticizing" used in its negative sense to mean idealized or unrealistic; making it seem better or more appealing than it really is).
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Therefore, the GS offers the following excerpts from a lecture series, "The Great Revolutions of Modern History," in support of his musical essay series.
"The Romantic Idealization of a Revolution" (Lynne Ann Hartnett, Villanova University)
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Revolutions, in the words of the British historian Christopher Hill, turn the world upside down. They challenge the fabric of society and people’s most basic assumptions. The radical energy of the 1960s and early 1970s signalled the spirit of a generation determined to transform the world. It defined an era.
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Defining Societies, Cultures, and Nations
Revolutions offer the rare opportunity to see the hopes and priorities of the political underclass emerge from the shadow of powerful elites. We loudly hear the voices of those who are usually consigned to silence. We bear witness to the hopes and fears of women and men who might otherwise leave little, or no, historical record. By looking at revolutions, we find differences that help to define societies, cultures, and nations. But we also find commonalities of humanity and experience. Revolutions systemically alter the dynamic between the state, authorities, elites and the people; they attempt to fundamentally transform power relationships..... Revolutions are predicated on the idea that when the state is unresponsive, dismissive, or exploitative, the citizenry can exercise its agency through extra-legal means.
Romanticizing Revolutions
In revolutions, people refuse to be silent; they refuse to accept the status quo; they step outside traditional parameters to imagine new social, political, economic, and cultural structures. And they try to realize them.
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People, therefore, are central characters in the drama of revolutions. However, some of the most turbulent and repressive revolutions are those in which ‘the people’ are simply invoked rather than directly involved.
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It’s easy to get swept up in a romantic idealization of revolution. Revolutionaries want us to romanticize. In order to legitimize turning the world upside down, [note here the GS's recurring theme from his musical essay series on "May Day"] from revolutionary actors need to convince their peers and posterity that disorder, upheaval, bloodshed and even death—all of which come with revolution—are worth the sacrifice.
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We see this romanticization of revolutions in a 19th century painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix depicting the revolution that overthrew King Charles X. "Liberty Leading the People" from 1830 literally paints revolution as an inspiring, sanctified event.
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Thematic Images for Romantic "Total Revolution"
& 1960s "Second American Revolution"
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The Second American Revolution
Successive waves of radical descent — from the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement to the popular uprisings of the Progressive Era to the labor militancy of the 1930s to the sweeping social and cultural transformation of the 1960s and ‘70s that we are calling the second American Revolution — would keep the unfinished work of US democracy alive….
The civil rights movement — which won its greatest victories in the first half of the 1960s — ignited the second American Revolution. Inspired by civil rights and Black Power activism, a string of other liberation movements caught flame that decade and the next – including the Vietnam antiwar struggle, the United Farm Workers union, the American Indian Movement, women's liberation, and the gay and lesbian uprising. Together these upheavals — which were often linked by mutually supportive activists and shared goals — forged the nation’s most daring interpretation of freedom and justice since the first American Revolution.
This second revolution forced the country to change its assumptions about race, war and peace, gender, sexual orientation, reproductive rights, labor justice, consumer responsibility, and environmental protection. Almost all these movements grounded their claims at one time or another in the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — compelling America to be true to its stated ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
~David and Margaret Talbot (2021)
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The Counterculture as Sixties "Carnivalesque" Revolution
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