From south-western Michigan, Jerry Langdon lives in Germany since the early 90’s. He is an Artist and Poet. His works bathe in a darker side of emotion and fantasy. He has released five books of Poetry titled “Temperate Darkness an Behind the Twilight Veil”, “Death and other cold things” “Rollercoaster Heart” and “Frosted Dreams” Jerry is also the editor and publisher of the literary magazine Raven Cage Zine poetry and prose. His poetic inspirations are derived from poets such as Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As well as from various Rock Bands. His apparently twisted mind, twists and intertwines fantasy with reality.
“Mere Mortals”: Davide Occhipinti, of San Francisco Ballet. From Hamill Industries; source photo: Lindsey Rallo
The Ballet of Terror
Mere Mortals
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
Reviewed by Christopher Bernard
Early on the gloomy day of the performance I attended, I noted it would be an unusually short evening – a mere hour and fifteen minutes, without even an intermission. And I grumbled to myself about short shrift and lean pickings.
But the city has been pasted for weeks with black-and-white photos, scored with the vaguely ominous title and its allusion to ancient gods and goddesses, of a bare-breasted dancer ensnarled in a swirl of white sheet, like a larva breaking from a chrysalis or an angel caught in a damage of wings, flogging the new work – and so my curiosity was keen.
And, as it turned out, with more justification than I could possibly have known.
“Mere Mortals,” the first dance commissioned under San Francisco Ballet’s new artistic director Tamara Rojo (the War Memorial Opera House was illuminated in red in her honor), was introduced to the world on that chilly January evening just before a weeklong train of atmospheric rivers threatened to pummel the Bay Area with reminders of nature’s (or the gods’) ultimate sovereignty.
As it happened, we didn’t have to wait for her salutary raging: the first tempest was brewed, quite satisfactorily, thank you very much, by her most gifted, and most rebellious, child inside the compact, baroque precincts of the War Memorial Opera House.
If you didn’t read the program, you might never have guessed that this dance, which seemed entirely abstract yet was radiant with an urgent and perfectly clear meaning, was in fact about the early Titans of Greek mythology, or Pandora and her cursed jar. Or that the dance drew parallels between the fraught liberation of human power found in those ancient stories, and today’s invention, by “mere mortals,” of something that may render obsolescent even our own highest gifts – namely, artificial intelligence.
But no matter: it was clear within minutes that we were witnessing an allegory about the entwining of liberation and evil at the heart of the human experiment, and the two-sided blade that is hope itself. And it was also perfectly clear that we were in the firm and steady hands of masters of dance, music, and stagecraft; at least one spectator was left in a trance of admiration at what these “mere mortals” were able to magick in a mere hour and a quarter.
The dance unfolds in half a dozen acts, at a rough count, each broken into short scenes, most of them led by Pandora (danced with a darkly inflected, impeccable grace by Jennifer Stahl), the infinitely curious woman who unleashed woe upon the world while also freeing a Hope that encompasses a touch of that creativity of the gods that menaces as much as it promises.
Pandora danced, solo, in a long opening scene until, at its apparently tranquil conclusion, she opened her infamous jar, out of which irrupted a plague of dancers, the Evils she has freed, swarming like an ink of insects onto a stage whose primary colors throughout the evening were the starkest of whites and blacks.
From then on, the dance is an intricate play of the dialectic of ferocious good and implacable evil whose paradoxical result is an endless invention: the evils themselves are provokers of beauty, and Hope itself is serpent-like, ophidian, menacing – freeing.
The Titans – a dark Prometheus (Isaac Hernández), bringer of fire and liberator of the most gifted of species (the program will inform you this character combines the rebellious Titan with his arch nemesis, Zeus, king of the gods and ruler of the world), and, later, his boyishly joyful brother Epimetheus (Parker Garrison) – compete to dominate the story, but fail to in the end: at the brilliant heart of the piece, Pandora and Epimetheus perform a remarkable pas de deux that actually embodies the romantic drama many fail to capture: most pas de deux are signs of romance but rarely persuade that the couple onstage actually is in love: this one did, profoundly, alchemically.
In the final act, Pandora is resorbed into the cosmos after a lengthy “2001”-inspired odyssey into a chaos of futurity, and the evils (or are they angels now?), dancing like ghosts glittering in silver, ring like an ouroboros and seethe like a horde of bullies and mean girls around the golden boy Hope (Wei Wang), who seems, briefly, triumphant over the chaos.
But even he, with his suspect minions, is finally sucked back into a darkness that remains, beyond either divinity or humanity, absolutely sovereign yet infinitely creative.
The choreographer of this dazzling evening was the Canadian Aszure Barton, who seems to have taken up the ink-black mantle of William Forsythe. In fact, this was one of the most powerful new dances I have been privileged to see since Forsythe’s “New Sleep,” premiered by the Ballet in the 1980s.
The brilliantly original score, by turns driving and lyrical – part electronic, part orchestral, with solos by violinist Cordula Merks, timpanist Zubin Hathi, and harpist Annabell Taubl – is by Floating Points (known, more pedestrianly, as Sam Shepherd). Conductor Martin West led with thrust and panache. Equal on the bill is a breathtaking production design and visuals by Hamill Industries: Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz, who helped shape the evening into a complex and satisfying whole. If I have any complaint, it is that the soloists were not identified in the printed program notes or the usual printed fill-in (the tyranny of the cell phone continues apace: a scrambled QR code will sesame you to the neglected information).
The gods of the Ballet were even more generous than giving us a mere work of genius: to make up for a “short” evening, they added an hour-long disco party in the lobby after the performance, with DJ, light-bearing dancers, and cash bars, that was attended by a few hundred dazed-looking audience members, some of whom let down their hair and joined in the dancing. In my mind I called it “The Party at the End of the World.”
I still felt in a bit of a trance when I got home, and posted the following on Facebook:
“I sit here at the computer, feeling relatively speechless, battered by an evening at the ballet. . . .
The words come with even greater slowness than usual, as if from a pit black as pitch, with a silence that . . .
. . . mere mortals break at their peril.
Dance needs to be cautious about evoking such gods.
Pandora danced open a treasure of evils.
Leaving, at the bottom, Hope.
Savage. Demonic. A kind of catastrophe.
If a magnificent one.“
I was left, at the end of the night, with a final question: who, after all, is Pandora?
Friend reader: is it us?
Is it you?
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
A Review of The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu, Part VI of The Posthuman Series
by Joshua Martin
Part VI of Daniel Y. Harris’ ThePosthuman Series, The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu (BlazeVOX, 2023) further pushes Harris’ project as an extreme experimentalist forward. Harris has created a kind of modern day Merz filled with, instead of the physical trash of the 20th century, all the many incarnations of digital and cyber debris fused into an immense amalgam of dense poetics mingling words, numbers, symbols, code, script, and nearly anything and everything else in between. A 21st century Dada filled to brim with digital nonsense and encoded beauty. The sections (themselves numbered in a disorienting manner, i.e. 2.14121, 3.3521, etc., which follow the infrastructure of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus) range from a word or a line to large blocks of nearly indecipherable text, all building upon each other as part of this vast and monumental ongoing experimental project.
This work is filled with neologisms and portmanteaus to rival Khlebnikov’s or Joyce’s greatest achievements (and just as untranslatable!). Harris’ work, which he dubs posthuman, could be called post-language, post-syntax, and certainly post any conventional poetic form we’ve come to expect or understand. Throughout The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu, Harris challenges not only what writing is and can be but also what it even means being human in this noisy, cluttered, and overwhelming age of information and technology. This project suggests a means of integrating the entire language of cyberspace with our conventional language(s) to form a highly idiosyncratic, fascinating, and disarming poetic vocabulary reaching to the farthest possible future, while also astutely representing our present age.
Nothing about this work can be easily classified or understood (if its even supposed to!). Harris’ work represents the absolute best of the notion of experimental writing. This book is for the most adventurous of readers who are willing to have their brains fried by a veritable feast of linguistic gymnastics. No one should go into this work expecting to be anything less than absolutely disarmed and sent into disarray by this captivatingly obscure, unclassifiable, and unbelievably erudite project.
The Posthuman Series requires anyone approaching it to question all their notions of what literature is, what can or does make sense, and where poetics can or might go as our lives become increasingly consumed by screens, our experiences rendered by algorithms written by coders in a language most of us cannot and do not understand. In this sense, Harris’ project is aligned perfectly with our times, as he collects all the overwhelming madness of our digital world, rearranges it into an amazingly expansive and all-encompassing poetics that reaches beyond all languages (there are many languages scattered throughout the text, not just English) to create a blueprint in poetry for the computerized (posthuman?) mind.
The words, forms, and phrases of The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu pass through our minds at a dizzying rate offering us little chance to catch our breaths. This is the Dada of now. Everything is intangible, massive, filled with more information than we’ll every be able to comprehend. We, as readers, can only succumb to its extremes and allow ourselves to be consumed by the massive scale of this undertaking, in awe of Harris’ skill, innovation, and fortitude. This is literature that makes us question everything, which is, after all, what art and, in particular, experimental art should make us do.
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu is available here from publisher BlazeVOX.
A Review of gnōstos, volume VII of The Grammaton Series
by Joshua Martin
gnōstos (BlazeVOX, 2023), volume VII or Irene Koronas’ The Grammaton Series, continues her trajectory of extreme experimentalism through a fragmented poetic language filled with radical juxtapositions, snippets, neologisms, and minimalistically ecstatic aphorisms. Linguistic flares and miniature rhapsodies. Each word a new world unto itself, brimming with exaltation, reveling in the illogical and the mystic. Overflowing with rich treats and poetic mashups. A heady potpourri of languages and references, this wildly inventive and diverse work probes the very nature of our 21st century world. Filled, as it is, with huge amounts of textual varieties, never standing still, always performing new and perverse syntactical experiments and collisions.
Letters, words, language itself, are simply building blocks for an expansive and stimulating poetics that reaches into the fringes of what language can and should do. At times reminiscent of Russian Futurism (particularly Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh) and its desire to transcend conventional language, creating something spontaneous through Zaum, Koronas’ work seems to be developing a new language all its own, free from the rigidity of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, no matter its origin. And there is a myriad of origins in Koronas’ work. Her seemingly endless knowledge of a wide range subjects, alphabets, theories, languages, and texts is impressive and inspiring. Koronas’ work is written with a scholar’s information and an experimental poet’s skill. Khlebnikov’s “language of the gods” and “language of the stars” aptly applies to gnōstos.
Though the length of many of these lines are often quite brief, they are packed with beauty, sublimity, and chaos. Many words are new creations in themselves. Disorienting, transfixing, and sonically innovative, gnōstos deftly explodes poetic convention, instead offering the reader a dizzying array of staccato riffs and verbal treats. There is no net. As readers, we are free floating among her endlessly unique creations. At times, the speed at which Koronas’ lines whizz by can make us feel lightheaded in the best possible sense. We feel as though we are reading lightning strikes on a page.
Language is taken apart, constructed, reconstructed, and made into an entirely new thing. Mystical and rapturous, reading Koronas is like reading an invented language, offering us a whole new way of seeing, being, and understanding. A poetics that wishes to explode, implode, and pull apart all conventions in order to find something truly novel. Experimentation at its finest. A radical performance seeking to encompass the entire cosmos in its fragments.
Exciting, elusive, entirely readable, illogical, visionary, and virtuosic. Bending, breaking, forming and reforming. Reading gnōstos is an inspiring and disorienting experience. A work which requires multiple readings in order to truly absorb its many secrets, mysteries, and triumphs. The Grammaton Series is a massive undertaking not only in its length and scope, but in its bold and formidable search for invention. gnōstos is reaching for something unique and intangible, pulling readers along as far as it can toward something visionary and profound.
I will give thanks to you, LORD, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.
--------Psalm 9:1 NIV
My open-heart surgery on August 30th, 2023 changed me. It altered my entire view of the world and that change showed me the value of my relationship with Jesus Christ. The surgery was to repair four blocked arteries, and without it, certain death would only have been a matter of time. Before my surgery, life had become routine. Each day was a repeat of the day before, except for church on Sunday. My relationship with Jesus Christ existed throughout my life, but this experience meant a change for me. This time the void that always existed in my life changed. I always had a feeling of comfort in the Sanctuary at an early age. Listening to what God had to say to me.
My salvation started in 1957 at my birth in Baltimore Maryland. Growing up in the darkness of the streets of DC where the only light was the votive candles burning in the Sanctuary. This silence brought an awareness of peace and comfort. There was a sense of a presence that was quiet and comforting to me. This comfort surrounded me during the surgery. There were no bright lights that I can recall or noise from the heart lung machine or people hustling around me. The operation took six hours and one hour in which my heart was stopped as the heart lung machine pumped blood thru my body. I learned weeks later that once your heart stops beating you are considered legally dead. During the operation there was a sense of space around me. Upon, waking up in a state of disconnection to my surroundings except for that breathing tube in my throat. which was the sensation in my body. Once the tube was removed, I vomited out water and was unable to speak. My memory after the operation was this feeling of space but not time.
Days passed and with each passing day gradually my senses returned, however there was great discomfort from the surgery. There was still this feeling of space around me. Each day there was a disconnect between me and my surroundings. During this time my emotions were on hold. Thoughts about life without having footprints from the past before the surgery. Thinking is that what one experience when they are born in this physical world? Only thoughts about God were my connection to my surroundings. I still alive and why did God choose me to continue in this world? This feeling of an empty space lasted even as the anesthesia subsided. The physical discomfort lasted for months. God had allowed me to start a new understanding of what life really meant. Only thoughts like I mentioned in childhood of God filled that void in me.
My waking hours I meditate of God's presence in my life. No fear about life or death are of no concern to me. Wanting to return to the Sanctuary at Asbury United Methodist Church. Sitting in the Sanctuary to fill that void like in childhood. My prayers are simple prayers of gratitude. Jesus Christ have filled that void. Christ Jesus was within me all this time in my childhood. On August 30th 2023 my prayers came to fruition to live for Christ Jesus.
“If you must gain entry for yourself and your family, then we must learn news from the Terror. Our historian requires it”
Stepan pushed his cap back on his head and wiped his brow. He had spoken those words a dozen times a day, now, for so many years he wished to forget them.
The man standing at his table stammered, and then courageously – “I would wish to forget it, too. Must we speak of it?” Stepan – “We must always speak. We must always write. We must always record. All begins with the word according to most clerics, as they interpret most Holy works of the word. A difficult truth, as they say in every Village –”
“Yes, yes,” the man said, wringing his hands. “A difficult truth is more beautiful than the easiest lie. I know. Well . . . they are now barricading my own Village. There is a siege upon it which my family escaped, I admit because of connections with members of the councils that make decisions, regarding which people are allowed to go, or which are required to stay. As you can see, one of my sons is only 13, but he is thin, and we were able to avoid his recruitment into the army, and my other son is only 8. My wife works with the bards in our village, and the artisans. She runs one of the shrines to the imagination, not one dedicated to the holy . . . I worked on behalf of the legal councils, so I was able to contact some friends, and seek permission to escape the Terror. I know it’s cowardly, but –”
Stepan cut him off, in a moment. “It was brave. You risked humiliation for your loved ones and did so in order to avoid behaving wrongly. There is no wrong here on any level.”
The man was flummoxed. He paused, then asked, “Does your Village employ Clerics at their ports?” “No. We are all Clerics here. We all share in the clerical work.”
Stepan straightened his hat, as if to say, he meant labor. He said, “Go on. Tell me more about what you think you know about the Terror. Facts please.” “We have learned from our own historians and bards that members of other tribes from other Villages have made raids and killed children. This is why I used my friends to help us leave. Our Village was doing well, as well as one could. There was a short time when we were not at war with any of the others, and our leaders were sending emissaries to negotiate for a sharing of the new resources that had been discovered.
But when we learned that members of other raiding parties were no longer leaving women and children alone, we made the decision to flee.” Stepan waited. He put some tobacco into his pipe, a long handled pipe from the horn of a local grazing animal that his cousin had carved out for him. He thought about asking the question delicately, or directly, then asked, without worry: “Do you think that members of other tribes were doing this without members of your own tribe doing this?”
The man gave the answer Stepan was seeking. “No. I believe that whatever one side in the Terror is doing, all of the sides are doing.” “The historians should call it the Horror. The horror is in the deed done. The terror is the anticipation of it.” Stepan paused, then nodded. This particular news of the Terror was sufficient, in Stepan’s judgment, to allow the man to pass the first test laid out for admission to his Village . . .
It had been a dark decade on the continent. Seven different villages, all separated by forested land, had been at war with one another over claims to the region, changing alliances, re-forming old alliances, without any one of them able to gain an edge or advantage over another. The terror – this was the name historians in at least three of the different villages had given to it – the terror had begun when certain resources, with certain properties, had been discovered, not so deeply in the earth as to go undetected.
The various metals and other natural elements to and from the earth included some metals, and some mysterious plant-like samples. The metals were far superior to what citizens of the many villages had worked with and used for shelter and tools. The elders, councils, executives, or other kinds of law-giving or law enforcing bodies, depending on the particular village, were all concerned that one or another of the other villages would monopolize the new discoveries.
A historian in one particular village noted the irony of the Terror and its origins, in his ongoing records and logs: the plant- like substances induced an almost euphoric, nearly hallucinatory creative drive and love for peace and humanity, when ingested either into the lungs, or the digestive tracts.
In stark contrast, the metals were coveted simply because they were so superior to the kinds of materials used by the engineers and military units of different villages, that the metals then in place would not hold up in defense of any army utilizing the new resource.
At the outset, assorted members of the educational, artistic, or priestly classes of different villages petitioned their governments for expeditions in search of the almost-magic plant that had been found. Artisans, painters, inventors, clerics, all sought for the new plant, in the hopes of uncovering some new metaphysical secret to the universe around them. Almost simultaneously, however, leaders of guards, sentries, armies – the knights and soldiers and their generals – petitioned these same governments for finances and backing, to embark on expeditions in search of the new metals.
The Terror had begun, but no one was quite certain how it had begun. It depended on which Village Historian one consulted. The historian for the tribe of one village attributed it to another, and that tribe’s village historian blamed yet a third village for beginning the Terror. Different accounts bore some similarities, and the generally accepted explanation was, simply, that the armed explorers and pioneers from one village, deep in the forest in search of the superior metal, had happened across a search party of clerics seeking the plant, now labelled “divine” by most seekers. The armed party of soldiers and knights mistook the clerics and artists for another armed party from another village, and no one was spared.
Killing another Village’s cleric was a capital offense. It invariably led to extradition of the offender, without protest or further challenge and, even in past times of war, this code was generally accepted. But killing another village’s artist, or poet, or bard – whose jobs included enlightenment, and whose unique skills included a recognition of the shortness of life – this was unimaginable, a horror of the first rank.
And so began the Terror. And this meant – as already noted – for at least one perceptive historian of at least one village – a most greatly ironic moment in the history of the different tribes and their villages. Indeed, it meant the most ironic turn of history ever . . .
For what could be more ironic than to immerse thousands of citizens, from hundreds of families, from seven different tribes, seven different villages, into a long, protracted, and bloody conflagration, all over the bodies of a few men who would have been among the first to preach against such a result, who would have been the first to admit their own mortality, their own recognition of the shortness of their own lives?
But one Village had escaped the conflict, separated from it all by leagues of ocean waters, and while the other villages raged on one against another, that one against a third, this Village simply grew, and grew – its population doubling, then tripling, with the scores of refugees who made their ways across the choppy seas by any means necessary, losing hundreds of loved ones and family members in the terrible, sea-borne trek.
And the historian that had noted the irony, so perceptively? Well, of course, it was the Historian from Stepan’s Village. That Historian learned more about the Terror than any of the other Historians from any of the other Villages combined. Because he accepted all of the participants, and their speeches about it, through agents like Stepan, he could hear all sides. This was Village policy.
Stepan was a customs agent for this isolated island village. In the past, before the Terror, he manned the port and he received goods. But goods stopped coming. The Terror began. Then good came, fleeing as it were what it was not. And it became Stepan’s job to receive, to document, and to welcome, the many refugees who sought a new life of peace, each of them seeking a new beginning at his assigned port. He asked the man some more questions, now that the man, and his family, had passed the first qualification for entry.
But the refugee first asked Stepan so many questions that he could not do his job. “Why does your Village not take part in the Terror?” he asked first. “It is across the seas. That is a long and difficult way to go just to die.” “Why do you not send emissaries and explorers in search of the metals and the new divine plant?” the man asked. “We have our own metals, and we do not need the new one. We have the ocean for defense, and it would swallow up any ship made of any metal heavy enough to crush our own.
And we have our own plants, our own elixirs, our own . . . sources of inspiration . . .” “But what about your inspiration, what do your holy men and bards rely upon?” “The word.” “And your elders choose not to engulf you in the Terror. They must be wise.” “As I said, it is a long way to go just to die.” “Tell me then about the word.”
“We all have these words, we all have language.” “What makes your understanding of it so unique?” “Your words. This is why I am here. This is what I do. Here are your papers. These will admit you. You are to write down every word you know, and every word that you bring . . .”
The refugee was puzzled, but crying. Tears of joy. “Our language is hungry. It is like your armies, or your expeditions, and the parties that go from your Village hungering for more. Our words need more. More words. You are to write down every word in your language, that you know. Henceforth, it becomes part of our own . . .”
The Space Maker
1
"Moon Walker"
Never dreamed
I would find myself
here
after so many years of life
on tender Mother Earth
rubberized boots
walking
and breathing through a mini globe
marvelling at the skin of the moon
a pitted and quiet
barren buffer against a cast
of stones and new discoveries
almost soundless
but eerie
as the distant horizon
takes on a reddest hue
bringing me to a stop
red smoke creeping toward me
settling over the mouths of craters
what could be burning
and where is it coming from?
I quicken my slow plodding
and come to the edge of a gaping crater
slow smoke reddish into a dull pink
coming out of a cave on the far wall
I consider climbing down
but something whooshes out of the cave
and flies over me
I duck
looking up as it passes
a Nazi insignia on the bottom
of an old flying saucer
war seems to be everywhere
I turn and face the sphere of earth
out there in dark space
so near I feel
I could touch it
seemingly nothing ever changes
so I wake up and wonder why
there's someone's blood in my bed.
2
Spinning
Sweet earth of blue
what have we done to you
I stand on your sister moon
squinting through space
over to your sphere
my slow spinning
mother earth
turning into a lonely
immense skull
but the great change is coming
earth reborn
with God's people.
3
Soon
All the land of all the people
all the years settled and dying
so many believing
sky, sea, and sacred places
and prayers and rapture
of saints to heavenly clouds
the Word
directing
footfall and stars
The Space Maker.
