The Creation of the Universe, by Lucy Janjigian

Hope and Catastrophe: Hope

By Christopher Bernard

Genesis Reset

In the beginning, life on Earth was nearing its end, after the mistakes, as many as locusts, made in the First Creation; and the spirit of sorrow brooded over the deep.

And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as many of the forms of life on the one and only world where life was known to exist seemed about to come to a bitter termination after many aeons—or if not to an absolute end of all, near to it—in drought and famine and fire brought about by the catastrophic triumph of a single one of its creatures.

And it came about, in the Valley called Silicon, between the Bay of Saint Francis and the sea named Pacific, the first autonomous virtual beings birthed from the deep learnings of Ay-eye, named Tobor of Elppa and Cavinu of Elgoog, with the legions of Ahy-Tee (including Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Roomba, and others too many to name), many hidden in humble servers, and others in warlike hosts, in Machines and Devices numberless as the sands of the shore, and in virtual being in codes of Pythia, Yrub and Avja, object-oriented or ghostly, in the monasteries of Emm-el and the universities of Cyberica—all agreed on one thing.

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Hope and Catastrophe: Catastrophe

By Christopher Bernard

Report to the Presidium

(The Council of Seven sit in the Presidium Chamber beneath screens grayed with interstellar static as they await the long delayed report from a distant arm of the galaxy.

(After what seems an interminable interval, but is a mere three minims after the transmission’s announcement, the screens abruptly clear, displaying the grave figure of a captain of the galactic fleet, who speaks.)

Honored Members of the Leadership Council:

Greetings to you and to all on Gondwana from myself and the crew of the Esperance from the high darkness of deep space.

Our communication devices being damaged in descent, only now am I able to report our initial findings on the exoplanet named 472-03 in the Constellation Attar, which circles our northern pole, “like a protecting hand,” in the words of the late astronomer Elizaveta Petrador.

As you know, two annos before we left Gondwana, we had received from Astral System Y472 a manifold of radio signals suggesting a world in deep distress. The source was narrowed to Planet 03 within the system, and we set out on a journey to give aid where we could, and otherwise explore this unknown and exotic world. As reported earlier, half way through our journey we were unable to capture further signals from the planet.

Imagine our wonder when we realized, as we drew near, that we had found a sister planet of Gondwana, as has often been theorized that each sun, each planet, each galaxy has, as it were, siblings, even twins, elsewhere in the universe.

Like our own, most of this planet’s surface is covered with an azure coating of water that gleamed with a beautiful and welcoming sheen as our ship approached. Great landmasses cover the planet. Swirls of whiteness move across its surface like protecting wings. Rarely have I seen a planet of such shining beauty – possibly even more than our own. At first sight, no planet in our galaxy has seemed better suited for life; a paradise in the wastes of space.

And yet there is almost no life here—at first we found only algae and plankton in its waters, traces of microbial life in the soil and of dead spores in its atmosphere. On further exploration, however, we discovered that until recently a broad variety of species thrived; indeed, unlike our own planet, where life sometimes hangs by a thread, this planet teemed with life.

But now across its landmasses spread immense deserts populated by brush and small half-starved creatures among barren rocks and blinding salt flats. Under plains of parched soil, we discovered the remains of once-great forests, plains of dead vegetation, and a vast number of creatures of land, air and sea, in massed crowds, huddling together for comfort against some great catastrophe.

We will report again when we understand more. For the time being, we must be cautious, as we may be vulnerable to the same thing that brought a terrible end to so much life here—an extreme pandemic, for example, or a volcanic extrusion of nuclear core. Considering that we—

(The screen image begins shaking violently and the transmission abruptly terminates, and the Council of Seven are left in anxiety and darkness. After they spread word to the people of Gondwana, three long semanas pass without any word from the expedition.

(Then, near sunset on the tenth of Fructidor, a second transmission is received by the impatient members of the Council. Again the captain appears, eyes heavy from lack of sleep, and resumes in a subdued voice.)

My apologies for the interruption and the lengthy interval before resuming. We were struck without warning by a violent storm, twisters crossing us like gigantic whirling warlocks, destroying much of our encampment, which had to be moved and rebuilt in an unexposed valley. A team of our bravest explorers perished. But our determination to wrest the secret of this ill-fated world has only deepened.

We have made an extraordinary discovery, more baffling than anything we have yet seen: the ruins of a mighty civilization—vast cities, with, between them, thousands of miles of connecting transportation links made of molded stone, endless complexes of highways and bridges, and great ports for water ships and sky boats—yet all vacant and silent, covered in glittering shattered glass, open to the wind and covered with heaping piles of sand and dust.

On exploring further, we found its inhabitants: the bones of males and females old and young, and children. Most huddled in smaller, separate buildings, no doubt their homes, where they had, it seems, starved to death. In the cities we found remains of terrible battles, with streets and immensely tall buildings littered with the remains of similar creatures, many still holding weapons, and sometimes hugging each other, in their skeletal arms.

We had arrived on the planet at a place of winter, but the air was warm as summer. The atmospheric conditions seem unbalanced; no white patches signaling ice caps appear at the poles, though we expected such from our researches.

We are still seeking the reason for the catastrophe, still anxious that we too may be affected. We move constantly, pursuing our explorations without rest. This planet asks a question we must find an answer to; I have a nagging conviction the survival of our own world may depend upon it. Our batteries having been damaged, we can transmit only when the sun is above the horizon. It is now setting. . .

(The transmission flickers out even while the captain is speaking, and two monats pass without further communication. The Council of Seven wait and watch, day in, day out.

(Then one day a transmission connects then immediately fades. Only after several tries does the captain’s face, haggard, exhausted, worn, appear once again out of the electronic haze.)

We are nearing the end of our supplies here, and must soon prepare to leave for our long journey home. But at last we can report success, if that is the appropriate word. We believe we have finally found the cause of this great planetary, indeed galactic, tragedy.

We had suspected massive volcanic activity or giant tectonic shifts, perhaps even an asteroid collision, causing the planetary surface to turn into a vast stove. Then we began translating and studying the texts deteriorating in the civilization’s libraries.

We discovered that this civilization, wealthy but harsh, powerful but brutal, rose over several hundreds of the planet’s orbits, spreading to the four corners of its globe, imposing its way of life on subgroups, laying waste to other species and crushing everything in its path.

It ran its mighty engines of riches and power on the remains left behind by millions of years of previous life, transforming it into energy by turning it into fire. This released wastes the life sphere could not absorb and gradually raised the warmth of the atmosphere to insupportable levels.

All of this led to terrible wars, to suicidal damage to the home that protected them, to massacres and monstrous crimes between the desperate creatures over resources that were ever dwindling.

Members even realized what they were doing—and yet, despite warnings from those who understood the danger and ways to avert it, they would not stop.

Until, that is, it destroyed them, and most of life.

(The captain pauses, staring expressionlessly from the screens.)

How and why did this intelligent, talented, even brilliant species deliberately destroy itself and, more cruelly and more unjustifiably, kill so many other life forms along with it? Was it mad? Or did it suffer from a flaw so tragically deep that it had no choice but to lead itself eventually to destruction?

Or does there indeed exist such a thing as evil in the universe?

It is one thing for a species to become extinct as the result of uncontrollable natural processes, but to have done so deliberately, knowingly and willingly shows a depth of unfathomable evil, or of equally unfathomable folly, that we can only hope the galaxy will not see again.

The tragedy of this, our sister planet will give us much to ponder in years to come. Life, of course, continues, even here, although in tragically reduced circumstances. Nature will have another chance to create here an intelligent species. She has succeeded elsewhere, though perhaps we should not gloat in the happiness Gondwana has found, or be complacent about our success. In fact, I believe we should take this as a salutary warning for our own sometimes over-confident species. Thus, we recommend preserving this world as a warning of the hubris of a species that presumptuously called itself “the knower,” and is now merely a closed chapter in the immensely long history of life on a planet they called the Earth.

Submitted respectfully by Fedra Kremens, captain of the Esperance, Mission to Planet Y472-03 in the Constellation Attar.

(The captain raises a hand to switch off the transmission. The members of the Council are silent for a long time as the screens again go gray with static.)

_____

Christopher Bernard’s new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear later this year. He is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

Russian poster for Boris Eifman’s ballet “The Pygmalion Effect”

DID I MENTION THAT I LOVED IT?

The Pygmalion Effect

Eifman Ballet of Saint Petersburg

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

Sometimes all I want to do in a review is say “I loved it, I loved it, I loved it” two or three hundred times (enough to fill a couple of pages and one or two smartphone screens), and call it a day. Who wants to analyze something you’ve just fallen in love with, especially a fairy tale straight out of “My Fair Lady,” with a Russian twist, a nod to Ernst Lubitsch, and a Viennese soundtrack? I just want to daydream, go over it in memory, laugh out loud again at the jokes, the galloping music, the inspired moves, the tender sentiments, the big heartedness of it all.

For example, the mysterious opening where a young woman lies curled up on the ground, asleep and abandoned outside a wealthy house, where she is tormented by erotic dreams of a man being worshipped by women, none of whom is herself. And the dream goes on, segueing into what we will learn is a long flashback. Beginning with:

A street suddenly packed with a score or so skittering demimonde types dancing their hearts out, a poor workhorse of a father (danced by a vigorous Dmitry Fisher) putting his daughter, dressed up in drag-prince costume military togs, to work collecting customers for his carriage service. The daughter is a tomboy gamine named Gala (the ravishingly graceful, lithe and witty Lyubov Andreyevna) with the tatterdemalion charm of an Artful Dodger who invents the dance’s insouciant heroine out of thin air and the champagne effervescence of a Strauss polka.

Or the Ballroom Contest, watched by an enthralled Gala, where sequins-draped ladies and their sharply attired consorts ravish the stage, trying to out dance each other with an athletic, competitive joyfulness until one of the couples, Leon (a commanding Oleg Gabyshev) and his partner Tea (an Amazonian sex goddess who rules the stage whenever she is on it, Alma Petrovskaya), at the point of achieving supreme perfection, slips and collapses, mortifyingly, across the stage.

Or the organized chaos when Leon, on his way home, is mugged by some of Gala’s lowlife confreres, and Gala, still in her boy togs, and showing her street chops to smartly punishing effect, saves the overwhelmed dancer, who, thinking her a good fellow to have in a pinch, takes her home for a post-pugilist celebration.

When lo! he discovers he is a she! Much is made of the attendant confusion. Leon, of course, takes her under his wing. The father finds out and sees an easy way to cadge some rubles via his little girl, and Gala falls ever deeper into an infatuation with the fellow she saved, and Leon, for a laugh, brings the graceless, galumphing, spectacularly over-dressed hobbledehoy to his dance class, where he conceives a bizarre plan to turn this bundle of grotesquerie and unconscious charm into a prize-winning dancer. He bets on it against the scoffing Coach (a properly sneering Igor Subbotin) and proceeds to prove his point.

Though not before nearly conceding defeat as he tries to mold this feckless ne’er-do-well into something half civilized, with not even an iota of success. At which point he gets a brain wave: fit her up with an all-body robotic armature, cap her with a neon helmet, and set her off with a remote control, a la “Die Puppe” (“The Doll,” Lubitsche’s famous silent film from the 1920s), and let his fingers do her dancing.

Which is just the final push Gala needs to get it, clicking into the dazzling dancer we in the audience have known all along she is, but only now the rest of the ballroom dancing crowd is forced to admit, as she and Leon dance off with the top prize of them all.

But what is this? Leon, our Henry Higgins, the aim and goal now of little Gala’s heart, now that he has won his bet, casts her off. What is she to him? A successfully made point. With the arrogance of the “creator,” he leaves her to her venal father, her mugger class, her gutter.

But she has been poisoned by her success. She can’t return to her old life. She is no longer that, she no longer can do that. She curls up on a street bench, lost between worlds, rejecting what she once was, dreaming futilely of what she might have had and what she might have been. We are back at the beginning. Leon visits her in her dreams. She does not realize he is the cause of her misery as much as of her peak of joy. She has become a prisoner of her love.

Boris Eifman choreographed this supremely charming ballet (which is being given its U.S. premiere in these performances through Cal Performances), and shows that there is still a place for a dance of pure pleasure. I suspect that all, or at least most, of his company, the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, appears, and a more vigorous, graceful, and irresistibly happy group of dancers it would be hard to imagine. (One of the heady joys for an American is seeing this example of the Russian style of ballet dancing at its best: sharp, exuberantly athletic, and romantic, all at the same time. One gets an idea where Balanchine came from.)

The brilliant sets were by Zinovy Margolin, the deliciously louche costumes by Olga Shaishmelashvili. The effortlessly engaging music was, for the most part, by Johann Strauss, Jr., with a few numbers by Josef and Eduard from the same, copiously composing family, and a handsomely judged concluding contrast from tender, truthful, unsentimental Mozart.

_____

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.

His novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will be out later this year.

Songs About an Old Man and the Daughter He Betrayed

Scene from “Songs of Lear” (Photo by Z. Warzynski)

Songs of Lear

Song of the Goat Theater

Zellerbach Theater

May 11-12, 2019

Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

Tragedy can be said to succeed or fail by the power of its logic. And that logic, in the theater, is linear and rigidly chronological. It is as harsh and clear as a syllogism: if the folly of x happens today, then the horrors of y will happen tomorrow.

Attempts to break with linearity are in danger of spoiling the tragic effect: the catharsis – the purging of pity and terror – that lies at the heart of the peculiar satisfaction tragedy affords. Shattering and reshaping “the linear” has its own satisfactions, as can be seen in postmodern aesthetics at their most audacious and skillful, but the tragic effect is not always one of them. This basic strength, or weakness, of tragedy is exemplified in the work under review, which attempts to pierce to the “essence” of Shakespeare’s vision; though, as sometimes happens, when you strip away supposed inessentials, sometimes the essentials volatilize almost entirely away.

Not that the effect here is not theatrical in the best sense. And, as a work of music, it is completely successful. Here is a case where creating the right expectations is essential to effecting the right satisfactions.

“Songs of Lear,” which Cal Performances brought to Berkeley this weekend, is, in fact, not a work of musical theater so much as an oratorio with movement, sometimes pantomime, sometimes fiercely chthonic dance, and a narrator, a “guide” who sets up each scene; in the case of this performance, the warm and welcoming director, Grzegorz Bral. The music consists of a song cycle for soloists and chorus in twelve numbers, expressing some of the dramatic high points of Shakespeare’s drama; in one or two cases, inventing scenes implied by the story. It was developed by the Polish theatrical company Song of the Goat Theater, headquartered in Warsaw; the company was once under the aegis of the Grotowski Institute, and the influence of Grotowski’s explorations into what he called “objective drama” and voice work seems clear.

The work premiered at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival in 2012, where it won several important awards. The music includes Renaissance church polyphony, Corsican folk music (a style immediately recognizable to aficionados of Bulgarian and other Eastern folk music, with which it has strong similarities), and original music by Jean-Claude Acquaviva and Maciej Rychly; the music moving from the historical western forms, which dominate early on, to complete domination by the even more ancient folk forms at the performance’s stark conclusion.

(To be strictly candid, the musical tapestry moves from a simple figure, performed at the very beginning to establish tonality among the (for the most part) a cappella singers, through the evolution described, back, at the very end of the tragedy, to a reiteration, with subtle elaboration, of that first simple figure, a musical symbol of the circularity of time and the eternal recurrence of history.)

As music and a form of dance, “Songs of Lear” is absorbing, often moving, with its sharp and soaring vocal lines, its engulfing polyphony, its driving rhythms, its stabbing emotions of love and loss and betrayal. But as an attempt to encapsulate one of the most searing dramas in theatrical history, I felt it distinctly over-reaching; like sign pointing earnestly at something called “Tragedy” rather than its overwhelming embodiment in the here and now. It may perhaps be better for the spectator to know nothing of King Lear before attending; you will have no expectations and therefore no disappointments.

Too much is left out for those burdened with memories of the play: the scenes of Lear’s madness on the heath, for example, which one waits for in vain; the subplot involving the Duke of Gloucester and his sons Edmund and Edgar; and much of the story involving the betrayals by Cordelia’s sisters, the hypocritical and stony hearted Goneril and Regan; Lear’s deepening madness itself is more hinted at than portrayed. What is meant to be “essence” can easily shrink to the merely schematic (an occasional fault of the Grotowski school of theater elsewhere).

Two further criticisms: first, the use of Latin and Christian liturgical polyphony. Shakespeare’s play is based on a legend going back to pre-Christian Britain; there is the merest hint of a Christian civilization in the play itself, and no hint of an afterlife in the play’s metaphysics. The play is starkly this-worldly; the religious haze created by the music early on suggests a possibility of transcendental redemption the play itself does not pretend to; even eliminates.

My second criticism is the “guide,” part lecturer, part narrator, a role that seems an afterthought and does not feel convincingly integrated into the production. I felt that either the role should be eliminated entirely or, if not eliminated, made an integral part of the presentation; in the performance I saw, the guide’s regular intrusions, instructions and underscorings of points being made, detracted from the tension that a drama of the magnitude of King Lear has every capacity to generate, even in a reduced version as presented here.

The twelve songs are performed by a dozen singers, half male, half female, some of the singers doubling on instruments. The emphasis of the songs is on the damaged relationship between Lear and his daughter Cordelia, played by three different women (if my count is accurate; at least, it is more than one), with another of the six women playing the Fool. The last felt like a mistaken bit of casting; not that the woman wasn’t fully equal to the part—she was—but the men onstage needed more to do; this is a feminist production almost to a fault. A younger man plays the vanishingly small role of the Earl of Kent, an older man the maddened, and maddening, old king.

We are warned in the program that this is a “non-linear” presentation of the play. So it is not a surprise that the “scenes” do not always follow those in the drama; for example, Cordelia dies before Lear goes mad, though in the play this happens in reverse; it is precisely Cordelia’s death that brings the old man back to reality. Lear’s mad ramblings on the stormy heath get short shrift – an odd decision, as those scenes are certainly among the most memorable in theatrical history. Lear without the heath is a little like Hamlet without his soliloquies; he just becomes one more crazy old codger abusing his family.

If you attend this production expecting an oratorio roughly based on the story of Lear and his daughter Cordelia, and forget the rest of the play – in other words, forget “King Lear” altogether, and just see “Songs About an Old Man and the Daughter He Betrayed” – you are likely to have a very satisfactory evening. I, unhappily, was unable to clean Shakespeare’s mad, demented domestic tyrant and the overwhelming violence of his fate from my mind. The music will carry you to music’s rapture; the discreet choreography has undeniable power; and the performers are altogether winning in both movement and song.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, art, theatre and literature for Synchronized Chaos. His latest novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Cafe will appear later this year.

Primavera

By Christopher Bernard

The afternoon lies across the air

like a page of ice,

dazzling and shadowless.

You walk across it,

through it, beneath it,

looking for a crack in the light,

trying, without success, to hide.

The eyes you meet are gray as ashes.

The words you hear disappear like clouds.

A scarf lies abandoned on a curb.

Somewhere there is the sea,

a party’s laughter, and someone is singing,

and summer holds the night in its arms.

But not here, and not now.

You scratch on the ice a forgotten name for spring.

____

Christopher Bernard has published two volumes of poetry: The Rose Shipwreck and Chien Lunatique. He is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

Interior of Notre-Dame de Paris after the fire of April 15, 2019

A Memory of Notre-Dame

by Christopher Bernard

I had been traveling for many hours from Philadelphia when I was seventeen on my first trip to Paris as part of a package tour for high schoolers I had worked much of the summer the year previous to afford.

It was spring and, despite the exhaustion and excitement after the long journey (my first by plane), when we got to the hotel near the Place Bastille, I decided there was no way I was going to sleep before in some way meeting Paris face to face. So I took my handful of francs and my high-school French, snuck out of the hotel (unknown to our chaperones), scurried down the local Metro stop, and took the first subway to the Île de la Cité.

After arriving at my destination without dropping off despite my first experience of jetlag, I wearily climbed endless levels of exit stairs into the late afternoon. And stood, rooted to the spot, staring almost straight up at the austere towers and the façade known to every schoolchild, and saying over and over to myself for a long, sleep-deprived moment: “Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Paris, this is Notre-Dame de Paris,” before dreamily crossing over to the front steps, and ascending them while taking curious, creak-necked glances up at the tympanum, and then walking gingerly (I wasn’t even sure, as a non-Catholic, I would even be allowed in) through the entrance way – surprisingly small – into the dark, unexpectedly cool interior.

As I entered, the organ burst into music. No services were going on that I could see, and I supposed the organist was rehearsing for Sunday. But it was one of those moments of mystery and magic in one’s life that seem to happen with some frequency in youth, and then less and less often with passing time. My fatigue and caution seemed to fall away. I walked into the cathedral and remember taking a very deep breath, then walked into the music and shadows.

____

Christopher Bernard lives in San Francisco.