One my favorite bands is “The Bad Plus,” a genre bending jazz trio.  I love just about everything they have done.

I say “just about” because they have a few songs that end in a discordant or incomplete fashion, and to me that’s no ending at all.  I recall a story about a son who always knew how to aggravate his composer father.  He would play seven notes of a scale on the family piano and refuse to play the last.  His father, no matter the situation, would inevitably have to come back to the piano and play the last note.

My question — Is this a matter of taste?  Or is it “wrong” to end a song discordantly?  As far as my limited knowledge takes me, jazz is the only musical genre that does this, however rare it might be.  Can discordant endings be appropriate in certain musical genres and not others?

I tend to think that it is wrong to end a song discordantly.  Songs are like stories and should have a beginning, middle, and end.   The songwriter has a duty to their audience.  There should be wholeness, completion. Don’t get our attention and then not deliver.

But then I check myself, because I don’t always mind, and sometimes even like, movies or books with ambiguous endings.  Should ambiguous or endings be considered ‘discordant’ endings?  Why or why not?

Historical memory will sometimes romanticize losers.

Robert E. Lee, Hannibal, Napoleon, Vercingetorix — all of them have a romantic glow about them in the minds of some.  In this ‘Romantic’ narrative, all of them begin as significant underdogs, but through pluck and brilliance make Goliath quake.  They nearly succeed, but then one mistake, or one setback of fate, and cruel reality overwhelms them.  So, Lee would have won had Stuart been at Gettysburg, Napoleon would have won if it had not rained at Waterloo, Hannibal if he had attacked Rome after Cannae, and so on.

Life can sometimes imitate art, but it is usually messier.  One can certainly make arguments for the causes of all of the military men I mentioned, but making them tragic heroes can blind us to reality.  Were all of them really underdogs?  Lee and Vercingetorix had many, many, advantages.  Napoleon nearly always faced divided allies.  Hannibal was not forced into choosing what amounted to an all or nothing strategy.  Furthermore, failure on a grand scale like theirs can rarely be attributed to one event.  All of them exhibited, to my mind, poor strategic thinking and were sunk not by fate but by their own choices.

Have you noticed that we don’t romanticize sports losers?  No one waxes eloquent about Joe Flacco, loser in two AFC Championship games, or Donovan McNabb, loser in a variety of NFC champioship games and one Super Bowl.  No one cares that Jake Delhomme nearly beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII.  Commentators killed Miami for losing the NBA championship to Dallas.  No romanticizing there.  The list goes on.  Perhaps the one exception I can think of might be Joe Frazier, but of course he beat Ali once, and was treated horribly by Ali in a way that should draw our sympathy.  My wife brought up the point that we romanticize Dan Marino.  Is there a common thread?

We also never romanticize political losers.  Michael Dukakis?  Who cares?  McCain, Mondale, Dole, — I can’t think of one romanticized defeated candidate.  The concept of gallantry amidst futility (or at least perceived futility) inspires admiration for some historical figures, but not political ones.

What can account for this difference?  I have no answers, but would like some suggestions.

Thanks,

Dave

[The problem] I mean is [modern] man’s inability to state his opponent’s view, and often his inability even to state his own.  . . . There is everywhere the habit of assuming certain things, in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things.  For instance, as history is taught, nearly everyone always assumes that it was the right side that won in all important past conflicts. . . . Say to him that we should now be better off if Charles Edward and the Jacobites had captured London instead of falling back from Derby, and he will laugh. . . . Yet nothing can be a more sober or solid fact that that, when the issue was still undecided, wise and thoughtful men were to be found on both sides.  . . . I could give many other examples of what I mean by this imaginative bondage.  It is to be found in the strange superstition of making sacred figures out of certain historical characters, who must not be moved from their symbolic attitudes. . . . To a simple rationalist, these prejudices are a little hard to understand.

From G.K. Chesterton’s “The Thing.”

Chesterton, as usual has a wonderful eye-opening point here.  But, as usual, after he blows you away you need to step back and make sure you agree.  The question is, what wars would have been better if the ‘other’ side had won?

Let’s remove the very obvious ones from contention.

Clearly the world might have been better off if, for example, the ‘Whites’ had won the Russian civil war against the ‘Reds.’  On the flip side, the right side won W.W. II.  I’m interested in the more controversial examples.

I do think the right side won W.W. I.

Some would disagree, but I say the right side won the American Civil War.

I say Europe was better off that Napoleon lost.

I realize that it is harder than we might realize to think of many wars that we wish would have gone the other way.

If we take Chesterton’s example, the Stuarts did not have a great track record, and it is hard from my perspective to see that they ‘should’ have won.  But I would love for someone to make a case for it.

Can anyone make a case that Carthage ‘should’ have won the Punic Wars?

Some might argue that the ‘wrong’ side won in the Peloponnesian War.  But in my opinion Athens had descended into self-worship and lost what made them great by that point.

I can offer a few moderately controversial assertions.

I would argue that the world would have been a better place if Phillip lost at Charonea, or if Alexander lost at Issus or Guagemela.

Greek democracy limped badly by Phillip’s time, and may never have returned to greatness.  But Philip snuffed it out completely.  By the time the Romans meet the Greeks, all the Greeks have to show them is absolutism, and this disease seeped into the Roman political consciousness.

Alexander obviously has many admirable qualities, but I don’t like him.  He was a butcher.  His success inspired others like Caesar to kill for glory.  His success romanticized him.  Maybe if he had lived he would have turned sour to those that came after him, but his early death sealed his reputation as the ‘boy conqueror.’  His failure to establish a workable political system led to the splintering and continued disintegration of the Greek world.  Though I would agree that Phillip & Alexander don’t create Greek weakness, they capitalize on it.

Can someone else make a good  and controversial case that another major conflict should have gone a different way?

Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English People:1000-1154 is one of the more entertaining medieval primary sources.  He drops in the occasional good anecdote, casts his narrative in a theological arc, and displays familiarity with Scripture and the Latin classics.

What fascinates me about him, however, are two passages that cannot help but shock the modern reader.

First, his description of the death of King William:

In the year 1100 King William ended his cruel life in a wretched death.  . . .  [while hunting] there Walter Tirel, aiming at a stag, accidentally hit the king with an arrow.  The king was struck in the heart, and fell without uttering a word.  A little earlier blood was seen to bubble up from the ground in Berkshire. . .  (p. 48, Oxford Classics Edition)

And a little later he writes,

In the same way Earl Geoffrey, among the ranks of his own . . . was struck by an arrow from a foot-soldier.  He scoffed at the wound, but after a few days died of this injury, excommunicate.  See how the vengeance of God . . . is made know throughout the ages, and is executed in the same way for the same crime!  While the church of Ramsey was being held as a castle [by the Earl] blood bubbled out of the walls of the church and the adjoining cloister, clearly demonstrating the divine wrath and prophesying the destruction of the wrong-doers.  Many witnessed this, and I myself saw it with my own eyes’ (p. 83, Oxford Classics Edition).

What are we to make of these appearances of blood?

Like Lewis’s famous “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” argument with Christ, we do not have many options open to us.

We cannot say that Henry is a mere gullible simpleton.  As we have already noted, he was a well educated man.

We might say that he simply wrong about the first instance.  He does not claim to have seen it himself, and one could argue that he merely reports the prejudices of local simpletons.  But we would still have the second example to deal with.

We can argue that he was lying in the second example.  But this event occurred within his lifetime and many would have witnessed it.  If he was lying he opened himself up to be contradicted quite easily.  Of course, he could still have lied.

Maybe he didn’t see blood at the church, but something that looked like it.  But everyone knows what blood looks like, especially soldiers.

So what would it mean if he accurately reported the truth?

1. It might have been a direct miracle from God.  This could be a valid interpretation of the second incident.  But the casual, offhand mention of blood in the first example make me doubt this.

2. It could have been the ‘expected’ way God works to reveal Himself in creation.  Perhaps this would put what happened at something slightly less than ‘miracle’ level intervention, but above ‘every day providence.’  This could be an interpretation of Henry’s words in the second instance, and explain the seeming nonchalance of the first.

The problem with this is that most of us would not expect this today.  Has anyone witnessed such a thing?  I’m guessing that if we saw it we would be more likely to call it a ‘miracle’ if we saw it today.  If we accept option #2 does it imply that God changes the way He reveals Himself over time?

3. Or, might it be that creation was built in some way to respond to sin in this way?  In other words, in different periods of time or different places is the human connection to creation closer, more ‘symbiotic?’  Has the West’s self-imposed distance from creation over the last few centuries meant that this would/could not happen anymore, at least in the developed world?

4. Owen Barfield seemed to suggest in Saving the Appearances that reality can be shaped in part by our perception of it.  Unfortunately, I could understand very little of his argument in that book.

Has anyone else read it?

While this sounds strange, C.S. Lewis hints at this view (Barfield was a good friend) in Ransom’s talk with Merlin in That Hideous Strength, where Merlin harkens back to a time when Nature could respond against evil, or perhaps even be manipulated by those with a special relationship to it.

This, in turn, might shed light on the heretofore puzzling comment in Mark’s gospel (6:5) that Jesus could  do no miracles because of their lack of faith.  Maybe our relationship to reality is one that flows in many directions.  Since we no longer believe such things to be possible, they no longer happen.  But if we did believe. . . ?

This last view might change our view of the past in a variety of ways.  Egyptian folklore, for example, is riddled with tales of magic and magicians with unusual powers.  Should we see more historical truth in them then we have so far?

As you can probably tell, I tend to prefer one of the last two options, but I have no real strong feelings.  I would love to hear other possibilities or insights.