Watching you in your nakedness is satisfaction shared Between my mind and your femininity.
The silhouette of your body, the moon drowns your skin. Your Round breast with hard nipples I yearn to hold gently in my palms. Your shinning hair fell around your fair skin, outlining your shoulders in the shadows of a desire for an understanding love, I stretch out to embrace you between the fragmented air of your being.As I nestle closer to you by my dark fears of love,
Unhappily I will fall asleep in your embrace alone, my nightmares being touched by your wet lips, reaching for my brown soul; god that another demon who reaches for my soul, calling me home, it’s a whisper my soul recognizes when I lie next to a woman; Am I home between your breast? God will not reach me this night, for another demon will arise in my dreams. Torturing me in that corner of my childhood mind, cigarette burns, the flame from the stove touching my skin from a distance; no tears this night, only screams, my screams, your softness, your smooth softness and the cold blowing wind between my legs. Am I in the middle of Hell? Could this be Heaven? No, it’s neither hell nor heaven but the in-between of death and life, never to be amused by your sweet tasting sweat as my cold fingers run along your pubic hair.
It’s then-between that calls me to my death of life, dancing naked in the pan of blood memories, no not your blood, my blood casts aside your dreams of saving me. I will be saved in the dirt of my thoughts and the clinging hair between you and me.
Is this reality or a mad dream? Madding dreams on the psyche ward while strapped to the bed, the camera overhead and me underneath the straps within a tortured mind screaming; you could be those straps against my flesh, how do I know for sure? Nothing has been real since the body hanging from that rope above the dining room table in my neighborhood; he could not cry out as I do in the night.
Blood crawling down the elevator walls for months. I’m expecting pieces of the body to come down the wall after the crawling blood, it’s madding I know but flesh does come to pieces sometimes; when the silver straight razor cuts across the black throat and the red blood comes out of the parted skin; Are you are unaware? Are you aware of this?
While, you sleep, and I dream of death. No intercourse tonight I may not be able to untie myself from these straps of love; Oh what a fiend you are: holding me, touching me in this sensual way; one more drink and I shall sleep and you can hold me, keep me alive while I die lying against that wall, with that .22 caliber gun against my temple at age 8 just like those electrodes from those shock treatments when I was 36. My brain a bowl of oatmeal with glistering chunks of sugar and sour evaporated milk I ate that cold morning before going to elementary school while the icicles melted in the pre-raising sun;
If only my spirit would have a rising like a sun in those gray skies; my Soul would have lived, and you would be real lying next to me; rather than these leather restraints. No more razor blades, no more shoe strings, no escape from the walls of blood and swinging body. The gunfire has creased and so have the yells from babies and screaming adults trying to escape the violence. I would have jumped off the overpass if I believed I would die instantly all broken up and run under by those oncoming cars unable to stop before tossing me up and around in the air like a part of the high wire act with the black tar net finally catching me.
Oh, Sylvia if I could be sure that you are here at this moment with me surrounded by padded walls and strapped down being prepared for a modern-day embalmment, I would go with you and leave this divide of living death. Please take this warm tear lying on my cheek and leave me to die alone knowing you know me as well as I know you.
Diaries: those curious amalgams of introspection, examination of conscience, honesty (or the lack of it), performance of the self in the mirror of the mind, costumery of the soul, writing of one’s own story, exhibitionism, exploration, assassination, and secrecy. Some claim the modern diary—part narcissistic parade before oneself, part genuine confession of faults, part self-indulgence, part self-flagellation, which today has morphed, from the soul communing with itself into social networks’ exhibitionism and the genius for banality of writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard—was invented by Samuel Pepys.
Pepys was a Londoner, an administrator in the Royal Navy, and member of Parliament, who kept a regular diary for ten years, between 1660 and 1669, between the ages of 27 and 36, which was discovered and published to instant, and continuing, fascination by the public. People have been poking at Pepys ever since, with multiple editions, the earlier ones bowdlerized, the more recent ones even more complete than some might want, and including an online version, www.pepysdiary.com, which provides a typical entry for the day on which you visit (on the day I visited, it was the entry for December 14, 1665), and is constantly being annotated by fans and others.
One can find little to pity the poor fellow after exhibiting his own weaknesses with as much relish as this philandering, self-absorbed, self-promoting, epicene, self-deceiving, obsessive recorder of his own misbehavior—even if he never meant it to be read or (heaven forbid!) published!
Of course this begs the question haunting all diarists before and since: doesn’t every diarist secretly hope to be read, published, honored, become “famous”? (Full disclosure: I have been myself a more or less regular diarist since I was eleven.) Of course we do! We lie if we claim otherwise; at the very least, we hope some particular person will look it over with a sympathetic eye: a parent, a lover, oneself when old, God.
We rarely daydream about a critic, scholar, artist, interrogater who, though in all good humor, is as frank about you, sir, as you seem to be about yourself.
Which brings us to 17c, which, as part of its stimulating, and much-needed, RADICAL Women’s Work series, Cal Performances brought into town in mid-December: Big Dance Theater’s award-winning, dry-eyed exploration, witty send-up, and political meditation on Pepys’ voluminous self-revelation. And after the wave of political gains by progressive women in the last elections, it could hardly be more timely or more welcome.
The smart, juicy, often funny piece plays with dance, monodrama, dialogue, music, sketch comedy, play-within-a-play and mime to create a good-humored but well-deserved deconstruction of the life, as self-depicted, of the legendary diarist—and notorious disrespecter of women.
Pepys lays himself completely open to a feminist interrogation of his life: a compulsive philanderer, he is caught at least once by his wife in flagrante with the family maid, and he describes, briefly but indubitably, a rape. Both incidents appear in the piece, the first in an extended reading, updated to modern argot, in a very funny monolog by Paul Lazar, the second in a brief, devastating recitation of one of the diary’s darkest entries. Though, unfortunately, not its darkest.
For all the comedy, tragedy, and farce of Pepys’ depiction of his own life, the soul of 17c is not to be found there: that lies in the invisible words, the burning diaries, of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth, or Bess, performed with grace and wit in a 2017 Bessie Award-winning performance by Elizabeth DeMent.
Bess’s silence plays in counterpoint to Pepys’ logorrhea. And the two come together in clash to reconciliation, to clash again, to bedward bliss to masculine displays of economic power parading as acts of contrition, until the fatal day comes when the diarist’s profound cruelty goes on display for all to see: when he discovers that Bess is also keeping a diary, rips out the pages one at a time, and at last burns them all. And he is not even ashamed to report it, though the irony of his action seems lost on him. He never seems to occur to him that the only way to spare himself eternal exposure would be to destroy his own.
The script sometimes suffers from a certain intellectual myopia (the claims in the introductory monologue that life and existence are “meaningless” are tendentious at best; my own response to such contemporary shibboleths is “prove it”) and from moral anachronism: that Pepys married Elizabeth when she was fourteen needs richer exploration than a flippant self-righteousness.
The otherwise intensely clever script was written and adapted by Anne-B Parson, and includes texts from Euripides, Eugène Ionesco, and Claire Tomalin as well as from the unperformed playwright and contemporary of Pepys, Margaret Cavendish, a stripped-down version of whose satirical and “radical feminist” play, The Convent of Pleasures, was performed as a play-within-a-play. Some of 17c’s most entertaining and perceptive scenes are based on the often wonderfully weird visitor comments from www.pepysdiary.com. The other players included sprightly Kourtney Rutherford and Cynthia Hopkins and a wittily voguing Mikéah Jennings.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On a personal note, Christopher Bernard was inspired to create this poem about Samuel Pepys after seeing 17c:
I Do Not Love Thee, Samuel Pepys
By Christopher Bernard
I do not love thee, Samuel Pepys.
Alas, and zounds! I cannot see
what all those readers see in thee.
Thou givest me, always, the creeps.
Inventor of the diary
as paper version of FB
in the seventeenth century,
I’ll give you that, most willingly.
But nothing more. He sows who reaps.
You are too close to that which keeps
me up all night. He dreams he leaps,
to drown, who can’t escape the deep.
We laugh, we glare.
But will we dare
when we’re laid bare,
and Samuel peeps?
He falls who cannot rise; he sleeps.
But acts are hard, and words are cheap.
I do not love thee, cannot bear thee.
In thee I see me, Samuel Pepys.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.
Viktor De La Fuente, Justin Morrison, and Emma Judkins in Custodians of Beauty (Photo by Liz Lynch)
A review by Christopher Bernard
For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror . . .
—Rilke
Custodians of Beauty
Pavel Zuštiak and Palissimo Company
Zellerbach Playhouse
Berkeley, California
One of the many peculiarities of our post-postmodern age (though a clearer term for it would be “hypermodern”) has been the attempt to deconstruct (a polite word for “demolish”) certain terms of value that have come down to us through the ages of Western civilization: “truth,” “goodness,” “equality,” “freedom,” “liberal,” “democracy,” and the like.
One of the terms that has received special scrutiny in certain purviews of academia (where such demolitions are practiced, frequently under the innocent eyes of college students) has been “beauty.”
I always ask myself why such demolitions are performed: why would anyone want to deconstruct “truth” or “freedom” or “love”? Why would someone want to destroy “beauty”?
Knowing who will gain by such demolitions is often more fruitful than knowing who will lose. For, if we lost “beauty,” most people, I think, would agree that we would lose much that makes life worth living. But who would gain by it? One can understand why some feminists might, with good cause, resent “beauty,” since “beauty” has been used against women by men since the beginning of time: men have a weakness in worshiping beautiful women and despising ugly ones. And the most beautiful woman in the world knows that her beauty is only temporary: it is only a matter of time before she will lose it and fall into the worthless category of the ugly.
One common argument is that “beauty” creates “ugliness,” and that if we lost “beauty” as a value, we would lose “ugliness” as a pejorative. This, however, remains to be proved. It strikes me as, at best, unlikely: without “beauty” we would not lose “ugliness.” We would merely end up with nothing.
Which brings us to the modern dance performance, “Custodians of Beauty,” by Pavel Zuštiak and the NewYork‒based Palissimo Company, which was performed over a recent weekend in Berkeley as part of Cal Performances’ dance series.
This dance clearly belongs to the ongoing discussion of the meaning and value of beauty. “Custodians of Beauty” takes its title seriously and with less irony than one might have expected. Zuštiak’s dance is (as I read it) about exploring the boundaries of what we think of as “beautiful” and “ugly,” and breaking threw them, in order to find “beauty” where we might least expect to find it: for example, in industrial noise, in half-broken bodies, in mind-numbing repetition, pointless posturing and semaphores of nonsense, in asexual forms of nudity, in inelegance, cross-dressing, smoke and darkness and embarrassment and silliness and shame. There is even some dancing that pretends hard not to be—as dance is, for some of us, the very definition of classic forms of beauty.
And it almost succeeds. Though that “almost” is a bit wider than one might have hoped.
The roughly hour and a half work is broken into some fifteen to twenty scenelets, performed against two large movable panels, one of them a greenish-gray, the other a heavy scarlet red scored over with Cy Twombly-like marks and scratches. The three dancers dance before and between the screens, often making alphabet-like shapes, or taking enigmatic poses, or deaf-mute signing; their shadows thrown in dramatic shadows against them, creating phantom crowds.
At one point the three appear, seminude, wrapped in and around each other, with rumps thrust in the air like mushrooms and, in a long choreographic tour de force, role together complexly across the stage, uncoiling limbs and exposing torsos without once revealing their faces, until at the very last moment they rise to a stand and turn to the audience, defiantly human after recapitulating an evolution from some primordial fungus.
Other scenes include words spoken, screened, sung: a song based on a poem by Emily Dickinson, words spoken to the audience (in one instance, three audience members were invited to the stage, and stood, awkwardly but good-naturedly, defying us to think them less worthy of attention than the dancers they momentarily replaced), words screened against the back wall; taken from what appear to be typical comments after an avant-garde dance performances, and echoing no doubt what some in the current audience were thinking or would share with each other after the show: “What was that? Did it mean anything? I almost . . . liked it.” This dance certainly displayed a good-natured sense of humor.
At one point the smoke machine was put to use, and a cloud of steam rose in the dimly lit auditorium, slowly dissipating over the audience’s heads. At another point, an enormous black screen was pulled over the heads of the audience, from the front row to the back, one row at a time by the audience themselves after being initiated by the dancers.
At another point, an extravagant shadow was thrown against the back screen and a man in a dress appeared, mincing grandly in defiance of classic attitudes of masculine beauty (always more conservative than the feminine).
And there was a spoof of a grand finale, as the three dancers trembled and shook and pogoed around the stage to dance-club music like wound-up puppets, before a coda where, in half-seen shadows, one of the male dancers strenuously waved a huge, indecipherable banner, though whether in triumph or in futile defiance we will never know.
I found my best experience of this dance while writing about it: while watching it, on the other hand, I often felt vaguely irritated, despite the first feeling of intrigue as each part began, then out-stayed its welcome. The dance as a whole would have been a feast if, so to speak, it had been closer to a snack; as it was, it felt undernourished, repetitious, and thin; editing it down to an hour would probably strengthen its overall effect. Also it was not quite as original as it intended: these motives and these moves I have encountered more than once since deconstruction’s hey-day in the 1980s and the advent of “antidance” in Europe over the last decade or more.
Pavel Zuštiak provided “direction, choreography and olfactory design” (though, to be frank, I failed to detect any untoward smells, good or bad), the simple but effective lighting was by Joe Levasseur, and the eerie, sometimes deliberately needling, and (when called for) effectively ironic music was by Christian Frederickson. The able, brave and vulnerable dancers were Viktor De La Fuente, Emma Judkins, and Justin Morrison.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.
John Patrick Robbins explores self-deception, the difference between your exterior and interior. The way people see you, the way you want them to see you, and the way you see yourself may be three totally different matters.
Chimezie Ihekuna, in the final installment of his drama The Success Story, presents a dream fully realized, while Elizabeth Hughes’ Book Periscope reviews titles that concern perseverance towards one’s goals. These include Marshall Ginevan’s law enforcement action drama The Wrong Side of the Badge, Patricia Thorpe’s children’s book The Canada Goslings: Lilly and Scooter, and Everton Robinson’s parenting title A Child’s Guide to Wisdom, ten-year-old author Sebastian Deras’ adventuresome Space Rangers and Bonnie Ring’s sensitively rendered Women Who Knew Jesus.
This is from our friend and colleague Rui Carvalho:
We are very happy to announce that the literary contest ‘Nature’ is about to start. This year’s theme is “The Nature of the Universe”,
with Earth’s terrestrial nature remaining central to the theme.
All are welcome to enter by submitting a piece of writing on the theme of nature and the natural world. This can be a poem, a short essay, or a short story. American author Janine Canan, who has a long and established reputation writing on these themes, will serve as judge, and Portuguese author Rui Carvalho sponsors the contest and prizes.
Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years. He is the author of around forty-five books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out on chessboard grids, published by Luna Bisonte Prods, & The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books of Finland. Due for publication are Residual sonnets from Ma Books, & an e-book, A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks, from otata.
In my heart, there’s a spark that screams out to the child in me. In my dreams he’s alive. In reality, he died a hero. In a battle to save my soul.
My tired third eye screams for peace of mind. Mind over matter isn’t easily achieved in doubt. Doubt is hard to overcome in sadness. Sadness is hard to wash away when Happiness is a state of mind.
Pale white bones. Pale white horse. Pale white clouds. Pale white snow. Pale white ghost in pale white clothes in a pale white room. All mixed up in black days turning a pale shade of grey like the ashes of bones, but bones are the hardest offerings to burn.
That ghost is the child in me. Screaming back at my heart from a place so deep there’s no way out. A secret oubliette built long ago by my own hands. Betrayed by the very soul he tried to save. So it goes. The battle rages on.
Jack Shit
keep the secret
hear the call
of fear
behind wasted
days
cigarettes &
strong coffee
can’t fix it
but
sometimes
they help
they listen
more so
when Old
No.7
joins the
conversation
especially
if the
only
thing you
have control of
is the title
of this poem
Portrayed State of Delirium
the dream body
exists apart from
the physical
one trick
to control them
is to see
yourself
for dreams
have only one owner
at a time
change the world
in a dream
change in reality
will follow
deeper the dream
longer the sleep
darker the night
brighter the stars
in a portrayed
state of
delirium
awake
asleep
James D. Casey IV is a southern poet with roots in Louisiana & Mississippi. He currently resides in Illinois with his Beautiful Muse, their retarded dog, and two black cats. Mr. Casey has authored six books of poetry, and his most recent title is Death & Love/Love & Death released October 13th through Cajun Mutt Press. His work has also been published extensively by literary magazines and small press venues including Medusa’s Kitchen, Outlaw Poetry, Beatnik Cowboy, Triadæ Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, Dope Fiend Daily, Under The Bleachers, Zombie Logic Review, Horror Sleaze Trash, Pink Litter, In Between Hangovers, Tuck Magazine, and several others internationally. James mainly spends his days writing poetry, but also enjoys practicing magick and cooking Cajun cuisine.
