Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of two children’s books, If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – the first in the “Otherwise” series.
The Hallucination
It tracks the edge of the wilderness
inside the skull of the mind,
tongueless yet obstreperous,
shouting like King Ubu lost in Poland.
It is shocking how unshockable it is.
The raptors of consciousness
gather in its many caves,
the blue shells of their eyes
do not blink.
Argus is its only ancient commentary,
though Medusa is to come.
Count its eggs, those tiny mausolea.
The mice in the garden gave it all their stories.
The mountain flowers are frozen like so many monkeys
in its zoo of gazes. The coyotes themselves
are whining to get in, you can hear them every night.
The ravens shake their beaks and coolly smirk
at the madwomen staring at their hands that are holding nothing.
Christopher Bernard invites people to sign on to this letter in the comments.
An Open Letter to President Biden
Dear Mr. President:
Surely you would agree that defending a "rules-based order" when, and only when, it decides in your favor is not acceptable; in fact, it violates the very principle of such an order.
Why, indeed, are we attempting, through legal actions almost too numerous to count, to hold Donald Trump accountable for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election? When a ruling, whether from a judge in court or the voters in an election, goes against you, it is neither morally nor legally acceptable to attack the system that led to that ruling in a fit of pique.
Yet that is precisely what your administration seems intent on doing. The scurrilous response by Secretary of State Blinken to “work with Congress to penalize” the ICC if it merely considers issuing warrants for the arrest of members of Israel's leadership - and your own petulant response (which, ironically, sounds curiously similar to the response by Trump when legal institutions act against him) - are, both of them, indefensible. The hypocrisy of American foreign policy, one of the few dependable truths of world history over the last two and a half centuries, has rarely been quite so blatant.
Israel has been murdering and denying the basic human rights of Palestinians in violation of international law and the U.N. for, not months or years, but generations. Israel has fooled much of the world, and decades of American presidents, into thinking it is the innocent victim when it has been the perpetrator of some of the most heinous offenses of modern times, not least the mass murder of civilians in Gaza since October of last year, and including policies of mass destruction, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and the killing of civilians going back at least to the Six-Day War of 1967, itself a crime under international law as it was provoked by Israel, who claimed it was a pre-emptive strike against an impending invasion by its Arab neighbors: a falsehood long disproven by the historical record.
You weep for those killed, horrendously, on October 7. But you have said nothing about the thousands and the tens of thousands who have been massacred by Israeli forces, whose homes have been wiped out, whose land has been stolen, whose families have been slaughtered, whose lives have been destroyed as deliberate Israeli policy since 1948 and before.
We in the United States are guilty of complicity in war crimes, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And that includes, above all, American political leaders.
You can influence long overdue changes in both the policy and actions of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians if you so choose. You can begin by sending Israel no more offensive arms. The Israel Defense Force has clearly, consistently, and defiantly broken American law in its use of our weaponry – weaponry paid for by American taxpayers. As president, you have the power, indeed the moral and legal obligation to do this.
If you do not reverse your policy of indiscriminate support for Israel, and that means if you do not stop supplying Israel with arms during the current genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza – and furthermore, if you do not hold Israel to account for its generations-long apartheid against the people of Palestine – I, and many like me, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to support you for president, despite the truly frightening alternative.
Often I have had to choose between two evils when voting for an American president, but never to the extent that I am being asked to in this election – and I am haunted by memories of 1968, when the electorate faced a similar moral dilemma during a presidential race, with tragic consequences. Choosing between an insurrectionist and an enabler of crimes against humanity I find profoundly repugnant, on moral grounds. I may find it impossible to make such a choice, or I will vote for a candidate who may have no chance of winning but whose positions do not make me feel I will have blood on my hands if I choose him or her.
I sense there are many like me among the electorate, both Democrats and independents, even among Republicans. If Trump wins in November, his victory, which could well be a catastrophe, may be because you made it morally impossible for conscientious voters to choose the only viable political alternative.
Respectfully,
Christopher Bernard
Mark Morris Dance Group in “Via Dolorosa” (Photo: Chris Hardy)
Calvary and a Prison in Athens
Socrates and Via Dolorosa Mark Morris Dance Group Cal Performances Berkeley, California
Western civilization. Two words that seem to enrage one half the world while blinding the other with a misguided sense of aggrieved loyalty. The so-called progressive left lays the blame for most, if not all of today’s evils at its doorstep. The alt-right and other so-called conservatives claim to be its sole defenders in a world gone mad with resentment and ingratitude.
“Slavery, capitalism, climate change, nuclear war, toxic synthetics, dying seas, the collapsing of wildlife and the sixth extinction,” the left claims, “including our own under the weight of a catastrophic success – these are the legacy of Western civilization.” “Freedom, unsurpassed prosperity, knowledge without equal, human creativity unleashed and human power without limit,” claims the right, “righteousness, grace and God: these are the gifts and the triumph of Western civilization.”
But today there is no longer such a thing as “Western civilization.” Long after Europe lost its empires and its political and economic dominance, its intellectual and spiritual domination of the world is complete. Now “Western civilization” is world civilization: free markets, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of human rights and the political authority of the people (in theory when not in practice), the imperative of human creativity, technology, critical reason and the scientific method in addressing our problems – these Western definitions of the good are unchallenged by anyone – though the right seems hardly to understand them and the left pretends to forget them. The right defends a grotesque caricature of “the West” that has its roots in the barbarians that brought down an empire and sacked Rome – their founding fathers are Alaric and Attila, the Vandals and Ostrogoths who gaped at the cities they burned.
The left attacks an equally grotesque simulacrum: a “West” that began in 1619, or 1492, or 1605 – when the Atlantic slave trade began, or Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, or the first stock exchange was founded in Amsterdam and what had been an efficient series of trading markets across the continent turned into the many-headed Hydra that now feasts on the globe.
At the heart of our dominant civilization stand two figures whose shadows have been cast down the millennia; the greatest rebels and martyrs of their times – doubters, skeptics, revolutionists. Each stood for his (for they were both men) convictions regarding reality, truth and the good, and each paid the ultimate price: they were summarily killed by the people and powers of their time, with the assumption their ideas and influence would die with them. They did not. Those two individuals also stood for the two poles on which what was, eventually, called “the West” has revolved for centuries. Their names? Socrates and Jesus.
Socrates embedded the dialectics of doubt and reasoned argument into the heart of the West. Jesus embedded the imperative of faith and love. Both stood for truth – though their conceptions of it were not always congruent, and much of Western history has been a long-undecided conflict, sometimes war, between them, one essentially spiritual, the other material – “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” as Matthew Arnold defined them two centuries ago.
Or, as we might say today, alt-right and progressive – neither side seeming to realize that both they and their opponents are Western to the core.
What civilization first placed its own self-criticism as one of its fundamental values? Western – and late Western at that. In most other cultures and civilizations, including earlier versions of Europe, the critic, dissident, rebel would have been imprisoned, executed or dismissed as mad.
What civilization places the idea of moral universals and absolutes at its beating heart? Again, Western. Most, if not all, other cultures enforced loyalty to their own and only their own; anyone outside “the tribe” was not considered entirely “human,” and certainly had no “rights.”
This is not to romanticize the West. Being human, it is imperfect – often floridly so. It has blood on its hands, as does every other culture and civilization since humanity broke off from its simian ancestors. And its virtues were not always intentional; they exist at least partly because there has been in fact no single “Western culture” but rather a cauldron of “Western cultures,” dozens of cultures, ethnicities, religions, races, in perpetual war with each other for millennia. But that discussion must be pursued elsewhere.
The Mark Morris Dance Group brought two dances, balancing these Western, and now world-dominating presences, one intellectual and heroic, the other spiritual and sanctified, to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater during a recent weekend; performances that could not help but stimulate these thoughts.
The first was a revival of Mark Morris’s celebrated “Socrates,” an intriguing work set to the music of Eric Satie and a libretto taken from three of Plato’s dialogues. Based on designs to be found in Grecian pottery, and at times curiously reminiscent of Nijinsky’s notorious choreography for Debussy’s “Prelude to ‘L’aprés-midi d’un faune,’” the dance moves in smoothly hieratic poses, sometimes childlike, sometimes serenely adolescent, across a landscape of classical purity and grace.
The dance has a libretto, performed gracefully by tenor Brian Giebler and accompanied by pianist Colin Fowler. The libretto’s first part is taken from The Symposium, the celebrated dialogue on the nature of love. Alicibiades describes Socrates as like a Selenus, a grotesque figurine containing, hiddenly, the figure of a god, and also like Marsyas, a satyr and flute player for the gods – though those who remember their mythology will remember his tragic end when he makes the mistake of challenging Apollo, god of the lyre, to a competition: he loses, predictably, and is skinned alive for his hubris. The second part describes an idyllic passage in Phaedrus in which Socrates and his young eponymous friend seek a place on the banks of a lovely stream where they will conduct a conversation in search of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
The third is taken from Phaedo, narrating the last moments of Socrates’ life, surrounded by his mourning friends in an Athens prison, when he drinks the hemlock to which he has been condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the youth of the city when, in truth, he was liberating them from the very illusions that led, ironically, tragically, to the greatest of ironist’s own martyrdom. Eric Satie’s music, famously cool and detached, makes little attempt to express the libretto; Morris’s choreography spends almost all of its time following the music and ignoring the words: there is almost no attempt, for example, to express the pathos of the closing pages until the very end, when, one by one, each of the dancers slips gracefully to the floor, expressing the death, perhaps not only of Socrates, but of the Greek ideal itself.
The second half of the program was a world premiere, awaited with much anticipation: “Via Dolorosa,” set to the music of Nico Muhly, performed on solo harp, with formidable virtuosity, by Parker Ramsay. The dance follows the Stations of the Cross, from Jesus’ condemnation to his crucifixion, death and entombment. Interestingly, it distributes the role of Jesus to dancers of various genders, ethnicities and races, appropriate for the universal humanity of the Good Shepherd. Muhly’s music is, for the most part, as detached as Satie’s, though it occasionally gives way to the harrowing drama of the moment. The stunning stage set – a blowup of a searingly beautiful patch of abstract brushwork, whose colors changed depending on how they were lit – was by Howard Hodgkin.
For this dance, too, there’s a libretto, in this case somewhat overwrought, by Alice Goodman, though in this performance it was neither spoken nor sung (as, it seems, might occur at some performances). Which was just as well, as it is, to be frank, a poor substitute for the simple descriptions in the gospel.
The dance was a little disappointing. Though there were moments of genuine originality and the childlike grace and warm humanity one associates with Morris’s dances, there just was not enough inventiveness and too much reliance on mannerisms one has also come to expect. It seemed just a little tired. There was also a strange attempt to take the edge off the final moments of the entombment, at the very end of the dance, to anticipate the coming resurrection, that felt contrived and forced. After all, even in Giotto’s frescoes, the angels are allowed to weep and lament as if there will be no resurrection to come, not take what looked like a not very unconvincing victory lap.
It was perhaps a more thought-provoking evening than one that was entirely satisfying aesthetically, but it was certainly worth the visit. And the audience gave it a standing ovation. _____ Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
Eyeless in Gaza
Strong, blind, he stumbles over the broken land.
His teeth are black. Boots crush a few innocents.
What does he care? His old wounds crowd his mind.
“Make everyone pay! Who pitied me? No pity!
Kill the children! Kill the mothers! Kill the men,
above all, who blinded me! Wipe them out!”
His fists hurl through the darkness.
The YouTube videos
show children
left behind his boot,
sand packed in their eyes, crusting their lips like dirty glitter,
the black-scarved mothers hysterical with grief,
the sunlight like a scar.
No pity, no pity – an eye for an eye,
and the whole world has gone blind. Evil
stalks men. It eats them. Then it spits them out.
Pity
everyone,
all of us –
or who shall pity us?
Aaron Bushnell, Martyr
At attention, in battle fatigues,
he stands before the concrete
cube within which
the ambassador sends his dispatches
between capitals. “The president
may say what he wants. The alliance
holds. Only the funds matter.
Gaza never existed anyway.”
He is staring at you.
His clothes are slick
as though he were standing in the rain.
There is a movement of his hand.
The ambassador
looks up, startled,
by a strange smell
as the man outside
becomes, for a moment,
fire.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an American poet, novelist and essayist. (“Eyeless in Gaza” first appeared in his collection Chien Lunatique, but he feels it is even more relevant today than when it first appeared.)
Fountain
Her hand leaps into the air like spray
as she dances, dances through the shadows
in the hushed auditorium she wraps around her
all the long spring afternoon.
She seems to rise in a lover's arms
of air and fog and sunlight.
Her eyes glimmer, her lips
murmur sweet nothings.
The hair flows over the brim of her shoulders
down her transparent back. Swallows
dance in the rain that dazzles from her fingers:
she is a living fountain, and drowns all the boys.
____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first two stories in the series “Otherwise,” for middle-grade readers: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia.
“Mere Mortals”: Davide Occhipinti, of San Francisco Ballet. From Hamill Industries; source photo: Lindsey Rallo
The Ballet of Terror
Mere Mortals
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
Reviewed by Christopher Bernard
Early on the gloomy day of the performance I attended, I noted it would be an unusually short evening – a mere hour and fifteen minutes, without even an intermission. And I grumbled to myself about short shrift and lean pickings.
But the city has been pasted for weeks with black-and-white photos, scored with the vaguely ominous title and its allusion to ancient gods and goddesses, of a bare-breasted dancer ensnarled in a swirl of white sheet, like a larva breaking from a chrysalis or an angel caught in a damage of wings, flogging the new work – and so my curiosity was keen.
And, as it turned out, with more justification than I could possibly have known.
“Mere Mortals,” the first dance commissioned under San Francisco Ballet’s new artistic director Tamara Rojo (the War Memorial Opera House was illuminated in red in her honor), was introduced to the world on that chilly January evening just before a weeklong train of atmospheric rivers threatened to pummel the Bay Area with reminders of nature’s (or the gods’) ultimate sovereignty.
As it happened, we didn’t have to wait for her salutary raging: the first tempest was brewed, quite satisfactorily, thank you very much, by her most gifted, and most rebellious, child inside the compact, baroque precincts of the War Memorial Opera House.
If you didn’t read the program, you might never have guessed that this dance, which seemed entirely abstract yet was radiant with an urgent and perfectly clear meaning, was in fact about the early Titans of Greek mythology, or Pandora and her cursed jar. Or that the dance drew parallels between the fraught liberation of human power found in those ancient stories, and today’s invention, by “mere mortals,” of something that may render obsolescent even our own highest gifts – namely, artificial intelligence.
But no matter: it was clear within minutes that we were witnessing an allegory about the entwining of liberation and evil at the heart of the human experiment, and the two-sided blade that is hope itself. And it was also perfectly clear that we were in the firm and steady hands of masters of dance, music, and stagecraft; at least one spectator was left in a trance of admiration at what these “mere mortals” were able to magick in a mere hour and a quarter.
The dance unfolds in half a dozen acts, at a rough count, each broken into short scenes, most of them led by Pandora (danced with a darkly inflected, impeccable grace by Jennifer Stahl), the infinitely curious woman who unleashed woe upon the world while also freeing a Hope that encompasses a touch of that creativity of the gods that menaces as much as it promises.
Pandora danced, solo, in a long opening scene until, at its apparently tranquil conclusion, she opened her infamous jar, out of which irrupted a plague of dancers, the Evils she has freed, swarming like an ink of insects onto a stage whose primary colors throughout the evening were the starkest of whites and blacks.
From then on, the dance is an intricate play of the dialectic of ferocious good and implacable evil whose paradoxical result is an endless invention: the evils themselves are provokers of beauty, and Hope itself is serpent-like, ophidian, menacing – freeing.
The Titans – a dark Prometheus (Isaac Hernández), bringer of fire and liberator of the most gifted of species (the program will inform you this character combines the rebellious Titan with his arch nemesis, Zeus, king of the gods and ruler of the world), and, later, his boyishly joyful brother Epimetheus (Parker Garrison) – compete to dominate the story, but fail to in the end: at the brilliant heart of the piece, Pandora and Epimetheus perform a remarkable pas de deux that actually embodies the romantic drama many fail to capture: most pas de deux are signs of romance but rarely persuade that the couple onstage actually is in love: this one did, profoundly, alchemically.
In the final act, Pandora is resorbed into the cosmos after a lengthy “2001”-inspired odyssey into a chaos of futurity, and the evils (or are they angels now?), dancing like ghosts glittering in silver, ring like an ouroboros and seethe like a horde of bullies and mean girls around the golden boy Hope (Wei Wang), who seems, briefly, triumphant over the chaos.
But even he, with his suspect minions, is finally sucked back into a darkness that remains, beyond either divinity or humanity, absolutely sovereign yet infinitely creative.
The choreographer of this dazzling evening was the Canadian Aszure Barton, who seems to have taken up the ink-black mantle of William Forsythe. In fact, this was one of the most powerful new dances I have been privileged to see since Forsythe’s “New Sleep,” premiered by the Ballet in the 1980s.
The brilliantly original score, by turns driving and lyrical – part electronic, part orchestral, with solos by violinist Cordula Merks, timpanist Zubin Hathi, and harpist Annabell Taubl – is by Floating Points (known, more pedestrianly, as Sam Shepherd). Conductor Martin West led with thrust and panache. Equal on the bill is a breathtaking production design and visuals by Hamill Industries: Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz, who helped shape the evening into a complex and satisfying whole. If I have any complaint, it is that the soloists were not identified in the printed program notes or the usual printed fill-in (the tyranny of the cell phone continues apace: a scrambled QR code will sesame you to the neglected information).
The gods of the Ballet were even more generous than giving us a mere work of genius: to make up for a “short” evening, they added an hour-long disco party in the lobby after the performance, with DJ, light-bearing dancers, and cash bars, that was attended by a few hundred dazed-looking audience members, some of whom let down their hair and joined in the dancing. In my mind I called it “The Party at the End of the World.”
I still felt in a bit of a trance when I got home, and posted the following on Facebook:
“I sit here at the computer, feeling relatively speechless, battered by an evening at the ballet. . . .
The words come with even greater slowness than usual, as if from a pit black as pitch, with a silence that . . .
. . . mere mortals break at their peril.
Dance needs to be cautious about evoking such gods.
Pandora danced open a treasure of evils.
Leaving, at the bottom, Hope.
Savage. Demonic. A kind of catastrophe.
If a magnificent one.“
I was left, at the end of the night, with a final question: who, after all, is Pandora?
Friend reader: is it us?
Is it you?
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
