Tension and Resolution: Music, Architecture, and Writing in the Ionian Mode
Styles a la Mode: Serving 1
The hours between twilight and dawn when our perceptions shimmer and the boundaries between the rational and irrational blur, when some believe spiritual or supernatural forces are most active, resolve to mundanity when the alarm clock rings. The volatile hours between New Year's Eve and New Year’s Day in cosmic synthesis and symbol enable caterpillars to become butterflies, tadpoles to grow legs and absorb their tails, nymphs underwater or underground to change clothes with dragonflies and cicadas, snakes to shed their skin. The space between sea level and mountain peaks, the gap in consciousness between play and ritual—these are liminal zones where the fabric of time flexes, reality bends, where impossible potentials appear, where transformation becomes not just possible, but inevitable.
Twilight, New Year’s Eve, sea level, play—these mark the start of interludes between growing tension and release, between inhalation and exhalation, interludes inherent in the Major scale, aka the Ionian Mode—and, in different flavors, in its kindred Western modes.
Imagine stretching an elastic band. As you pull it, tension builds like ascending the musical scale; release it, it snaps back to its original shape. The slow climb up the first hill of a roller coaster builds tension and anticipation. The release, hair blowing, gales of laughter, hysterical screaming, comes in an exhilarating, liminal drop. A pendulum glides from its lowest point to its highest point and slides back down. Compressing a spring builds potential energy. Releasing it converts potential energy into kinetic energy—garage door opens, garage door closes. A planet moving away from its star soon moves back in its elliptical orbit. Tidal forces, created as the moon's position changes, flow according to the whims of the moon followed by a letting go as the tide turns.
The Major scale mirrors the long, slow trail ascending from the cradle to the descent into the grave, friction and tension, springs compressing, tides rolling in, out, until some say blessed release.
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Music in the Ionian mode ascends in pulsating bursts and semi-bursts, ratio 3:1, three smooth steps, one stumble, three more smooth steps, one quick release. Like an ocean wave building, this mode begins with a stable floor and rises up, gathering momentum until it crashes on the shore—or on the next note. In its physics of self-generated aerodynamics, it lifts us to neurological rapture, physical anticipation released in a dance with bliss, lowering action, harmonic, hypnotic, blasphemous.
Home again.
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Architecture in the Ionian mode ascends in a columnated symphonic form, goddish, uplifting, enervating visceral afferent neural signals from one’s toes to one’s nose, reflecting efferent instructions to waltz or cha cha cha through the chambers of the temple or the spaces inside the memorial or the rooms of the palace, to comprehend the displays, the paintings, the sculptures. In its mystical geometry of intention and space, this architectural mode transforms walking into dancing, call and response, swing your partner, and as we walk from entrance to exit, accumulated tension and overstimulation dissolve in awe, in finding that mysteriously pleasing balance on a sidewalk, mesmerizing, irreverent.
Nobody can remember where the car is parked.
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Texts in the Ionian mode unfurl verses or telegraph paragraphs across the page, a score for a syntactic symphony of mellifluous utterances. Vibrant verbiage cascades, synapsing fleeting epiphanies, interweaving tensions, ambiguities. Phrases arc in soaring contours, launching skyward, elevating readers to dizzying heights of imaginative speculation. Cognitive crescendos thicken, then zip into crystals of insight. The denouement reframes, simultaneously captivating and titillating, flirting with the forbidden, the private. This linguistic alchemy transmutes tension into revelation, leaving us breathless, slightly aroused, and, if we are lucky, deliciously scandalized or revitalized.
In Ionian concertos, columnated temples, and calculated prose, seeds swell to marbles, marbles bloom to fruits—...pardon my indulgence, for I've savored the forbidden sphere, and its nectar was divine.
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Henry Bacon, the early 20th century American architect, studied his craft briefly at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1884. Leaving the university to work in the field for a few years, in 1889 Bacon won the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, providing him with two years of study and travel in Europe, which he spent learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture.
Bacon came to love the temples of ancient Greece, so much so that he was criticized for his work being too derivative. Not to be deterred, he applied his passion to the task of creating his masterpiece titled the Lincoln Memorial on the mall in Washington DC. Richly ornamented, a theatrical performance that never stops, a place to reflect and recommit to democracy, the final design of the memorial featured thirty-six exterior columns to symbolize the thirty-six states in the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death. The names of these states appear in the frieze above the columns.
Lincoln’s most famous speeches ring silently in the majestic inner chambers where visitors see shadows blot the eyes and dapple the texts. The “Gettysburg Address” appears on the wall of the south chamber, a short speech of eternal force delivered at a cemetery six weeks or so before the Emancipation Proclamation, which was unveiled on New Years Day in 1863. With a perplexing complex of motivations and reservations boiling in his brain, Lincoln waited to unveil, building suspense, clocks ticking, a full six months in 1862 to make the Proclamation the law of the land, talking endlessly with his team of rivals in Cabinet meetings.
Suddenly, at the midpoint of the war, he made the Emancipation Proclamation real by speaking words.
Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Speech” delivered on March 4, 1865, graces the north chamber. This speech reaches for a compassionate restoration of the Union “with malice toward none.” Recall that Lincoln instructed Grant to release the Confederate soldiers with their rifles after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Grant watched as treasonous brothers marched southward on a dusty road with their dignity and their weapons on their shoulders.
There was to be no restoration, no resolution, tension in perpetuity. Our country lost its virtue and found vice, Vice President Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, an alcoholic with a brain and the ethical reasoning of an ant. From thence the country careened from the Ku Klux Clan toward Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 declaring separate but equal Constitutionally valid. The injustice of slavery morphed as the frontier closed, as segregation calcified, a kidney stone in the innards of American culture. By the way, Greek city-states usually punished defeated enemies severely, through execution, slavery, or destruction of cities. Bacon did not strike this chord in his blueprints. Though others were less tolerant of Lincoln’s mercy, particularly as the years passed, Bacon designed the Memorial to channel Lincoln’s optimism.
On the other hand, there were instances where Greeks showed respect towards defeated foes, particularly among fellow Hellenes. Victories and defeats inside the Greek states sometimes resulted in lenient treatments. Lincoln’s policy resolved to respect Confederate soldiers, prodigal sons, and encourage their reintegration into society. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln saw the war as divine punishment delivered in the dead of night. His role would be to bind the wounds.
Our national sin of slavery needed a blood sacrifice to end it.
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In his design Henry Bacon incorporated a hybrid mix of Ancient Greek Dorian and Ionian style of architecture exemplified in the original Parthenon, now a ruin among ruins. Whether stout and sturdy columns in the Dorian mode or tall and slender in the Ionian, Ancient Greek columns were built to endure the centuries. Whether alternating patterns of Dorian triglyphs or continuous Ionian bands of ornaments, the horizontal fascia of sculpted or painted decoration carried cultural meanings and historical narratives through time for the people, the citizens, edification. Bacon intermixed these features in Lincoln’s Memorial.
In the fifth century BCE when unveiled the Parthenon sparkled in the sun. Dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, the structure housed a massive statue called “Athena Parthenos” (Parthénos = maiden or virgin) created by the sculptor Phidias with a little help from his friends. At 11.5 meters tall, Athena Parthénos was constructed from “spare parts” of cypress, gold, and ivory and assembled on site. It became a gathering place for religious rituals and festivals, especially the Panathenaic Festival in celebration of Athena's birthday. Built during the height of Athenian democracy under the leadership of Pericles, the Parthenon symbolized the power and pride of the Athenian state and its democratic values. In a physical show of persistence, it stands today—a little wobbly.
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Athenian pride in America’s democracy dissolved.
On April 14, 1865.
John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor whom Lincoln admired and even invited to the White House, shot Lincoln in the head.
A thief of time, Booth stole the country’s future.
On March 4, 1865, before his killing of Abraham, writing in his diary, Booth, who had been in attendance at the second inaugural address that day, wrote: "What an excellent chance I had, if I wished, to kill the President on Inauguration Day.”1 From the barrel of gun came the bullet that murdered Reconstruction.
We have left a memorial to dance in, to ponder, a memorial linked in history to Athens, to the Parthenon.
And we have the NRA and Donald Trump.
“A visitor to the Acropolis who entered from the Propylaia would be confronted by the majestic proportion of the Parthenon in three quarters view, with full view of the west pediment and the north colonnade. As the viewer moved closer, the details of the sculpted metopes would become decipherable, and when in proximity to the base of the columns, parts of the frieze would become evident in tantalizing colorful glimpses peering from the spaces between the columns” (Ancient-Greece.org).
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Writing an essay in the Ionian mode shares with music the elements of symmetry, drama, symbolic ornamentation, and sweep. Very much literary in intent, the Ionian essay builds movement through its subject in long strides, long strides, long strides, a short stride, creating sticky words to attach themselves like burrs to readers, designed to make friction, to build emotion and understanding, to construct a landing pad for stepping out and getting back to ordinary life. The sweep of the piece moves deliberately across textual space taking three long sentences then a short one, three full paragraphs then a short punch paragraph, three more long strides and a half step, and so—establishing a crescendo and finally resolving the sweep in a peaceful, satisfying manner.
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Southerners might view the Lincoln Memorial critically, focused on their own destruction and suffering experienced during the Civil War. They might see the monument as a reminder of a difficult and tragic period in Southern history. Some individuals, particularly those with strong ties to Southern heritage and Confederate ancestry, might view the monument as a symbol of Northern dominance and a reminder of the loss and humiliation experienced by the South during and after the war.
Robert Moton, Tuskegee Institute President, spoke at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, May 30, 1922. He submitted his speech beforehand to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who told him to cut 500 words, calling them “propaganda.” The following is one section Moton deleted. Let us resolve this exploration with words never spoken.
“I say unto you that this memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make real in our national life, in every state and in every section, the things for which he died.”
auffman, Michael W. (2004). American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50785-4.