The Unheard of World. Joan Howard pictured center. Photo by Robbie Sweeny
(IN)COMPLETELY ABSURD
The Unheard of World
By Fabrice Melquiot
Translated by Michelle Haner
Exit Theater
San Francisco
A review by Christopher Bernard
Even with the best of intentions, to say nothing of energy, intelligence and talent, world premieres can be treacherous things. The premiere of an English translation of a modern French play can be more treacherous than most, given the great differences of premises and expectations between French and American audiences—including such things as their different senses of humor and attitudes toward philosophy, which can quickly become awkward in a philosophical comedy.
The latest production by one of San Francisco’s most audacious companies, foolsFURY, which in October premiered, as part of its Contemporary French Plays Project, Michelle Haner’s translation of Fabrice Melquiot’s magical realist Le Monde inouï is a textbook case. (Melquiot is a prominent contemporary French playwright; foolsFURY produced The Devil on All Sides, in artistic director Ben Yalom’s translation, to much acclaim in 2006.)
“…‘our Sister, Mother Earth’ … now cries out to us, … burdened and laid waste …”— Pope Francis, Laudato Si’
You throned us in your belly
down countless generations,
unfolded us to the light, fed at your breast
the children in us that grew to be women and men.
You taught us wonders:
each star in the night, each flower in the morning,
singing and beauty, each word, each thought,
the rites of courtesy, discipline of goodness;
praised us, scolded us, comforted us, held us.
All thanks to you, Mother Earth, all thanks to you.
The sun strides across the sky.
The birds pierce the air.
The rain startles the ground.
The seas are renewed without end.
The mountains dream in the morning.
The flowers are boundless.
All thanks to you, Mother Earth, all thanks to you.
And in return, what have we done?
We have cut out the heart of the world,
in man’s mad cunning, and burned it.
We have ransacked your home and fouled it,
and we have set your house on fire,
destroying the loom of the earth that made us,
the seed we grew from, the withered blossoms.
We are like a drunken man driving fast toward midnight,
intent on destruction out of a nameless resentment.
Forgive us, Mother Earth. Forgive us.
Free us.
Free us from our darkness,
the fear and need that drive us,
the cowardice and greediness of desire,
our craven weakness before brutality;
cast out the insanity of mankind,
past the crimes that strew our lives,
our refusal to see
the evils that are ours alone.
Save us, Mother Earth. Save us.
Show us the way—remember when we were children?—
of holy life.
Teach us how to walk again
lightly upon the earth.
Teach us to heal when you are ailing,
to comfort when you grieve
and no longer make you weep in the trammels of the night.
Free mankind from itself, Mother Earth,
and teach us to be loving to you forever.
All thanks to you. Forgive us. Save us.
_____
Christopher Bernard is the author of the forthcoming novel Voyage to a Phantom City, to be published by Regent Press in 2016. He lives in San Francisco.
A Little Talk Between Brain and Soul (Laudato Si’, Pope Francis)
By Christopher Bernard
The Brain and the Soul are meeting at Philz. The Brain is dressed in computer geek togs: leopard-style TV glasses, a shaved head, a tee-shirt reading Code Earth, leatherette flip-flops, and ragged but expensive-looking jeans. He has an iPad in one hand loaded with a document he is making sure Soul doesn’t see, and the latest iPhone in the other, which he consults every so often to fact check. The Soul is dressed simply in a white shift and sandals, and wears a warm smile. The only possession she brings with her is a ring on her left hand. She is near-sighted and occasionally squints.
We find them already in mid-conversation. The Brain is doing what he does best: talking nonstop.
The Brain:
(Thinking: Got to speak in antiquated tropes,
pre-memes and metalanguages
and undeconstructed syntagms,
but that’s the only
parole and langue coding that
my ol’ prefrontal-cortex-challenged friend Soul
gets.)
Toward an Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the 21st Century
By Christopher Bernard
I am no moral authority—am neither a rabbi nor an imam, a minister nor a pope. But, as an average straight older European American male, I am deeply concerned about a future I may see only the dark, leading edge of, but that will be affected in many small ways by the life I and others like me have lived, to say nothing of our material “afterlife”: our words and actions and their effects, which will last long after our physical existence is over. And so this is as much a personal statement as it is a call to thought and action.
I offer the following as a modest part of a debate we will, all of us, need to have about the long-term future of life, including the life of human beings, on earth. The phrase “ecological civilization” is not a new one; it has become current over the last several years in a number of environmental circles, though its first official use may have been by the Sino-German Environment Partnership, which in 2012 used the phrase to describe the heart of its mission.
That we need to create a way of life in better balance with nature if we as a species hope to have a tolerable future is something most of us, I suspect, would agree on. I will not waste time in describing and trying to justify the sense that we are in a plight that is indeed dire, possibly as great as the human race as a whole has ever faced. The question is how to achieve that new balance. I describe below several basic goals to keep in mind as we take thought on how to act to face a crisis that will drastically affect the future life of the human species, even its survival, and the fate of all of life on earth.
In the following I sometimes take a deliberately provocative tone; I do this to inspire response and engagement, not in mere comments on the internet, but in the analog world where we live, breathe and have our being—and where we will decide how, and if, we will live in the future.
He counted again: the numbers added up, beautifully.
His fingers grasped the quill so hard it split.
“I can make more. What if I can make it all?”
It was nearing midnight in Europe.
A messenger was crossing the mountains,
taking an urgent notice between sovereigns
who had never met face to face.
As he neared the summit, he stumbled,
his boot dislodging a stone
that fell, gathering stones as it went
in a wind of rocks, trees, snow,
collapsing across the valley
in an avalanche, burying it all.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet and writer living in San Francisco. He is coeditor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector. His poetry can be read at The Bog of St. Philinte.
of all shapes and designs, from the plainest, like mine,
to luxury, to joke and variety designs:
Dooby-Doo, Bart Simpson, Princess Elsa, Shrek –
a case she had gotten
from the office delivery clerk, Steve Butts,
a middle-aged man who had been downsized
by a local insurance company at the age of 55
and was taken in out of compassion
by the office manager, who knew him
during his glory years as a claims adjuster.
Steve had gotten the case from a warehouse clerk,
José Parra, thirty-two, prematurely balding,
undocumented, who lived in a trailer park
with several men from his village in Guatemala.
He sent half his minimum wage to his family
and sold clocks he had filched from the warehouse
late at night on eBay.
A young warehouse worker named Minh Vuh,
a Vietnamese whose parents had been boat people
when they were children, had placed the clock
carefully in the case, with a handful of confetti. Minh
was engaged to a sweet young Laotian
who lived three blocks from his family home.
Their parents were not too happy about that,
so they had to meet secretly after school
and on his work breaks when she was in the neighborhood.
It all felt very romantic. “Like Romeo and Juliet!”
his girlfriend said, giggling. Minh kissed her on her tiny nose.
Minh didn’t remember (he had no reason to), but
he had put that very clock on the
second shelf from the top in column 37 of aisle C
last September
after receiving it in a shipment of similar clocks
off a truck driven by an ageing Filipino
named “Jack” (he had rejected his original name when a young man –
he said he wanted to be “100% American!”
and that meant having a name like Bob or Joe or Bill,
and he thought “Jack” sounded sexy and macho).
Jack had picked up the shipment from a Sacramento wharf
where it had been unpacked from a container
by a young African-American
named Obadiah Washington,
who was in fact a rap artist (the day job was a secret)
and performed at local clubs at night under the name
Dr. Sling.
The container had been hauled off the ship Flower of Seoul
by Ted Anderson, of old Swedish stock, on his last day
before retiring. The container was his last but one.
When he hauled the final container of his career,
his fellow longshoremen smashed a champagne bottle against it
and made a party of it for the next hour on the wharf.
The container with the clocks inside got a splash of the champagne,
but was otherwise undamaged by the festivities.
The Flower of Seoul had carried the container
across the Pacific the week before.
The ship was manned by a small crew,
most of them young Indonesians, and piloted
by a Taiwanese captain named Jiang-Ji Li,
forty-five, with a family of six girls at home
and a nagging wife who made the boredom of sea life
seem like an endless vacation by contrast.
Getting his girls married, however,
was another matter: the eldest
had been poisoned by “women’s liberation”
(as he still called it) and wanted to become a captain
like her father. Why couldn’t she have been a boy?
These thoughts had made the crossing
an onerous one for Captain Li,
especially the prospect of going back:
the Flower of Seoul would be making a week-long stop,
after picking up timber in Portland,
at Taipei.
The clock had sat for the entire trip,
unseen in its dark container,
its hands set at the traditional 10:10.
n the port city of Busan, South Korea,
the container with my clock in it
(though, of course, it was not yet my clock –
would it ever be, really? Is ownership
of anything, let alone a clock,
time’s strict and impartial measurer,
by a limited and mortal being like man
even possible? That is a delicate
philosophical question
that we can not, alas, pursue here),
that container had been placed on the deck
of the Flower of Seoul
with two dozen other similar containers
of different colors and sidings –
some corrugated, some smooth –
with the result that the ship looked like a father
so overburdened with packages
he was likely to fall down,
by a longshoreman named Kim Dong-hyun,
twenty-eight (a little fat fellow
who loved dakon kim-chi so much
his mother gave him a case every year
for Gujeong),
using a crane
to lift it from a semi driven by a driver
named Kim Ji-hoon (no relation), a tall, skinny fellow
of thirty-three,
who still lived with his parents
and played computer games on the weekends,
driving his mother to despair about ever having
grandchildren.
He had driven the truck
from a small factory outside Seoul,
where he had stopped by for the clock consignment,
up near the border
(it was a long drive not helped
by the bad heat wave and the endless traffic –
the highway was becoming a continuous traffic jam,
but no one in Seoul wanted to pay for improvements,
so Ji-hoon just growled and daydreamed about the next version
of WarCraft, supposed to be coming out in August).
A young woman – a sixteen-year-old named Song-hi
with long hair and fat cheeks and a pert expression –
had packed the clock in the consignment box
after taking it from the end of the assembly line
where it had been checked for quality by a grim matron
named Yun, who had a drunken husband,
two ungrateful children and a spoiled cat,
the only creature in the world she felt understood her.
The clock had been assembled
by half a dozen other girls, all wearing the same uniform.
Chimin, whose face was a perfectly flat oval
and always rode her bike to work,
added the swivel stands to the clocks.
Soyon, who was always sad
and never talked about her home life,
put in the inner workings of the clocks
and the battery receivers:
the little drawer that poked out of
the clock’s plastic case.
Subin, who liked to clown and make practical jokes,
attached the minute and hour hands, and “sweeps”
(i.e., second hands), when they had them, to the clocks.
Hayun, who was very tall and very proud
(actually, her unusual height made her painfully self-conscious),
added the white face to each clock. Once,
she had been so distracted,
she had put the faces in upside down
for more than 20 clocks.
Nobody down the line noticed until Mrs. Yun, of quality control,
saw them and had a meltdown,
and threatened to fire everybody.
That was a bad day for Hayun!
Chi’u, who was so short she
disappeared under the assembly line
when she stepped off her stool,
put in the oscillating mechanism
that ran the clock.
Hyechin, who, for some reason,
no one liked and everyone made fun of,
put in the alarm.
The girls got the parts from the other side of the factory,
where they were made by two men and a woman:
Chunyong, fifty-five, who dyed his hair,
was the lead craftsman
amd made the clock oscillators.
Songmin, his first assistant,
a stiff young man – the first of his family
not to have to work in the fields –
crafted the cases.
Yuchin was the first woman in the factory
to have made it into “craft”: she had a small tattoo
of a periwinkle on her left inner wrist,
and was considered quite wild,
but that was all right by Chunyong,
her manager,
because she was so talented.
She crafted the clock faces,
arms and sweeps,
based on her own designs.
(These were first OK’d by upper management, of course –
that was one of the reasons they had hired her:
design and craft in one person, with only one salary!
The clocks sold consistently, especially in the American market,
so “UM” was content.)
Songmin and Yuchin got the polystyrene they used
from bins of plastic parts
that had been delivered by
Kwon Young-sik, who had only one eye,
from a bad accident on his last
delivery job (it had not been his fault;
he had left because he thought that it would bring even worse bad luck,
after his accident, to stay).
The parts had been made in the big
National Plastic Co. Ltd. plant
on the other side of Seoul.
Much of the plastic was recycled
from toys, hardware tools, and other clocks.
Chunyong had gotten the quartz for the
oscillator crystal that runs my clock
(I guess I can call it mine, now)
from a bin where the crystals were packed
in small boxes
after delivery by Park Ye-jun,
a short, fiery man with bad breath
(he lived on garlic for breakfast, lunch and dinner),
from the mines of Tae Wha,
near Chungju, half way between Seoul and Busan.
The quartz from which the mechanism of my clock was made
had been mined from the earth there
by a very young man named Ahn Min-kyu,
eighteen years old, just out of school.
His family had been fishermen from time immemorial,
and he had planned on being a fisherman too,
when the fish stocks of his seashore village
disappeared one day –
it was thought because of pollution from the North –
so he had to change plans and, instead of probing the ocean
for a living, probed the earth, as there were jobs
at the booming Tae Wha Mine.
So he left his village
and went to Chungju
and learned to dig the earth
for minerals. Then one day,
in a poorly lit tunnel,
smelling of sulfur and damp,
he dug out, with his pick
(the machinery was down, as so often),
a clump of quartz – several million years old,
formed by magma thrusting
from deep within the earth –
the mine was along the rim of fire that followed
the edge of the northern Pacific
from America to Asia,
and made volcanoes erupt
and quakes shake the earth
(a smaller quake had woken me
not long after I was given the clock) –
a clump of quartz that had been deposited
in milky white crystals
with other rocks, from fire and river and wind,
in the dark earth.
He placed it, using his shovel, into the cart,
and the cart rolled away to the surface
and the sunlight,
then he turned back to the wall of rock
with his pick, and swung.
And that is the list of people to whom I am indebted
for the appearance on my bed table of the little alarm clock.
The list could go on –
there is really no reason to stop here:
What about the parents, and the grandparents, on and on,
of all those people who at one point or another
touched or handled or carried the clock, or
what would later become the clock?
What about their siblings, uncles, aunts,
cousins, teachers, friends?
What about the original inventor of the very first clock?
And who, or what, invented him?
One could go on and on. And on and on,
without end.
And that is just for the clock I looked at
when I woke up that morning.
What if I had to do the same thing
for everything else in my life?
The mind suddenly flies off
like a flock of startled crows,
shredding the air with caws . . .
I woke.
It was the alarm,
its shriek
telling me “get up! get up!”
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of A Spy in the Ruins, In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of Caveat Lector. His poetry can be found at his blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte.”
Image from: Alarm Clock Wallpaper
One day I heard on a street of this city –
billionnaire ville of high tech and IT,
cultured pearl of Silicon Valley,
capital of the 21st century,
San Francisco of the crazed and the crazy –
a man laugh out, “Whatever you do,
or think you can do, there’s one thing you can’t do:
you can’t disinvent technology!”
But, darling, what if we could, you and me,
undo the long golden chain of human
marvels and practical disasters, back
to the wild dawn of it all? What if we could
unpave, unpollute, unpoison the world
that we are destroying with our civilized life,
that Frankenstein’s monster of terror and sweat?
—The cell phone suddenly melts in my hand
like a Milky Way left too long in the sun.
The laptop wrinkles like an autumn leaf,
the desktop goes up in a puff of smoke
at the sparrow’s pass of a magician’s wand,
goes up with a smell of burning wood.
Servers curdle like bottles of milk.
GPS goes out like a light.
Monitors line up like dead fish on the sand.
Abruptly vanishes the World Wide Web
like a spider’s cobweb catching humans like flies,
and with it the stranglehold of the internet.
A wind picks up over the empty land:
it blows forests of sky dishes away,
flocks of radios, stereophonic herds,
the clotted brainpans of obsessive nerds,
landfills clogged with wireless TVs,
movie cameras, projectors – not those! – yes, those
too – molten flash drives and CPUs,
busses and rockets and snowboards and skis,
rollerblades, Velcro and nonstick pans,
silicon chips reduced to sand,
rare earth metals melting down with smartphones,
the burnt-out husks of intelligent homes,
trains and steamships and telegraphs and sails
crossing the seas like clouds of white whales,
skyscrapers and skylights, iron alloys and glass,
the first lawnmowers smelling of cut grass,
and the central beast at the heart of the wheel:
the million-headed Hydra, the automobile;
the casket elevator, the pick, the spade,
the tackle and hook of a cable of braid,
the IUD, pill, the condom, bidet,
vaginal rings and penis pumps
(the tech of pleasure isn’t spared its lumps),
Glocks and anklets, in vitro wombs,
water-sealed coffins and virtual tombs,
warheads and nylons and nuclear bombs:
the wind of time in reverse sweeping away
everything we invented: the plough, the clock,
the spectacles on the pimpled nose of a monk,
dreadnaughts, all dreading, at long last sunk,
pencil, parchment, typewriter, quill,
propeller, salt cellar, egg-beater, scythe,
horseshoe nail and dentist drill,
uncool change lane and cool Swiss knife:
everything that fell from the war of life
into our far too-clever brains
that are never satisfied and never tire,
back to the beginning of everything until
we lie down again in the mud of a cave
and, snuggling together, as we know best,
disinvent the one we can blame for the rest:
the two sticks that first rubbed together into flames.
See? All gone! It couldn’t be done?
We’ve done it, you and me, in the course
of a little fantasy and, with apologies, verse.
But then, I never needed any of it.
I have needed you, deep as I am in the mire.
Each time we embrace, we invent fire.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of A Spy in the Ruins, In the American Night,
and The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of Caveat Lector.
His poetry can be found at his blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte.”
Image from Fire Fire Fire.
