Rheims Cathedral Burning

Rheims Cathedral, burning during the early days of World War I (G. Fraipont, 1915)

The Beast and Mr. James (an excerpt)

A play about Henry James and World War I, by Christopher Bernard

Act 2: 1914

London. Evening. A lobby in Covent Garden with stairs sweeping upward in the background; “Libiamo” from Verdi’s La Traviata is playing in the background.

HENRY JAMES is anxiously pacing the lobby, occasionally chewing a thumbnail. His hat and cane lie on a nearby lobby bench. He is dressed, with subdued elegance, for the opera – dark suit, light vest, elegant cravat, patent leather shoes, etc.

The music fades a little; a box door has closed.

HENRY JAMES (to himself): What did dear, kind Edith call me? A nervous nelly, with the imagination of disaster. Oh fie! I’m as nervous as a young cat. The worst can’t possibly be upon us – not now. They must settle something between them. They can’t be so mad as not to. They must see the stakes. Our countries are no longer run by lunatics and the brain-dead spawn of in-bred families. Common sense must have come to count for something in this bloody epoch.

USHER enters.

USHER (with a deeply reproving look; very loudly): Please, sir, be quiet so that the members of the audience can enjoy the music! Thank you, sir!

He leaves with a departing scowl at HENRY JAMES, who glares after him.

BURGESS, JAMES’s valet, dressed in outdoor ware, enters, carrying a newspaper.

HENRY JAMES (with a flushed hope, takes the paper; in a loud whisper): Thank you, Burgess, forgive me for driving you out in the middle of the night, but I just could not … (At sight of the front page, he lets out a cry, almost a shout.) No! … The Kaiser, that … no, no! …

He reads the column with moments when he pauses and stares over the top of the paper in despair, as the music continues in the background.

HENRY JAMES (with no attempt to be quiet): He’s mad! They are all mad!

He then takes his hat and cane and leaves hurriedly, with a gesture to BURGESS to follow, as the USHER re-enters, looking like thunder at them as they depart. “Libiamo” swells to a climax and ends, with wild applause.

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Ivan Arguelles

Ivan Argüelles

Ecstasies in a Great Darkness

Ars Poetica

Poems 2006−2013

Poetry Hotel Press

320 pages, $24.95

By Ivan Argüelles

A review by Christopher Bernard

“Dazzling, brilliant, inspiring, eloquent, demanding, confusing, chaotic, flummoxing, the work of a mad genius, the work of a genius madman” are some of the things that may come to mind as one reads the work of Ivan Argüelles. And this is what one might expect of someone whose dense and difficult poetry is some of the most vital literary work by a contemporary American writer. Dark, lyrical, intense, and at its best of a deep, if at times willful brilliance, Argüelles’ writing shows little patience with the flippant ironies of the postmodernists, yet he takes the modern skepticism of any metaphysical certainty seriously and uses his work to probe some of its darker implications. His work has long been a Commedia of our nihilism.
And yet he is a natural ecstatic, which gives his writing a profound poignancy. He subscribes to a kind of maximalist Augustan modernism, seized with prophecy and the divine afflatus, though fully capable of dips into the slangy and demotic; he is, refreshingly, a master of that rarest of literary voices, the contemporary high style, a style unafraid to assert and insist, yet that, at every step, undermines its own insistence:

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Panamanian Golden Frog, from the Daily Dank

Zero Carbon & the Great Extinction

By Christopher Bernard

It was Sam who got me thinking, one day, after I read a book about how mankind was causing the greatest extinction of species on earth in 65 million years. Sam’s my dog, a black Labrador with deep, sad eyes. It was what I saw in those eyes that changed my mind – actually, it changed my whole life. My name is Johnny José Brennan, and I live in Davenport, Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River.
I read the book over one of my few weekends away from the office. As I read, I often shook my head in alarm and amazement. I’d followed reports on global warming and humanity’s other devastating effects on other living creatures over the years, and fully accepted these were serious issues, but I’d had no idea about this; I’d believed it was mostly a question of rising oceans and more violent hurricanes and unstable weather that would have an effect a couple of generations down the road. But this was a different order of magnitude altogether.

I vaguely remembered my Uncle Jésus (on my Mexican mother’s side) railing against what he called “ecocide” when I was little, and something he had called, with a melodramatic flourish, “the coming holocaust of the species.” My dad, an Irishman with family still in Donegal, had claimed global warming was all made up by liberals, that environmentalism was just a way for Big Science to get grants from Washington and take more of people’s rights away; he and his brother-in-law had had many a memorable shout-’n’-out (angry shouts followed by even angrier, if possible, slamming of doors) while I was growing up, so I dismissed both of them, my father’s conspiracy theories and my crazy uncle’s rants about “species collapse.” But now I wasn’t so sure.

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What Are We, Anyway?

On Being Human

By Karl Wolff

38 pages

Chicago Center for Information and Photography

Various formats, including electronic and a paper edition, available at cclapcenter.com/onbeinghuman

An essay review by Christopher Bernard

The question “what does it mean to be human?” has become daunting. Both more urgent and more problematic in recent decades, it promises to become even more so in years to come. This short book of brief and stimulating essays on “novels and movies that examine the question of humanity,” written by Karl Wolff, a staff writer and associate editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, brings a number of these concerns to sharp focus. His book does what criticism does at its best: not only raising important questions and suggesting new avenues of exploration but introducing readers to ideas and works new to them, or encouraging readers to revisit and understand them in new ways.

It is odd that up until a few decades ago, the title “On Being Human” could have been used for some anodyne book in an undergraduate “humanities” course on “the miracle of Greece,” the marvels of the Renaissance, and the triumph of the Enlightenment, with a few passing references to such modern sages as Tolstoy, Albert Schweitzer, and Gandhi. Only in the last century, especially the last generation, has the category “human” become problematic, troubling, even empty, as the lessons of the “inhumanity” of human beings learned from the monstrosities of slavery to the carnage of Verdun to the death camps and killing fields of Europe and Asia to the Sixth Extinction have sunk in, and the virtues of our humanity have seemed increasingly overwhelmed by our evils.

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The Disappearance of the Flies

By Christopher Bernard

      “Did I ever tell why I no longer call myself a humanist?”
                          —Overheard at a climatology conference 

So, the word’s finally out:

I am the world’s Caesar,
and you are my Christians.

Not that I hate you absolutely—

on the contrary, for the most part

I enjoy you;

those of you I cannot eat

or flog into subservience,

to help me, or amuse me, or decorate my

upscale live-work high-end design space

now, or by no later than the end of next quarter,

are just in the way,

as I thrust ahead

to glory, to a sweet, psychotic power,

and a suffocating wealth

built on the dependable human delight

in the enchanted moment of acquisition.

I’ve got you,

I’ve got the world.

It is no longer God’s or nature’s;

it is mine,

I own you,

I who hate to have and love to get.

There was once a despot

whose footsteps bloodied his time.

After he had conquered the world,

bored with his possessions,

he decided to destroy them:

slaughtered his slaves, his women, his sycophants,

sent his soldiers to the ends of his empire

to pillage and sack it, out of boredom and rage

that he had no more worlds to conquer.

He burned his own palaces to the ground.

In a crazy drunk one night,

he broke his neck in a ditch.

The peasants crept up to his small, pale body,

the body that had conquered the world,

and watched the flies flickering above it.

Today there were no peasants.

There were no flies.

____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins,The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs, and a collection of stories, In the American Night. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. 

Minoan bowl depicting the Minotaur, from www.nem.tku.edu.tw

The Minotaur Speaks

By Christopher Bernard

In the darkness a line glimmers~
like a piece of spider silk, a tendril of its web~
quivers and pulls
around another corner, 
then disappears in the gloom,
trembling in the rancid darkness, hot 
and stale as a cellar,
binding the random corners of my chaotic home.

At one end clings the man the gods have sent to kill me~
(we’ll see about that!)~but the thread’s other end
winds and coils and shines,
leading . . . where? 

Oh, farther into the maze where father Minos left me,
the bestial child his whore of a wife, my mother Pasiphaë,
dropped nine months after coupling with the Thracian bull
whose member she had coveted~

mating monster with monster,
how did they expect to escape having a monster for their offspring!

And so Minos threw me into this foul place,
scrawled into confusion like a ball of tangled yarn,
no one can find a way out of, no matter how brave or cunning,
a darkness I explore to find but deeper darkness,
and there left me, to feed on sacrificial virgins,
the beautiful, pure-skinned, untouched 
children of the Greeks.

I trip over their bones as I bang from wall to wall,
lost, hungry, bellowing in the dark,
still hearing the echoes of the weeping that come 
from the maze’s mouth, where the others cower, crowd, and wait
their turn in the labyrinth, their death duel with the Minotaur.

The line tugs. Where does it go? It slackens again~who bound it
to the one Greek they promised would kill that abortion, 
the bull-man~

as if I had no soul, no mind, no heart, no memory
of happiness under the sun’s gaze, and only howl and snort,
bucking my horns on the rocks in an agony of memory
of those few weeks I knew the bright flash 
of day.

It tugs again, and thrums~he is looking for me, this Theseus,
with his smooth face, his eyes shining with bald terror,
imagining me~

one hand trembling on the rock face, the other
sweating at the end of the thread. 
The thread! it may lead 
back to the maze’s entrance, escape 
out of this stinking darkness into the air and sun,

the immensity of light and breath of cloud and the sweet moon,
the high sky above me~could it? 

Of course, it could! 
Someone~
a lover?

someone who loves Theseus (even my mother didn’t love me!)

gave him, of the thread,
one end. 
And the other
she holds, waiting for him, 
standing patiently 
at the dark hole where she saw him disappear,
frightened and hopeful, 
feeling each quiver and jerk with fear, 

to keep her dearest love from being killed and eaten by me. 

What if I follow the line 
it shows, so white, in the darkness?

Lord sun above me, beyond this mantle of rock~
if I follow the thread, will it lead me back up to the flowery air 
and the sighing 
of the sea, 
back to light and life and even
a hope for love 
under the stars, 
back to the heaven called day?

It slackens.
Grab it, now, beast! 
It is so light~so frail~
how could anything so fragile be a promise a beast could believe,
a hope in this slaughterhouse, this fist of stench and weeping~
my hope?

I’ll let you guide me, 
one way to my death
at the hands of Theseus, the other to my life 
in a girl’s hands, bright with day.

Lead me, thread. And do not break 
until I am dead 
or free.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins, the short-story collection In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness

By Anthony Neilson

Shotgun Players

At The Ashby Stage

Through January 12, 2014

AMAZING FEATS OF THEATER

A review by Christopher Bernard

Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson’s short omnibus of original fairy tales appears this season in a brilliantly imaginative production by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

Edward Gant (a cunning and adroit Brian Herndon) is the impresario of a little band of wandering players, and our factotum and guide into Neilson’s maze of stories that are ghosted out of imagination, a few planks and thin air before the audience’s childlike eyes. The show, set sometime in the late nineteenth century, is part magic act, part vaudeville, part sideshow, part musical, part poetry recital, part comic existential quest, part tragic farce, as we are led into Edward Gant’s attempt to find an answer to what will turn out to be his own despair.

The production is an example of how little it can take a fertile imagination to concoct a world: the back of a truck, serving as a kind of stage-within-a-stage, a few lights strung up in the rafters, a papier-mache ball and a pulley and wire, and voila! There you have the Earth itself, spinning quietly in a theater suddenly become all of space.

A gentleman from Gant’s troupe walks about, carrying a stick from which hangs a white paper sphere: it is the sun. A lady traipses in with another stick from which hangs, like a fish frozen in astonishment at being caught, a pale crescent: the moon. Another gentleman walks by with two sagging rods from which are suspended little cages signifying the planet of war – Mars – and the planet of magic and mystery: Saturn. (Edward Gant’s troupe being limited to three, plus himself, the rest of the solar system must be left—to our imagination!).

Thus the setting of the loneliest planet in space is made the heart of the show, where we witness three stories that take us from Sicily to Vienna, from London to the Himalayas, from a boy’s lonely bedroom to a small stage in Berkeley. The first story, set in Italy, is centered in an encounter Gant once had with a young lady (Sarah Moser, who, like all the players, does multiple duty, and shows great variety and skill; this is her first appearance with the Shotgun players) suffering from a virulent form of acne that destroyed her prospects for romance and marriage. Amazingly, however, her acne has a miraculous side: each of her pimples, when pinched, yields a pearl, which would have made her fortune (if not her happiness) had not her own sister, a “beauty,” queen bee and alpha female, taken advantage of her.

The second story follows the attempt by a man (Ryan Drummond, very fine in his several roles, and especially in this one) to wipe out the memory of his great love and of her cruelly ridiculous and pointless death. The attempt leads him into the Himalayas to a holy hermit (Patrick Kelly Jones, a wonderful character actor), who convinces the poor suffering fellow that the only way to remove the memory will be by way of a primitive lobotomy: hammer, chisel, and drill, followed by removal of the offending area of brain. Very spiritual indeed! But the surgery has unforeseen consequences….

The third story brings us, by way of a farcically sappy story about a lonely teddy bear and an imaginary tea party, to the here-and-now with dramatic suddenness as one of Gant’s players, in an attack of sanctimoniousness, rebels against Gant himself, against the fairytales he is being made to perform, indeed against the entire project, which he sees as empty, pointless, “pretentious” drivel. “People come to see about real loneliness, real suffering, real poverty,” he shouts, while gesturing toward us, the audience. “Not this pompous, silly, made-up nonsense! You’re a fraud, Gant! And I’m not doing anymore of it!” And he threatens to stamp out of the theater in a huff, back to “reality.”

Just as the show threatens to fly apart at the seams, Gant himself pulls everything together – all three stories, with their elements of fantasy and reality, fairy tale and realism, dream and reality, fact and truth, of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (as Marianne Moore famously described poetry – for that is what this show is: the purest poetry), and even his rebel’s demand for authenticity, for “reality” – with a gesture and a word that complete the show with a hard, sharp click.

Beth Wilmurt provides the superb direction; the witty and atmospheric set design is by Nina Ball; the properties, of particular interest in this production, were by Kirsten Royston.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and the recent collection, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is a also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.