On Becoming a Fossil
by Christopher Bernard
There is always the question of when it
began,
or when you first noticed it.
One day, a spot of gray on a nail
of the left small toe,
has become, a week later, a pebble.
So that is the way you are headed now,
who was never (let’s face it)
much with it.
One reaches no age with impunity;
your time was hopelessly yesterday
even at the time you were a tyke: your
music
was never Chuck Berry but Ludwig van,
your reading not Vonnegut or Hermann Hesse,
but Henry James and Thomas Mann.
Your generation to you was a mess:
half decadent, half barbarian.
There is a certain progression, as, below,
it rises, salt-like, from your toe:
a certain stoniness in your hearing
or taste of pristine metal after bathing,
a calcification of a memory
that rattles between two syllables of a
greeting.
A quiet thrumming at the back of the
throat
that reminds you of Medusa’s immediate
glare,
a locked joint as you embrace a pillow,
a crying spasm in your left calf,
a line of pain hooked between pelvis
and ankle.
You stare at the spiral of darkness of
an ammonite,
thinking through eons of stratigraphy
pressed to ink between layers of shale,
civilizations shrunk to a cloud
of dry mud, monuments, poems, songs:
the layers of stone in a cliff wall
soaring toward the sun where you climbed
as a boy,
dreaming of the flight of the hawk, how
your wings
shall weave in the air
in random happiness
from cloud to cloud
as drunk as Icarus as he climbed toward
Apollo,
winging across the earth that made you
and now
embraces you as you tumble back,
the sun melting your wings—
your hopes, your dreams
blowing away like the feathers of a lark—
to air, to water,
to stone.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.
If Love Is Folly…
“If love is folly, I’m your fool. Give him
your pity, not your hate,”
he said upon the Junebug’s shell.
The ring of fire rounds the house.
Prevarication’s not your vice: you speak
black truth to summer’s eye.
You are not always loved for this. The
wanton greensward pecks the grass.
Perhaps a throw of rug would toss the air
with whiskers, spiders, mice.
A dodehexahedron stands immaculate on
green fields of ice.
I cannot say. I cannot know. For I am
mad for you, you know.
I break to justice, loss, and fate.
I litter pillows with my tears,
am lost in the forest of the years,
and no birds listen to my name.
And yet I have of wisdom won these few
aspersions to its rule.
Have you a right to happiness in this
one life you only know?
There is no other where but here;
the trick is catching fireflies before
they cinder to the skies.
Be kind to the thing that you call “me,”
you will be kind to humanity.
We are lost in the labyrinth
of time and space; infinity
is eternity’s other face.
Power, wealth and fame are phantoms,
and love is a beautiful illusion.
The distant battles end in war,
and there is the mouth of the cave. I feel
the thread that will save me from
the Minotaur.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.
Still from Gira, by Grupo Corpo. Photo: Jose Luiz Pederneiras
21 and Gira
Grupo Corpo
Zellerbach Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Gyres of Eshu
A review by Christopher Bernard
Cal Performances (the Bay Area’s most adventurous promoter of dance, music and live performance) delivered once again one late weekend in April, as part of its Illuminations: “Fractured History” series: Brazil’s formidably gifted dance company, Grupo Corpo.
Based in Brazil’s legendary Minas Gerais, and founded in Belo Horizonte in 1975, the company is driven by the synergistic talents of two brothers, Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras, house choreographer, and director and set and lighting designer, respectively, who have created, with their collaborators, an aesthetic that blends classical ballet and the complex heritage of Brazilian culture, religious and ritual traditions, the whole leavened by a musical culture that is wholly unique.
The company brought two ambitious dances to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The first was their breakout dance, from 1992, which put the company securely on the international dancing “map”: 21, a number that retains an enticing mystery to it. It also introduced one of the company’s musical signatures: the music and instruments of Marco Antonio Guimarães and the artists of the Uakti Instrumental Workshop. These last not only have a unique armamentarium of instruments, but even use their own microtonal scales, unless my ears were fooling me—essential elements of what makes the company’s work uniquely engaging.
21 was groundbreaking: a slow burn that used the entire company in a processus of simple chthonic motives, closely gripping the floor like the movements of wary but defiant jungle animals, on dancers at first dressed entirely in yellow bodysuits against a pitch-black background, appearing at first behind a misty transparent screen that creates a ghost-like effect, and rising midway through the work as the dance moved to illumination from mystery.
The dance began with a hypnotic monotony of group motions with slight variations against a polyphony of percussion and string and blown instruments entirely new to this listener’s ear, and gradually morphed into a succession of solos and increasingly elaborate duos, trios, and corps, by turns haunting, raunchy, and carnivalesque, until its energies, long simmering, boiled over and broke out into a joyously orgiastic conclusion that brought the Brazilian gods to the stage and the local audience to their feet.
The imaginative use of lighting and color, as well as the costume designs (which transmogrified from the monotone to the wildly polychrome) of Freusa Zechmeister, were as vital to the overall effect as motion and music.
The second dance, Gira (“Spin”), from 2017, takes the elements of spiritualist rite suggested in 21 and brings them unapologetically to the fore. The dance is based on the rituals of Umbanda (a merging of West and Central African religions such as Yoruba with Catholicism and spiritism) to the music of the jazz band Metá Metá and vocals from Nuno Ramos and Eliza Soares. The dance is based on rituals calling forth the spirit of Eshu, a deity who acts as a bridge between humanity and the world of the orixás of Ubamba, Condomblé, and the spiritualities they have in common. Eshu commands and drives the rite of the giras, or spinning, whose motions, like those of the dervishes of Islam, open the dancers to the gods and the gods to the dancers.
Gira evolved as a series of variations on the motions of the ritual, increasingly fugal, danced by the performers as if in the trance that the ritual aims, paradoxically, both to create and to emerge from. Both male and female dancers wore long white skirts and were bare breasted in a show of a curious mixture of vulnerability, beseeching, and seduction to bring forth the divine.
It’s a beautiful and evocative work, if overstaying just a little.
Not to be forgotten is the technical brilliance of the dancers themselves: masters of their gifts, and sharpened by the equal mastery of the company’s leadership.
____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Killing the Bear
Born into fury,
starved and angry,
inhabiting the mountains
shiftless around Shasta,
he seemed when you met him
that summer day . . .
You had come there, alone,
from your home city
to escape its troubles,
the mad-making politics
that poisoned most
of the galling country:
a presidential oaf,
half cunning fox,
half demented bear,
and the rest of the barbarians
not only you loathed
with a lucid hatred,
and few ways to disgorge it.
So you went to the mountains.
Brought sleeping sack, tent,
bare necessities, fire needs,
a week’s worth of food,
a lamp, a knife;
hiked an hour and a half
into the Sierra
through oak and pine woods,
manzanita, brush land,
meadows of yellow grass,
by creeks of runoff
from the winter’s snowfall,
until you found a place
near a rock pile, flat,
at once cozy and open,
near a stream and a view
of a majesty of mountains
and no sign of humanity
for miles …
You stopped, took a deep
long breath—the first
you’d taken, it seemed,
for months. Your nerves,
tense so long, slackened.
You felt you were home
at last. You whistled
while setting up your tent,
felt the squirrels watching you,
sat for hours by the fire
as the long, high, deep
sky of summer evening
almost imperceptibly
faded into night
and stars you had not seen
since childhood…
It was a rude awakening
when sun pried your eyes open
to the sight of an old grizzly
staring blankly at you:
huge, mangy, hungry,
unsure on his legs, or the courage
of terror (despite
a distracting irrelevancy,
“Are there even grizzlies
in the Sierras?” almost tripped
your reflexes)
never would have driven
you to your first thrust.
The knife was near your sack:
a butcher knife it was,
just sharpened before you left;
hard, new, shining.
You grabbed it as the bear
trundled awkwardly at you,
and, yanking out of the sack,
you screamed like a banshee,
and, foolishly enough,
ran at it. The beast stopped,
puzzled by the naked
monkey waving a bit of
glitter with a pathetic
shriek. At full height,
he roared as you plunged
the blade into what
felt soft as a pillow.
A paw swatted you with contempt.
and you fell over the dead campfire,
smearing you with a warpaint
of ashes;
yet still holding the knife.
He came at you, claws out.
Leaping up with a new shout,
you swung the knife in wide arcs,
the beast baffling a moment,
then slipped behind a sycamore
as he clawed away its bark,
then pulled it down. Slipped
your foot at the edge
of the stream; you cried
in anguish and anger,
sure it was over
as the bear bore down
finally upon you,
his teeth bright, his breath
in your face, his eyes
as cold, shining as stones.
Terrified, hysterical, you shouted out
your last cry
and thrust the knife
at the throat.
It sunk to the haft; blood
spurted over your hand. The bear’s
roar choked to a gurgling,
the mouth froze, startled, the eyes,
blank, black, stunned,
as the light vanished from them;
they looked almost sad.
You felt almost sorry
as he sank over your legs,
groaning a sigh
as you pulled out the knife,
and fell back into the stream.
You hauled your legs slowly
from under the dead hulk.
Then pulled yourself from the flowing
cold water, and stood
on the stream bank,
gazing down at the beast,
the overthrown king
of the woods.
Then something curious happened:
you heard a voice. Strangely,
it was as if the grizzly
spoke from the dead body.
“Human:
between you and triumph
is no more than between
you and your destruction:
the difference is the act.
Shall the way of your life
be like the ice on a lake
or like the arc of an arrow?
“Be cunning and patient,
and when the time comes
to strike—and it always comes –
be swift, and be certain.
Most of all, remember:
keep your knife always
sharp. And close.”
Then you heard the singing
of many birds. Your eyes
opened to the flickering
of shadows above your head,
and you looked, surprised, around you.
You lay in your sack,
the tent undisturbed.
A zephyr shook it. You crawled
out to the cool morning.
What a dream! you thought.
Yet you were not sure.
You looked carefully about you,
half expecting the grizzly.
Nothing appeared but a few
squirrels; a robin
landed on a grass patch and flew off.
There are dreams so vivid
they seem more real than waking,
the reality of waking
could you but see the real.
But when you wake, you sleep,
and when you sleep, you waken:
the lessons of that other world
are ones that you fail
to learn at your peril.
Who can be sure? No one.
Yet the hungry bear
that now is coming toward you
is vulnerable to one
(you know, now you have woke),
to one, single, lucky,
well-timed, well-delivered,
coolly administered,
unfearing stroke.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist living in San Francisco. His book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. In 2025, his first novel, A Spy in the Ruins, is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its original publication.
Cal Performances presented the Bay Area premiere of William Kentridge’s new collaboration, The Great Yes, The Great No, on a recent chilly, rain-sprinkled March evening, to a standing ovation in a warm, dry, and packed Zellerbach Hall in the “People’s Republic of” Berkeley.
Truly, it was manna to the baffled left these days of a monstrous politics. And a stimulus and wonder even to skeptics of both progressives and reactionaries; echoes of Cavafy, Dante, and Carlyle were clearly not unintended. Even of Coleridge and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; even of the Narrenschiff – the “ship of fools” of the Middle Ages and Katherine Anne Porter’s bleak, modern fable.
The work, co-commissioned by the ever-questing Cal Performances for its Illuminations series (the theme this year is “Fractured History” – a timely phrase, as we threaten to crumble into a humblingly fractured present), is the latest in the South African artist’s theatrical undertakings, culminating most recently in Berkeley with the amalgam of fantasy and prophecy Sybil two years ago.
In Kentridge’s new work, we are introduced to a cargo ship repurposed for refugees, ploughing the seas of midcentury on a voyage to escape a Nazified Europe for temporary asylum in the New World. In March 1941, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle left Marseilles for the Caribbean French colony of Martinique, bearing several hundred refugees, including luminaries such as “the pope of Surrealism” André Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, novelists Victor Serge and Anna Seghers, and the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss: a ship of geniuses, culture avatars, and anti-imperialists fleeing a continent of psychopaths for the utopia of the irrational, of “revolution,” of “freedom.”
A curious but relevant fact about Martinique: it was the one island Napoleon allowed slavery (according to the libretto) when he abolished it throughout the Empire – and why? Because of Europeans’ insatiable desire for the sugar Martinique was known for and could not produce “economically” without its slaves.
Kentridge haunts his ship with figures from multiple eras binding the imperial center to the tiny Antillean island: the Martinican poet, and father of anti-colonialist theories of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and his wife Suzanne; the fellow Martinican sisters Nardal, whose Parisian salon incubated negritude with the Césaires and African writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas; and other relevant phantoms: Napoleon’s beloved Martiquinaise Joséphine Bonaparte and the Martiniquais, and future revolutionary theorist, Frantz Fanon.
We were treated with Kentridge’s characteristically virtuosic blend of spoken word, dance, dream scene and song, surreal cartoon and reversed film sequence, liberated signifiers, extravagant costumes and portrait masks for each of the avatars, dancing tools and animated utensils (including one of his signature mottos, a twitchy, goofily animated typewriter), in this modern version of classic singspiel.
It took off on a wildly surrealist ride across time and geography, with a collage libretto combining quotations from the figures named and such notable subversives as Bertolt Brecht. Narrative is not Kentridge’s strong suit, and his attempts in that direction usually run aground on pancake-flat characters and prosaic plots (he has yet to quite realize that a story without logic (his explicit pet peeve, in this work, being reason and all its affiliates) is like a decalcified hippo: somewhere between a glob and a blot. He is at his best when indulging his imagination and letting poetry suggest where prose merely deafens.
At the head of the ship stood its captain, an African version of the classic Greek Charon, boatman of the underworld ferrying souls to their final ends. The captain (a brilliantly insouciant Hamilton Dhlamini) dropped many of the evening’s most provocative lines. Another performance especially shone; Nancy Nkusi as Suzanne Césaire, whose recital of the verses of her spouse Aimé, from his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, provided much memorable imagery. Not least was her haunting appearance in a black-and-white film scene, crawling across a banquet table surrounded by tuxedoed gentlemen with the heads of coffeepots and the cannibalistic appetites of all empires.
A constellation of quotations were projected or spoken or sung, or all three, across the magic lantern–like astrolabe that backed the stage: “The Dead Report for Duty,” “The Boats Flee, But to Where?” “The World Is Leaking.” “These Are My Old Tears.” “The Women Are Picking Up the Pieces.”
And a Chorus of Seven Women sing, dance and comment on the mystico-political voyage throughout, translated into the native languages of the singers: Sepedi, Setswana, siSwati, isiZulu, in the music of Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
A small, tight musical ensemble accompanied the proceedings throughout, led by the percussionist and composer Tlale Makhene.
For all the cornucopia of imagery, word wonder and music, my feelings about the evening were obstinately mixed. What I loved were the endlessly inventive visuals Kentridge can always be counted to magic out of the bricolage of his imagination, the 360-degree projections of the ship, the gimcrack costuming, the slants of film and dashes of music, the rich, sly humorous poetry, both visual and verbal, that illuminates, in flash after flash, as much as it entertains.
But there was also an element of agitprop, of heavy-handed prose hectoring and editorializing as it blundered into the show – the poetry, singing, told us endlessly more than the political prosing, shouting, which performed the bizarre act of shipwrecking itself. And when there are positive references to such monstres sacrés as Trotsky and Stalin, I, for one, am out. An artwork makes a poor editorial: when it trades poetry for slogans, it thrills only a few converts.
There is, unhappily, an even more serious point to make. Something about the enterprise rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Late winter 2025 on planet Earth hardly seems the best time and place to be celebrating “the irrational.” Whatever we are facing, politically, historically, it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a “tyranny of reason” or the authoritarianism of the bourgeoisie. In the current moment, I, and I suspect many others, feel trapped inside a global surreal nightmare from which we may not be able to escape. A surrealist fantasy celebrating unreason seems perhaps not the most appropriate message for a world on the verge of shipwrecking on the reef of insanity.
Those of us cursed with a reflexive skepticism may not care much to embark (without security guarantees) on so dubious a journey. For every “Great Yes,” there is sometimes a small but potent “no.”
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist and author of numerous books, including A Spy in the Ruins (celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2025) and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses. He is founder and lead editor of the webzine Caveat Lector and recipient of an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fires, L.A.
Ashes is bright Malibu,
Altadena’s palms,
black, naked, gravel
of bitter alms.
Roses devour
the monarch wood,
blown from Santa Ana
to a cold tide;
rags left
from brocades of towns,
tapestries of cities
burning down.
Katy’s house,
white against ash,
drops tears into
her outstretched hand.
Great dragons of fire
snake the night hills,
seeking their reflections
in abandoned swimming pools.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and essayist living in San Francisco.
The launch event will take place at 2 Waverly Place, on Saturday, January 25, at 1:00 pm. Readers: Christopher Bernard, Steven Hill, Ho Lin and Jonah Raskin.
Admission: Donation (Suggested: $5.00). All proceeds will go to victims of the LA fires.
