Marcos Balter, Claire Chase — PAN

PAN is a musical drama for solo flute, live electronics and mass community participation. It tells the story of the rise and fall of Pan, satyr demigod of the woodlands and protector of shepherds. Pan is an ambiguous creature, capable both of great gentleness and unimaginable brutality. He is adored by his flock, and enchants them with beautiful music — but his flute is fashioned from the corpse of one of his lovers, murdered by Pan in a fit of rage.

For each performance of PAN, Chase is joined by a group of amateur musicians recruited from the community in which the performance is staged. They sing, play wine glasses and bamboo chimes, and chant in lingua ignota, the secret language invented by (or revealed to) eleventh-century saint Hildegard of Bingen. The work feels less like a concert piece and more like a ritual, or even a séance, in which the boundary between performers and audience is permeable, or even non-existent.

I wrote a series of pieces to accompany the first performance of PAN, and will continue to write for the work as it evolves over successive iterations.

You can read them below.

What use are myths in a post-truth world?

We tell stories all the time. Only some of them are true. Of the untrue stories, some are just inaccurate: they try, and fail, to capture how things really are. But others don't aim at truth at all: insofar as they describe some world, it's not this one. The Sherlock Holmes stories might be set in London, but they don't describe it; at best, they describe some possible London, adjacent to but discontinuous from the actual city as we know it.

The Greek myths strike us not as mere fictions, but as fables. They feature fantastical protagonists like gods, nymphs, fauns; there are no creatures like Pan, with his half-man, half-goat body, in our neck of the woods. Unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories, the myth of Pan doesn't describe a possible, though non-actual, world. More natural to suppose that the Greek myths, and their more recent descendants, offer us visions of the impossible. Perverse creatures that we are, we find ourselves fascinated.

It's hard to give a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being a myth. But even knowing one when you see one requires, at the very least, that you can distinguish the fictional stories from the non-fictional ones. If a story looks like it at least purports to be true, you can set about finding out whether the world is as described. If it smells fictional, on the other hand, you can kick off your shoes and make yourself a cocktail.

A lot of ink gets spilled these days about the 'post-truth society.' Many of us are worried by the fact that a large proportion of fractured narratives with which we find ourselves blasted every day are not as truthful as they announce themselves as being. It's hard to distinguish, within the realm of the non-fictional, between accurate stories from inaccurate ones. But there's another problem, too, which is less frequently discussed: it's getting hard to discern the non-fictional stories in the first place.

It used to be that there were reliable indicators that a given story belonged in the realm of non-fiction rather than fiction. The context in which the story was encountered used to be a good heuristic: if you saw it in the paper, odds are it at least aimed at the truth, even if it ended up falling short of the mark. But the newspapers are in decline. Social-media/news/cat-video platforms like Twitter and Facebook, whose management systematically refuses to accept responsibility for the curation of information, are on the rise. And outside even those platforms, various kinds of online 'content' - to use an increasingly, not to mention ironically, vacuous term - is proliferating like algae blooming in a millpond (this piece being a sample pollutant). Most of us consume most of our stories online, where reliable markers of the non-fictional are scarce.

But that's not all. As Russian troll farms know to their staggering pecuniary and political advantage, we have a tendency toward credulity where stories are concerned. We tend to take fiction for non-fiction more frequently than we err in the opposite direction. When made-up tales get pumped into people's Facebook timelines, a zone where the lines between non-fiction and fiction are basically non-existent, most people will automatically assume that those stories were not fabricated. And since we're also more inclined to assume stories are accurate than inaccurate, it's a short step from outright fiction to false belief.

We're obviously up to our necks in fiction these days. Surely the last thing we need is more of it. And yet, even as society sinks further into the 'post-truth' quagmire, we're witnessing a resurgence of myth. Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, True Blood, the Twilight films, Harry Potter: these are all visions of impossible worlds, peopled by impossible creatures. It could just be that we're all desperate to escape our current predicament; what better distractions than dungeons, dragons and the Quidditch World Cup? But maybe there's something else going on, too.

Myths wear their fictional status on their sleeve. They announce themselves as having nothing whatsoever to do with truth and falsity, with accuracy or inaccuracy. They make no claims on our beliefs about the real world. Hence the possibility of escape - but also the sense of security, perhaps, to which a myth gives rise. The goings-on in the Upside Down might be scary, but at least you're confident that those goings-on are confined to a world discontinuous from this one.

But I don't think the value of myth, these days, is solely a matter of their offers of escape from Trumpsylvania. Just because a myth is fictional doesn't mean we can't learn something from it. A vision of the impossible can serve to limn the possible. It can unite us, too: a society divided by lies and slanders is still united by its myths, not just in the contemporary moment, but across time as well. If we each have our own persistent narratives, in reference to which we understand the unfolding of our lives, then myths are the narratives that shape the unfolding of societies. In re-telling its myths, a society articulates its understanding of itself.

And when we make art from myth, as the Pan project does, we take advantages of deeper resources still. Myths are shared repositories of meaning: they're wellsprings available for us to draw collectively from as we struggle to make sense of the world. When we use myths to make artworks, we not only offer counterfactual visions of the world, but we also furnish forth the very capacity for sense-making that feels so under attack at the moment. As Stanley Cavell put it in Must we mean what we say?, a work of art:

'... does not express some particular intention (as statements do), nor achieve particular goals (the way technological skill and moral action do), but, one may say, celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all (if you like, that they are free to choose), and that their actions are coherent and effective at all in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society.'

Nature has never felt so indifferent, nor society so determined. If we need myths to battle the post-truth wildfires, we might need art more.

Fallible Popes, round squares and the death of a god

As every reasonably well-versed Catholic knows, to be Pope is to be infallible where doctrinal matters are concerned. The pontiff can't be wrong about core matters of the faith. This is why Andrew Brown describes the disgruntled clerics who recently accused Pope Francis of heresy, in light of his lenient views on divorce, as having taken the ‘nuclear option’ within ecclesiastical criticism. It's inconceivable that the Pope could be a heretic. The accusations of heresy levelled at Francis thus amount to the insistence that he is not, after all, the true Pope.

A heretical Pope is a bit like a round square. It's an object (with apologies to the pontiff) with contradictory properties. A thing can't be at once round and square, or fallible and infallible. And a thing can't be at once immortal and mortal, either. If you're a god, you're immortal. And if you're immortal, you can't die.

So how do we make sense of the death of ‘the great God Pan,’ announced (Plutarch tells us) by the Egyptian pilot Thamus to the burghers of Palodes? If Pan was a god, he can't have died, and so Thamus must have been mistaken. Or if he did die, then Pan can’t have been a real god at all.

God or not, Pan is a troublesome figure. He’s lauded by some as the supreme deity of nature. He’s the guardian of shepherds (‘Breather round our farms,’ as Keats rather splendidly puts it), the lord of sunlit meadows and misty glades; he's the weaver of exquisite pastoral melodies. But Pan is badly behaved at best. At worst, he’s deplorable. He's heedless, reckless. His rapacious appetite for women reduces them to creatures to be cornered, defiled and either cast aside like spent vessels, or destroyed entirely.

So when Thamus cups his hands around his mouth to announce the death of Pan, we can imagine the Palodians hearing something like this:

‘Hey! Remember that one you used to worship? Make offerings to, build hillside shrines to honour? The one you called a ‘seducer,’ about whose so-called romantic trysts you rhapsodised rather than decrying them as the brutal rapes that they were? The guy to whom the ordinary codes of conduct didn't apply because he was one of the ‘deathless ones’ — a god not amongst men, but beyond them? Well, turns out he wasn't so divine after all. He's dead.’

In Plutarch, we read that Thamus’ unexpected announcement is met with ‘a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement’' But one wonders what, exactly, the Palodians were lamenting.

It could just be Pan himself. Perhaps the Palodians really did love the sybaritic old goat. Even if we find it hard to look past Pan's misdeeds, the Palodians might not have been so scrupulous. Or they could be mourning the loss of his beautiful music. Indeed, maybe Pan’s melodies are part of what reconciles the Palodians to the more unsavoury parts of his character. How could anybody be all bad that can play like that?

Or perhaps they’re weeping for the death of an epoch: the demise not just of one god, but of the whole profusion of deities. The demise of Pan sounds a death knell for a world in which every leafy corner sparkles with intrigue, where the truth is veiled in beautiful mystery as the gods are concealed within Olympian clouds. The Palodians might be facing into a more modern, clear-eyed society where talk is plain and the facts are plainer still; a world in which there is no more room for capering fauns, nymphs or hamadryads, whatever those might be. The Palodians may well feel foolish for their past suggestibility, like children who find themselves disparaging once-beloved games of make-believe. Still, they may nevertheless feel a pang of sadness at the loss of that wide-eyed way of being in the world. 

But the Palodians could be mourning something else, too. They could be weeping for Pan's victims: the women who, simply in having the misfortune to be desired by a god, were instantly rendered dispensable. The Syrinxes, the Echoes, the Selenes: the many casualties of Pan's insatiable lust. And they might be weeping not just for sorrow, but for shame. If Pan committed the deed, the Palodians were cheering from the sidelines. Maybe the Palodians are wailing at the realisation that it is they, not Pan, that are the monsters, and have been so all along.

As every philosopher knows, you can’t have P and not-P at the same time. You must choose. But sometimes, as for the Palodians, each escape route from incoherence bristles with hazards of its own.

Suppose not-P: Pan never died. Thamus reported the death not of Pan, but of somebody mistakenly identified as Pan. If so, then Pan lives on. All is as it was before: Pan is free to do as he pleases, safe in his Olympian distance from good and evil. His past crimes go unpunished, with still more lying in the future. But now that Palodes has recognised Pan's deeds as crimes, the society can no longer plead ignorance in the face of them. No amount of nostalgia for past innocence can put the cat back into the bag.

Or suppose P. Pan did after all die, in which case the Palodians must face the fact that they not only allowed or condoned his misdeeds, but praised him for them; indeed, that their entire societal structure made a figure like Pan possible. They thought that Pan was deathless, hence blameless. But now he's dead, and the only ones around to take the blame are the Palodians themselves.