Señor Despaïr

Against a Hopeless Time


Sand, evening.


The silence of the steps 
by the breathing shore
after the thing I believed too late. 

The steps slip in and out of hearing 
like a memory I cannot reach, a word 
at the back of my mind
that will not come as I stumble
through fog hiding the sea and my shame
in a grayness I almost touch,
toward pilings that loom like the back of a crowd
in a dark theater as they wait for it to begin,
a dance to dazzle them
in cruel wordless patterns bound to something 
    almost holy.

A shining crow—
rara avis indeed here where sea gulls rant,
smudges of whiteness, quivering sandpipers,
and alcatrazes like cracked schists—the crow 
starts up, cawing and strident. 

“Do you see the patterns of the raindrops in the
     sand?” 
behind me a courtly, old-world voice seems to say.

“They call it random out of their mathematical   
     despair.”

The last word is spoken as if in Spanish: “des-pa-
    eer.”
I turn to see a small, older man, smiling, attired
    impeccably,
bizarrely formal for beach wear—perhaps an hidalgo
from Oaxaca, or a patrón 
from the cultured banlieus of Buenos Aires—
in an old-time white suit, elegant 
bolo tie, his hair and mustache groomed and white
    as sea foam.
I half-imagine he has materialized from the sea.

“But we do not need to listen to them too closely:
we cannot build a life on the psychosis of physics.
If you follow any chain of logic to its end,
you end in madness.” 
                                       
I almost thought he said 
next: “The night 
will rage with the storm, 
the rain cuts like ice through the air.
Come, huddle in my arms.” 
                                                  But no. 
He stood there politely and spoke on,
his English lightly accented with Spanish. 

“Listen to the wind—el viento!”
He paused. “The next blow will flatten us, no
    doubt,
or if not, rip a hole in the sky
that will sink the world in the night like the sea. 
It will be, as they say, very impressive!

“I cannot take much more of this, being 
an old man, and yet I must, 
foolish and weak as I am.
There is little tenderness because there is little
    forgiveness.
I will pray to the night if I can find no other
    god.
But I can find no other god—eh, what of that?”

He looks toward the waves still visible in the
    dusk.
“ ‘Join us, join us!’ they call.

The darkness thickens around us, like a blanket.
I stare hypnotized like a snake at the old man.
He smiles more deeply, stares up at an invisible
    sky 
then lowers his strange eyes back to me.

“One day I was invited to a party—
there was much food and drink y música,
and beautiful and clever and friendly young folk,
    and dancing
all night, and romantic corners just made for
    kissing—
a wonderful party ‘where everyone is going,’ and I was guaranteed to have the time of my life.

“But there was one condition, of course (have you ever heard of a wonderful offering without a
    condition?
After all, we live in a capitalist society!):
No one was allowed to leave the party alive. 

“Everyone knew the condition? Of course we did;
we were not born, as you say so cleverly,
    yesterday!
It was even written in capital letters at the top, bottom, and at elegantly spaced intervals across the invitation we each received in the postal mail
    two weeks ago.

“But each of us was convinced
we would survive:
We would sneak out just before dawn, 
when the death squads were scheduled to descend 
on the silent household
where the partiers were lying about, dead to the 
   world or in restless dreams after the exhausting 
night’s festivities,
and kill them all in their sleep.

“One or two are rumored to have escaped. 
People constantly seek them:
they look into the face of everyone they meet,
hoping that maybe this one is a survivor.
I myself have been taken for such! I am certainly
    old enough!

“May I ask you something?
Do you have a soul? 
That thing that aches in the space you feel
somewhere behind your eyes
or hiding in the cavern of your chest;
that thrums with grief,
shakes with joy, makes you mad with love?

“You often wonder about that. I know this!
The scientists, those nihilistas,
are almost gleeful when they say they can’t find
    any 
prueba científica for it, so, like ghosts, fairies,
    and God,
it must be dismissed with the condescending doubt 
one gives idiotas, the uneducated, 
and Republicans!

“The soul, they say, 
is nothing but . . . is nothing but . . . is
    nothing,
nada, though you feel it is 
todo—everything.

“It is not unlike this, which they say is the size
of the heart.” 
He raises his fist and looks at it
almost with admiration.

“It can build a city, it can kill
a rattlesnake. It can shoot a president!
It may be nothing, but it is a nothing that can
    make nothing
of everything. Remember that,
my physicist, biologist, economist, psychologist, psychiatrist, capitalist, Antichrist . . .

“Did I say that? I did not say that—erase it from
    your mind.
It was not said, it was not heard or thought. 
The truth will set you free
por nada. It opens the prison cell
to reveal la prisión infinita outside.”

The old man pauses and locks my eyes in his 
in the darkness as it tightens softly around us.

“You think me un viejo loco,
scrambled with drugs and too much tequila—'crazy in
    the head!’—
or just a crank outdated, useless. And you are
    right!

“It is better for you to think so, you who are
    young,
however old you feel: Compared to me,
you are a child, and deserve to keep your innocence
a little longer
en las cadenas del mundo y del tiempo—
in, what do you call?—the chains of time and 
    the world,
as long, that is, as you are able to deny them 
in the rage of your mind 
and your strenuous will,
your pride and your fury
at the fate that world and time
are wreathing around your future, 
the one you hope to defy 
with a brilliant name across the air
that all may see, or none, that shouts out: estaba
    aquí — I   
was here!
Once, once only, irremovable 
in the sun’s cold memory, para siempre.
Even if no one ever sees it again: it was,
eternamente, like an absolute
matchstick—un hombre: un fósforo eterno!

“So what shall we call it, for we must have a name
    for it,
a word we can blame it on, 
to give us the illusion of knowledge and power?

“‘El Reino des Perdidos'—‘The Kingdom of the 
    Lost’- I 
first liked, then found 
trillado, trite;
then ‘Ink on Coal’ before I found that too banal;
‘Despair’ was at the head for a week; 
and even better: ‘Désespoir’—
before my crítico interno returned 
and tossed that definitively down the pissoir!
‘An Enemy of the People’—now that is an honest
    title!
But Ibsen used it,
and his fans can be unforgiving.
‘The Plot of the Homeless Sovereigns’ was a
    desperate gesture only,
and ‘The Wilding Masters’ was an admission of
    defeat.
We eventually settled on something ancient yet
    unused,
direct, simple:
‘El viento y la noche’: 
‘The Wind and the Night.’

“I remember how the sun rose then. 
The throngs of clubbers staggered from a bar called 
    The End Up.
The heroes banked in a strange fire.
They bowed with a terribly earnest politeness.
It was damning: for only a murderous hatred
with a shot of blood and a pint of poison 
to tickle the imagination could make a man glad.
Love be damned! It was hatred we wanted,
and the prospect of crushing an enemy.
Not the fact so much—the idea:
une jolie fantaisie, as the French say.

“The world is not content to destroy.
It must humiliate at the same stroke:
jeering, shame, and annihilation.
A goal worth pursuing, truly,
even if not realistic! Who knows, 
next time we may get it right!
The Prince de ce monde will aid you if you are
patient and humble, and persevere: Perfect 
destruction is as beautiful as perfect 
creation—more rare and beautiful still!—
una perfección only those cast 
into oblivion can ever know,
for only they are so far lost
there is no memory of them. 
Like certain suicides:
a song, a drama, a dance,
in which realization, culmination, ruin
are one. Are one. Are one. Are one.

“Mi mundo era yo.
I was the world.
When I die, dies the universe—
the only universe I can know.

“I want to shout, ‘No! Never!’
but the futility of such words 
suffocates them 
even before they speak.”

The old man sighs, but seems 	
not to notice. Drunk on itself,
his voice patters on.

“But courage, my friend! Courage, defiance, and
    wit: 
a taste for metaphoros and phrase-making: 
much can be made from this garden for growing 
unos universos eternos y infinitos—
universes eternal and infinite!—
out of the humus, compost heap, trash,
of the prima materia of this world;
swelling like lotus blossoms out of the waste
and perfuming the morning with a wilderness sweetness
none—no, none!—could have hoped for or dreamed of,
a delicacy exquisite,
a living line, a profile of ivory
cut from a cloud: the hand of an angel
baffled, as it turns in the air,
by the beauty floating on emptiness 
like waterlilies on a cold pond.

“And who is there to consider all this, 
delight in its million brief enchantments,
its undomesticated glories, 
its conquests and gentleness,
its random ecstasy and splendor,
its snuggling, cozy and quite comical smiles,
its mystery without end—
who but us, my friend? And a few 
torn-winged angels
we no longer believe in, and a passel of other gods.”

The sun had set. I could see no more than the old man’s
    shadow
against the black wall of the sea, from which the voice 
emerged in the wash of waves.

“Despising este espectáculo extraño—this freak show!—
into which we were born
is a sign of good taste.

“For only pity sees the mask 
breaking behind the brazen face
where fear fights with pride, grief 
with insolence, folly with suspicion 
carved, half from wisdom,
half from a refusal to look at the face 
de la realidad: the human 
spirit, part demon, part angel, part monkey—
a pretentious ape that invented God 
and hell.

“But—you are right”—though I had said nothing.
 “Even more foolish is bitterness,
though it cleanses the soul to let it out,
like a scrubbing with a little black soap and brimstone. 
It feels nice to rant, half mad, 
to say unjust and terrible things
to an innocent and long-suffering listener.
Like yourself, young señor! To hell (not 
to use stronger language,
but I have some respect for your sensibilities,
which may not yet have been corrupted
by the fashion in profanity that is now all the rage,
young señor!) to hell with this, to hell with that,
to hell with it all! 

“Wherever one looks, there is no matter,
and mind disappeared long ago
from every metaphysician’s backpack. No mind, no
    matter,
just waves of energy crossing uncertain voids,
not even nothing underneath:
the only thing we know is words
that cannot even say it!

   We must be careful,
my friend: only the select have ever heard me this far
(they usually run away!), either they are willing to be 
    corrupted
or they have an espíritus fuertes as antidote
for this poison before it kills their . . . souls. The rest
yawned off in droves: we have the fragrance to ourselves,
the sweet briny aroma
of truth. 
    (Sí sí! Esa palabra sucia! That dirty word! 
Go, vete, foul escéptico académico!
Back, back! Where is my stake
to thrust through your black heart at dawn!
Where is my cross! The terrible count
must be destroyed so we may live in hope
of peace, if not happiness:
Truth is dead! Long live Truth! 
    For what are you,
my friend? A prince in exile, a monarch 
on a burning throne.
Sí, mi amigo! I draw your face in ink on coal
against ashes and night.

“Do not be bitter (so I speak to myself); by all means, do
    not be bitter;
you are not alone, cramped in your little cell
of body, time, brain—though one feels
lonely enough in the mob
of billions on this earth.

“They watch the same moon shrink and grow,
scrounge the sun’s seeds from the brittle earth
and stare, like you, at the blackness behind the stars—
that strangely comforting darkness.

“Unlock the gate a little late you closed 
behind your heart after, like a horse, it fled!” 

I raise my hands to my face in the darkness.
Somewhere someone is praying.
But only silence crosses my lips.

“Oh, mi niño . . . ,” the voice whispers.
“The heart’s fear masks its love.
Its hatred masks its munificence.”

Or do I only imagine it? “There is nothing to dispute,
no cause for quarrel—unless of course
your quarrel is with God! ‘He’s too big
for that,’ someone once said—and,
si, he had a point. And I rejoined: 
Even a mouse in a corner fights
the cat!

“So what if he’s bigger than you? That means
you need to be more cunning than God—
like the one who reigns in the regions below!
Anyway, what could be simpler?
He need but give a clear and simple 
reason for the world he has made, 
and for putting us in the middle of it! 

“Above all else: 
We see through you! Do not think
you can hide behind the atheists. What a brilliant
ploy you thought that was! You do not exist!
Poof! You are now off the hook, and the nihilists
can go wreck the world between their bombs and bottom
    lines.

“The devil’s cleverest trick was convincing us he was a
    fable,
and now you’re trying it out on your own! Nice try, 
    o Señor!
You must have more on your conscience than I thought!”

The pause is washed with a blur of surf,
dimly white, like the old man’s moon-lit shadow.

“Humanity is a fiasco. Let us face it frankly.
Man is a bizarre accident (alas, woman also, 
siento tener que decir—er, sorry to have to say!)—
and probably is alone in the cosmic chaos:
It’s just us and God! Two points of mind
and perverse will, one mortal, one inmortal—
talk about having nothing in common but thin skins 
and a bad temper! Fourteen billion
years of grandstanding between them! What a farce!
Clowns performing for an audience of clowns!

“Am I being cruel? Have you gazed with unjaundiced eye
at your neighbors? At yourself? You are not the exception.
What goes on inside your head, en su corazón?
Dime, what do you see there? No, don’t tell me.
I have had enough despaïr for one evening.”

A gull, pulled from the passing wind, screams
through the night. It’s so dark, I cannot 
see my hand in front of my face—
that is a true phrase.

“The truth,
which you believe does not exist, like God and the devil,
is testing his arrows at the edge of the universe,
that beige and brain-shaped cloud, before he notches 
his bow. It will take less time than forever 
to reach us, entangled as we are, like a ball 
of yarn at the end of a kitten’s hijinks. 
The claw is no less merciless for the sweetness
of the eyes of its owner. The world is lovely,
dark and deep. She is innocent and beautiful and ruthless. 
Dime una mentira para que pueda volver 
a dormir. Tell me a lie so I can sleep again. 
Too many truths have burnt a hole in my brain!
I hear the silence of the arrow—el silencio de la flecha—
as it flies toward me . . .”
_____
Christopher Bernard’s most recent collection of poems is titled The Beauty of Matter, “A Pagan’s Verses for a Mystic Idler.” Señor Despaïr will be available in book form from Real Magazine Productions, a publisher based in India, later this year.

The Grotesqueness of Glamour, the Glamour of the Grotesque

Red Carpet

Paris Opera Ballet

Berkeley, California

Reviewed by Christopher Bernard

Cal Performances brought the legendary Paris Opera Ballet to University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater over a sunny weekend this October to give the North American premiere of Hofesh Shechter’s new dance, Red Carpet.

The historic company, one of the world’s most celebrated (and the subject, some years ago, of a remarkable documentary by the almost equally legendary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman), traveled from its home at the Beaux Arts Palais Garnier to the modern concrete Zellerbach in a work that combines, mocks, plays with, celebrates, satirizes, and at moments transcends, the poles of an aesthetic whose tension keeps the arts alive: as Schecter says in the program notes, “between glamour and the grotesque.”

Red Carpet is a frieze of a little over a dozen vignettes complexly choreographed on a polymorphous, dimly lit space in a crowd of cohering and crashing styles. We begin in a timeless ballroom dominated by a magnificent chandelier lit by a blaze of artificial candles (a handful sometimes broken and unlit, in vulnerability and decay), beneath which—as it periodically descends to the floor, in full glory, or goes dark, withdrawing into its own ghostly shadow—more than a dozen dancers in a motley array of outfits, from an eye-catching core—a woman in a superbly glittering, blood-red ballgown and others sheathed in glitter-shouldered white—to weaving epicycles of strutters in the post-punk gear of an underground dance club, writhe and strut and wind and defy, as on any modern red carpet surrounded by an audience of obsessed fans, cynical press, and professional gawkers, to the grinding beat of a four-musician band hitting above its weight and whose pounding is layered, when the band falls silent, with the fluting whoosh of an electronically generated sound of perpetual wind.

There’s indeed as much grandeur here as glamour, and an always fascinating grotesqueness (as someone once put it, ugliness is its own aesthetic category, a kind of small change of the sublime).

Each section pits multiple styles against each other—from strained classical elegance to muscular modern, from the industrial synced in brutal competition to violent pop at the edge of disillusion and fury—in little troops of the mass dominating the piece.

There were only two extended solos, brilliant takes on a wild male chaos driven crazy in the dance of modern life, by Takeru Coste and a mohawked Loup Marcault-Deroud, in the performance I saw. And three quarters the way through, a quintet in sudden white dances against an ox-blood red curtain, suggesting the naked human form beneath the jungle of self-representative fashion hitherto on display, on stage as in human life.

Curiously, the representation of nakedness is often used to represent a kind of authenticity and purity that clothing supposedly hides. Yet here it had the opposite effect for this viewer: it is precisely clothing, makeup, style—the marks of individual choice and taste—that express the individual more directly than the body alone can ever do; the body merely bare, like the skeleton, is anonymous, a ghost, almost a nothing. It seems, if anything, less truthful, less communicative, than the elaborations of personal design. Nakedness, like sexuality, has the paradoxical effect of destroying the individual.

Red Carpet is an exhilarating experience, with many stunning moments and memorable gestures—a hammering of fist on fist in a forest of ecstatic writhing, a disco mass pointing skyward, an old-school butter-churn at one moment, at another an indrawn intensity apparently unaware and uncaring of being seen. Above all the deliberate density of movement, the obscurity and obscuring, of each dancer’s actions, like a fugue so densely worked out you can’t possibly follow any individual voice, or like the rituals of certain religions that are seen by parishioners behind a screen so their exact character is never certain, only their importance to the parishioners’ salvation.

And yet I came away with the frustrating sense it could have been even better than it was. It is such a fine piece, brilliantly danced by the company, yet it missed that perfect sense of rightness that the greatest dances, even those expressly aiming to express chaos, can provide.

Too much of the inventiveness in the piece is front-loaded, giving it little space to grow into later. In the final third, there was a feeling of exhausted inspiration, of repetitiveness, even of silliness (the quintet aforementioned quickly devolves into a series of pantomimes that, for this viewer, were both too obvious and too disconnected from the rest of the piece). And the ending of the piece was strangely unsatisfying; the world may or may not end in a whimper, but this dance, alas, does.

Nevertheless, what I remember most vividly is the grand ball of a crowd endlessly diverse in style, approach, movement, and form that, seemingly despite itself, combined in a strange rightness that was as moving as it was exciting: like a great abstract painting in motion, at those moments (and there were many) everything fell into place. Or like a living, moving forest that Shechter himself evokes: “[Choreographing a dance] is like being in a forest. . . . I continue to explore. I haven’t left the forest.”

Red Carpet was created by the Paris Opera Ballet’s multi-talented Shechter along more dimensions than usual: he also designed the atmospheric set and wrote the unrelenting music, which was performed by Yaron Engler (who also collaborated on the music) on drums, Olivier Koundouno on cello, Marguerite Cox on double bass, and Brice Perda on an array of wind instruments. The moody lighting was by Tom Viser. It frustrated some members of the audience, as they loudly proclaimed in the lobby afterward—but not this one: straining to see what was going on, as suggested above, seemed part of the point, though the point was sometimes over-drawn. But I’m a bit of a sucker for ghostly effects, so I have few complaints.

_____

Christopher Bernard is the author of The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, which won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

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.

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.

MIXED EMOTIONS

The Great Yes, The Great No

William Kentridge

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

For some people the day comes

when they have to declare the great Yes

or the great No. – Cavafy

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.