WHAT'S up DOC?

film still courtesy of "The Prince von Pappenschmear, A Prequel", New Camerata Opera

Since 2016, I have collaborated with New York-based New Camerata Opera as a commissioned librettist. Our original opera serial for Youtube, entitled "The Prince von Pappenschmear" debuted in Spring 2017. See the first chapter here. The following year, we released "Chapter 2: A Prequel": Click here.

I am currently working on the third and final installment and am getting back to brass tacks and character studies.

The narrative was inspired from the biography of Dr. Ernst Grafenberg, after whom the G-spot was eventually named. He was an early contraception activist and scholar of female erogeneity. A Jewish German gynecologist who believed he was relatively exempt from persecution, because most of his patients were Nazi wives. Though he was a respected doctor at the University of Kiel throughout the 1920's, he was forced to resign his position at the university in 1933, and later imprisoned for stamp-smuggling. In 1940, largely through the efforts of Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood fame, he was released and emigrated to New York City, where he spent the rest of his days.

Following is my character sketch for the fictitious Dr. Erving Griffenberg, a romantic and devoted scientist who concocts an interesting method of resisting Nazi hegemony:

"It's so difficult telling people they're wrong, that they've been wrong. Nobody likes to admit that. It's just as hard to tell yourself you've been wrong your whole life. That what you counted as truth, as virtue, could very well be mistaken. For all my career, as a man of science first and foremost, Truth has been my beacon, my sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle lady in the mist. But truth is not the whole truth, so to speak. It is Life itself I've always championed, toward which I've always trained my critical and poetic eye. The preservation of life has always been my goal, and always it has been the nucleus of my scientific quest. I dare say it's the nucleus of any science. Science is performed, explored, employed for the sake of the living, to ensure that they go on living. That has always been my truth, my virtue. But when truth tells you that in order for life to continue, death must be implemented - when truth delivers such a paradox, what do you do? What can you do? How must you proceed? It is not enough to announce, like Dr. Pangloss, that you cannot any longer. After all, he wasn't a real doctor. Symbols are important, and the symbol of life is perhaps the most important. The symbol of the babe, in other words. The newborn mewing kitten and the bleating calf have driven their diaphanous tendrils into the deep soil of our imagination. Nobody argues with the babe, the helpless, the pure, the contingent, and hopelessly imaginative being that believes it really is a magic creature. It cries for the breast and always without fail receives it. It is the divinity of its own universe. All human life is performed in order to return to that state of magical omnipotence. Our end-goal is always that Elysium of serenity and potential, however well we know that our fate is really ashes and dust. To take that Holy Mecca of infancy away from humanity is to displace it, to shoot earth-shattering tremors to the very core of our being. As agents of the intellect, however, we need to ask why life means just that for us. Why is that Truth? Why our end-all be-all? And should that fleeting promise of the infant hold unqualified significance for us? Should the Baby withstand all criticism, all reflection? And furthermore what of hostile life? We know from biology, from evolutionary science, political philosophy, if not to say all of the humanities, that much of life is hostile. In its very nature, life is indifferent, to the point of hostility. Hostility to the entire human project. And what about particularly hostile times like our own, when life has been shoved aside from the banquet of inheritances? There is no doubt that now Life’s enemy, the power and greed of mankind has replaced it at the table. Too much life of the last 20 years has been traded for a pittance at the battlefield. What is it traded for? A passing stability? A temporary holding pattern, a mirage of peace, at the expense of more life, more waste? The powerful are never interested in the essence of LIFE. Bold Life interferes with their digestion. Nature teaches this. Since life for the powerful is nothing more than a bland spread for their biscuit, great pains are taken to extract its flavor. The powerful, it is well known, are a breed of delicate dyspeptics. Life then becomes a new thing, it becomes deflavored, devalued, and new factories are erected to manufacture and process this new barely edible life. It is now a thing for profit, for gullets, a thing for the buying, selling, swallowing, and forgetting. Once capital-L Leben is processed and drained in this way, it gets filled with dust. Not a magical dust mind you, but a quite ordinary, tasteless sawdust. But life, my inner voice screams, is truth. Life is virtue. How to reconcile this? How to live in this inimical contradiction? The babe is my profession, both symbolically and literally. How to think these thoughts when babes are mere cannon-fodder - corpuscles shot straight into the maw of obese, cellulitic power? The conclusion must be that life is no longer life, the magical babe no longer magical, that birth is an adversary to our preservation as a species. it is science's imperative to put an end to this imposture. Only thus can we shift away from this farce, this rank borborygmus of civilization. We are trapped in an enchanted mirror of Life that haunts us with our infernal reverse-image. We are like the witch the Grimm brothers tell us about who one day realizes she is no longer the fairest in the realm. The hope is that since mirrors are optics, chimaeras of light, perhaps one day we can trick the mirror itself and gaze once more at the maiden within, and her suckling babe. But first we must fool the witch.”

- Dr. Erving Griffenberg, 1934, Kurfürstendamm