Christopher Bernard’s novel Amor I Kaos: Installment 4

—But they are. Even beyond the last hope of imagining. For example: ecstatic redemption. Love given, love received, in mutual rhythms of thrill and calm. Freedom without despair. Youthfulness without stupidity or disintegration. A quiet doom. Those fledglings out of the pocket of whatever had been lost without any hope of being found. Though it seems to be too much to ask for. In its own demented and almost criminal heat.             —Well. One always lives several lives in parallel, you slip between them, one to the other, fragments that never quite bind into a completely satisfying whole. So we lie to ourselves via the cerebral cortex, medulla, amygdala, brain stem, the requirements of grammar, and our various talents, such as they are, for story-telling, until the whole thing seems to hang together, More or less.

—Like Lincoln’s assassins.

—The truth (ignoring the cocky provocation) being too much of an appalling and humiliating mess to be borne, it’s quite beneath our dignity. Lincoln indeed.

—So I take what I can use and …?

—… and lock the rest in a back cupboard. Never throw any of it away, of course, you never know when it will become handy. But for heaven’s sake, don’t take it seriously, it will make you suicidally depressed, and what is depression but a pointless sorrow, one that does not even let you weep. And tears are sorrow’s gift, its peculiar pleasure. No. Keep truth under a strong hand and never let it forget who is the boss. You . . .

—Me?

—No. Let me repeat. Keep truth, etc., never let it, etc., who is the boss. Full stop. This side transcendence.

—And what is that, Herr Professor, she asked innocently. Not truth?

He looked at her evasively.

—Again, no. An old and terrifying yet reassuring dream of what might be if only we could shape the world’s anarchy into something like the heart’s enchantment.             Though that was not what you had said.

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Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 3)

It was almost too demeaning, she thought. To be hampered in that way despite all the options at the time. The seeming options, anyway. Because once you’ve done something, it seems as though it had always been meant to be, and so maybe the options were illusory after all. Amor fati…

—If only!

—No, really. Plus the beauty of matter, in Joubert’s lovely phrase. Because he was right, that Frenchman with the shy ambition and the small, beautiful notebook. So beautiful in its humble bravado, its bold modesty. All that clean, beautiful white space surrounding the few lovely words. No overwrought romantic windbaggery for him. But I’m drifting from the subject. Though what indeed was the subject? She looked at him with her usual skepticism. Did she love him? Maybe she did, in her peculiar way.

—My life is my hell, he told her one day. Matter-of-factly. I wish I could say I love it. I wish I could say I love you.

—Me too.

Then they parted for three days. Three weeks. Three months. Years. Decades. But not forever.  They were adults. You would have thought they had learned never to be entirely sincere, that was what got young people always into so much trouble, the infatuation with “honesty,” no relationship will last five minutes of complete that.

—Apparently not.

—And so they tormented one another with their precious truth. You are my hell. A Sartrean proverb! And no one can leave hell. You see the problem.

But that meant nothing. Never even turned a hair. Minimally extant as it was. The withers unwrung, the moist appeal in the gathered vats, the wayward affront. The absolute right to one’s own life—to one’s own will. The boy who lived on the hill came to that conclusion one afternoon in the fall, as he was walking through the tall, yellowed hay at the edge of the field that bordered his family’s property. It was startlingly true. Nobody, but nobody, had a right to deprive him of his will. Nobody had a right to force him to sacrifice his will to anyone else, to a group, country, class, religion. They might have the power, the legal right, but they had no moral right. In that discovery lay his strength. His right to his will was absolute; this would become his moral compass.

—It should have turned him into a monster, acknowledged the portly man.

But no: just as no one had the right to deprive him of his will, so he had no right to deprive any other person of theirs. In his will lay his meaning, his joy.  That seemed logical, right. Furthermore, the joy of other people increased his joy as long as it did not clash with it, and as long as he was happy in his will; if he wasn’t, nothing was surer to enrage him. The biggest threat to his will was, in fact, other people’s suffering, their pain, and their envy (ditto, in reversion, above). And this, which struck him like a hammer blow: the greatest source of the will’s joy, even at the core of its often deep and savage pain, was the perpetually deferred desire that is love, and not only for one but for all. The will is launched in pursuit.  Life begins as desire and continues as love.

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Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 2)

The prevailing winds, from east over the Atlantic, across gray, clammy tides, puling seagulls, their black caps and flexing, sickle-like wings, the terns’ small, quick arcs, the funny rushes and escapes along the skirt of the wave wash of the pipers hunting for small, nutlike sandcrabs. The tart briny scent, the yellow, scummy, impetigo-infecting gullies. The gray white sand grainy with tiny white and black crystals he could almost count as they separated in his palm. Clumps of salt grass covering the dunes like long green hair. The endless distant roll and crash of waves along the beach, the lulling confusion of whiteness, a serene and tranquil drama of the shore, raving and collapsing without pause from horizon to horizon.

When they met shyly in their swimsuits, the summer Christopher Pascal was sixteen and Sasha Kamenev fifteen, and their families spread their beach blankets and chairs and umbrellas under the tinkling shouts and laughter of swimmers and beachball players and sandbucket diggers and sandcastle builders not far from the lifeguard stand on the hot, white dry sand and the cool, gray wet sand along the edge of the playful lashing mindless formidable beautiful and frightening sea.

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This is  a novel that we’ll serialize each month until we reach the end.

Amor i Kaos

A novel

By Christopher Bernard

This novel is dedicated to the memory of the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (1931−2017), whose example has given many the courage to follow the drive of imagination and desire wherever it leads, in fear, in fascination, and in wonder:

The Blind Rider,
Count Julian in his pocket,
Juan sin tierra on his eyebrow,
Makbara at one ear,
the Solitary Bird at the other,
rides his blind horse over the blind country:
a walk, at first slow,
then a trot, faster,
then a canter, faster,
then a gallop, faster,
faster, and yet faster,
till the blind horse
opens blind wings
and lifts him
on the stones of the wind
into the blind
sky

_________________

The wind rattling the kitchen window, wind he had hardly been aware of, was suddenly clear as the shaking of a cage.

— But you are not in love with me.

There was some satisfaction, at least, in twisting the blade with his own hand.

She continued watching him.

—Yes . . .  No . . . I’m sorry . . .   I can’t anymore . . . I have to . . .live past you. It’s not you, it’s  . . . me . . .

She scowled at the inept cliché. Something she would usually have refused to commit, under penalty of an eternal shaming.

The shaking seemed to redouble its fury.

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A Beanstalk Grows in Oakland

Overnight

Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre, Lower Bottom Playaz, Ragged Wing Ensemble, and Theatre Aluminous

The Flight Deck

Oakland

Full ensemble in Overnight. Photo by Serena Morelli

What would you do if you woke up one morning to discover that a skyscraper, all glass, steel and corporate facelessness, had appeared on your neighborhood block literally overnight, like Jack’s fabled beanstalk?

Would you question your sanity? Start a riot? Burn it down? Apply for a job there?  All of the above?

The world over, this has become hardly a fantasy in many people’s lives: in China, entire “megacities” have sprouted in little more time, some of them still awaiting their first inhabitants, ghost cities, cargo cults of the wishful thinking of bureaucrats and over-zealous developers. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Dubai, Tokyo are well-known for big buildings going up with unnerving speed.

Even in the Bay Area it’s hardly an exaggeration, as entire neighborhoods in San Francisco are transformed from low-rise villages to immense forests of office and condo towers within months. Continue reading →

Celestial Objects

Eunice Odio

Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio

Translated by Keith Ekiss, Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinoza

The Bitter Oleander Press

$20.00

A review by Christopher Bernard

It has often been said that modern man is in need of a new religion, of a new God, that the old religions and old gods, apparently resurgent throughout the world, are in fact in a battle to the death with a vision of the universe offered by modern science that differs so greatly from that of the Great Axial age from which most of the world’s great religions emerged that they cannot hope to remain relevant for long.

Either they will die, or they will destroy the scientific vision of the world, and by so doing, since they will find themselves unable to renounce the instruments of power science has made possible (though, to be consistent, they should renounce both subatomic theory and nuclear bombs, the theory of evolution and the internet, climatology and drones – but when has a fear of logical inconsistency ever stopped a martinet more powerful than a schoolmaster?), they will destroy the world, or, if not the world, civilization, and thus bring the human experiment to a spectacular end, to say nothing of the Final Judgment that a number of religions have long portended.

There is another way to our own suicide, and that is through a form of radical secularism fomented by the scientific worldview itself, a view purportedly hostile to religion of all kinds—seeing religion as irrational, intellectually presumptuous, morally hollow, hostile to knowledge, reason, and humanity—and yet which turns out to be itself irrational, cruel, presumptuous, hostile to reason, humanity, and even science.

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Marvels and Terrors

Antigona

Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca

Z Space

San Francisco

Reviewed by Christopher Bernard

“In the world there are many terrors and marvels,

but none more marvelous, and more terrifying, than man.”

—Sophocles, from his tragedy Antigone

Noche Flamenca brought its dance version of Sophocles’ famous tragedy to Z Space in San Francisco for an unfortunately short run this February. (Short because, as the result of an injury, the first week of performances had to be cancelled.)

However, the rest of the run remains, and there is still time to see one of the most intense evenings in dance you are likely to see this season.

Sophocles’ searing play touches on some of the profoundest issue of human life: family versus the state, love versus politics, the gods versus man, feminine versus masculine values.

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