February ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Opera: La Bohème)

We’re looking at part of an Italian opera (not a quote like usual) composed by Giacomo Puccini.

About a month ago (Jan 2025), I went to an opera at the Sydney Opera House in Australia as the finale to a two-and-a-half-week honeymoon. I’d never been to an opera before. It was beautiful. The singers performed selections from many of the famous European classics, so it was a perfect musical bus tour for an unsophisticated ear like mine.

I didn’t know that operas provide translated subtitles of the pieces so that the audience can follow along with the story. I was naively prepared to just sit there and listen to the singing. In this case, they translated the original Italian into Mandarin and English on TV screens around the stage.

I also didn’t know that many of the classic and most famous opera pieces are mythic. I should have guessed. Many Italian operas are dramatic love stories involving flirtatious neighbors, spurned suitors, seducers, and head-over-heels lovers. There’s nothing complicated on the surface of the story of the opera. In fact, they’re almost too simple, which is usually a sign that the stories contain super-condensed meaning.

They read much like fairytales with easy-to-follow plots sprinkled with simple imagery. I saw this when I enjoyed Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème (The Bohemian). In it, we have Mimi, a seamstress who visits her neighbor Rodolfo (a poet) in the middle of the night looking for a flame for her candle because hers had gone out (no electricity in those days). They flirt a little bit and then she describes herself to Rodolfo, telling him that “my favorite past times are lilies and roses.” She says that “people call me Mimi, but my name is Lucia.”

Lucia AKA Mimi

I don’t have to know Italian to infer that Mimi is a form of “Mother” or “Grandmother” and that Lucia is related to the word Lucifer, which means light-bringer. Lilies and roses are universal symbols of the goddess. Walk into any well-adorned Christian Church, especially ones devoted to the Virgin Mary, and you’ll almost certainly see her holding a lily or a rose. The lily and rose are just like the thousand-petal lotus of the kundalini tradition that perpetually unfolds and opens out of a seeming void, dazzling and hypnotizing the Self.

In fact, the Hindus call the world maya, which means mother (and Mary) but also is linked to magic, measure, or matter. This implies that the surface of the world, its matter, is illusory to the extent that it comes into view by measurement or limitation. When Rofolfo introduces Mimi to his friends, he says,

Maya or Mimi completes the circle (the company), is measured and thus limited into finite things and events by the maker of words, Rodolfo. It’s a kind of magic. To be disillusioned with the world means to look past its persistent illusion and see it in its Absolute, unconditioned state.

Mimi goes on to say again that she doesn’t even know why people call her Mimi, since her real name is Lucia. She’s aware of her secret identity but unconscious of being the Mother of the world, in much the same way a woman gives birth to a child entirely without the powers of conscious intellect. A woman who scientifically understands the process of pregnancy and birth makes her no better at doing it than a woman who lacks that understanding.

Mimi is the classic receiving feminine, the yin, darkness. She brings out the light by being its opposite. Remember the opening scene is her asking for a light! Without darkness, there’s nothing to contrast the light, and thus bring it into existence. She’s the enclosed womb of creation, awaiting the masculine light and word of spirit (Rodolfo) to impregnate her.

Rodolfo elaborates:

Coming out of my brain is the blossoming of songs. | Coming out of her fingers is the blossoming of flowers. | And coming out of our souls exultant | is the blossoming of love.

We see here the complement of word and image, mind and body. Rodolfo is the maker of words, a poet whose songs blossom from his brain. Out of Mimi’s fingers (body) come flowers (image).

Mimi tells Rodolfo that she lives in a little white room in the tallest tower, watching over the skies and clouds. She sits in heaven, above the world below. And from this tall tower, she declares, it is she who sees the ray of spring’s first light after the thaw of winter.

Mimi is somewhat like the Greek Persephone who, after being dragged down into the underworld and forced to marry Hades, is rescued by her mother Demeter and brought back up during spring, thereby renewing or reviving (i.e. making) the world. Mimi is the first to spot the light of spring because as Hades’ wife she represents the cold void of winter. Without her, the light has no receiving opposite, no receptacle, no partner to fill and illumine.

But the honeymoon phase wears off. As time goes on things get complicated. Mimi and Rodolfo begin to fight and argue. And in the end, Mimi dies by Rodolfo’s side:

MIMÌ (to Rodolfo)
Goodbye.

RODOLFO
What? You're going?

MIMÌ
Back to the place I left
at the call of your love…

RODOLFO

So it's really over.
You're leaving, my little one?
Goodbye to our dreams of love.

MIMÌ
Goodbye to our sweet wakening.

RODOLFO
Goodbye, life in a dream.

MIMÌ
Goodbye, doubts and jealousies... Goodbye, suspicions... ...Poignant bitterness...

RODOLFO and MIMÌ
To be alone in winter is death!

MIMÌ
Alone...

RODOLFO and MIMÌ
But when the spring comes
the sun is our companion….

MIMÌ
Am I beautiful still?

RODOLFO
Beautiful as the dawn.

MIMÌ
You've mistaken the image:
you should have said,
beautiful as the sunset.
"They call me Mimì...
but I don't know why."

Puccini composed La Boheme in 1895. It premiered in 1896. It’s not surprising to me that it’s still performed today. We can’t help but return to the story and perform and listen to it over and over because it somehow expresses the inexpressible, that elusive root of Being, which is the mission of art, as Thomas Cahill once told us.

QUESTION

How will you use your words or imagination today, tomorrow, and the next to affect your world?

Cheers,

John

March ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Neville Goddard)

January ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Meister Eckhart + Frodo)