IF they’re any good, new maps of old territories always help. Think of the revisionary spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. If Western culture goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, why shouldn’t an Italian director make intelligently subversive westerns? The director Sergio Leone once said: “After all, Homer was the first great writer of westerns” and “Just because you put a man on a horse and stick a hat on his head, it doesn’t mean he’s an idiot”. Leone’s films remain uncompromisingly intelligent, tough, lyrical and Homeric.

The comic pace of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly contains moments of tragic poise and compassion, too often overlooked, but the most radical work of the film was to reinstate a European idiom in the quintessential American genre. Not only the good and the bad, but a third character, unreliable, loyalty-switching, self-preserving and self-renewing, an aspect of a culture in which Judas might be understood not merely as despicable but as a kind of human alibi, and therefore worth some sympathy. The trickster is also a god.

Doubleness may seem normal. After all, it’s the heartbeat – it’s physical. But the tripleness of Leone’s movie subverts that security, for tripleness is magical, transformative. Leonard Bernstein has this to say about it: “… basic as it is in music, [three] is not grounded in our biological nature. It is not physical in its function. The heart just doesn’t beat in 3/4 time, Viennese propaganda to the contrary. Try to imagine how life would be if we were triply constituted instead of duply. Imagine having three steps in breathing: inhale, then laterally to another lung, then out … people with three eyes. The mind reels. We are duple; perhaps that’s part of our finiteness. But the value of tripleness, to music at least, lies precisely in the contrast with dupleness.

“It is a subversive exception to the brute instinct of the regimental, ‘left-right, left-right’. Three is an invented number, an intellectual number, it is primarily an unphysical concept. Perhaps that is why three has always been so mystical a symbol to man, as in the Holy Trinity.”

Understanding this should give us pause. The silence such understanding requires is present in all great works of art. It’s the moment of understanding which we noted when we looked at King Lear’s last words and Ravel’s magical child’s realisation of his own power and self-control.

John Berger talks about this at the end of an essay called The Moment of Cubism and he figures it not as a necessary ending, but as the time of precipitation, just before the start of something we cannot imagine, like the orchestra at the beginning of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed as it must have been once, for the very first time. The symphony is in fact already under way, but it sounds as if they are tuning up, and about to be called to silence. “The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art. The incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it, is the secret of art. What is the meaning of that incongruity and the shock which accompanies it? It is to be found in the distinction between the actual and the desirable. All art is an attempt to define and make this distinction unnatural.

“For a long time it was thought that art was the imitation and celebration of nature. The confusion arose because the concept of nature itself was a projection of the desired.

“Now we can see that art helps us to refuse the inadequacy of the given, and to want better.

“Art mediates between our good fortune and our disappointment. Sometimes it mounts to a pitch of horror. Sometimes it gives permanent value and meaning to the ephemeral. Sometimes it describes the desired.

“The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. [Art is what allows us to] see our past, while turning our back upon it. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon [what follows]. And it is precisely this which happens at the instant when a piece of music begins.”

Come at it that way, and what splendour: there is a coherence, after all. This is why the arts are all, and always, both arrival and departure, never one without the other, each a way of coming home. Both their subversive challenge to all forms of authority, and their assertion of order and value, provide a sense of welcome home: both two and three, the wanderer and the resident, the good, the bad and the ugly, the prodigal and the parent.

THE Andante of Prokofiev’s second violin concerto is the work of a man committed to returning home, even at the risk of his life, and willing to embrace such risk. The music is cheerful, for it resides in the knowledge of that home, not only Soviet Russia, but art itself. To paraphrase Bruno Walter: Stalin is dead – Prokofiev lives. And with him, we are coming home. In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad says this:

“We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends – those whom we obey, and those whom we love. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. Few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.”

The New Zealand critic and author CK Stead prompts further thought on that word “faith” – in secular, rather than orthodox religious terms. In his essay, What I Believe from The Writer at Work: Essays (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 2000), he says this: “In society every correction of a past error seems to involve the creation of a new one. To assert this is not to suggest that we should all become passive. Man is a social animal, with social responsibilities. We must make decisions and choices and take consequent action – even if only to cast a vote in an election. Our role in life, it may be said, is to make mistakes!

“But there is a wisdom which stands separate from action. Religion once provided it, and still enshrines much that is durable. […] But as the force of religion has receded, contradicted and eroded by the revelation of what might be called its errors of fact, the respect given to the arts has advanced. […] There is in Western civilization a large minority of sensitive, intelligent, and usually productive people whose lives are given shape, order, meaning, a sense of elevation and a certainty of purpose, by the pursuit of the best in music, painting, literature and film. These works of art are their shrines and chapels, their source of enlightenment, order, and hope.

“I have gradually come to separate two modes of thought and action, each of which has its place in what I conceive to be the good life. One is the political mode, the other (for lack of a better word) the existential. It is as though we need to be involved in the folly of politics […]. But if we are not to be frustrated […] there must be that other, wise, contemplative self [and] a wisdom beyond politics which must govern the best in poetry and fiction.”

The future you have waited for is assured. Continue to persevere.