DANCING IN SPACE

The Joffrey Ballet

Zellerbach Hall

University of California, Berkeley

A review by Christopher Bernard

What is greatness – moral, intellectual, artistic? It has a musty, old-fashioned sound, and is not exactly a fashionable idea just now, with our cultural hysterias against “elitism” of any kind, or perhaps ever was in a democratic culture with its sweet, egalitarian shibboleths. Nevertheless, the idea of greatness, saintliness, genius – of a superiority one cannot ignore but only acknowledge with humility and gratitude and admiration, even, in supreme cases, awe – periodically returns, because, like “truth” or “goodness,” it is a value that, however we may pretend we can do without it, at a certain point we discover that we can’t without collapsing into moral incoherence: nihilism, demoralization and despair.

In my own experience, artistic greatness, in particular, is partly discernible by the fact that the subject is more powerful, more beautiful, more astonishing or impressive than I remember it: that painting, this poem, this dance company, that book is more than I assimilated or knew; in some sense is permanently beyond me. It reminds me of what is often meant by “transcendent experience” – “artistic greatness” seems to mean a direct, sensuous experience of transcendence, piercing through the fog of distracted daily living in concentrated brilliance – and thus is an absolute value and not a category of relative merit.

I was provoked to these thoughts partly by the arrival in Berkeley over a recent weekend (and thanks to Cal Performances) of one of the country’s pre-eminent dance companies, a company that has, in the past, shown itself capable of reaching such heights with sometimes intimidating ease – the Joffrey Ballet, based in Chicago and not nearly a regular enough a visitor to the Bay Area and the finely tuned dance audiences we have here. And the company was indeed better than I remembered.

The Joffrey, originally under Robert Joffrey, then Gerald Arpino, and now Ashley Wheater, has mastered a lithe and muscular style of dancing that was on full display throughout a cast in which all of its member are presented as principals.

The performance I saw opened with Christopher Wheeldon’s “Commedia©” (yes, the copyright symbol is part of the title, as with other dances by Wheeldon; is this meant to prevent other choreographers from every using this title for one of their own works? Will someone now copyright “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker”? One can only hope they will resist the temptation), a brittlely elegant dance-class piece mimicking the somewhat matte cheeriness of the Stravinsky score it is set to, the clever, if chilly Pulcinella. Never having warmed to the music, I found it hard to warm to the dance, admiring it too from afar, though the contributions of Yumi Kanazawa and Yuki Iwai were noteworthy, and above all that of Brooke Linford, which was of an altogether memorable lightness and grace.

Stephanie Martinez’s “Bliss!”, which followed, set to Dumbarton Oaks, a richer and more complex piece of Stravinsky’s, was a good deal of a looser, less self-conscious affair, spinning between beefcake machismo and winsome femininity, with strong contributions, again, by Iwai and Kawazawa and by Jonathan Dole, and with an almost hilarious riff on muscularity by a stunning Derrick Agnoletti.

If the performance had ended, or peaked, there, at the first intermission, I would have had an interesting afternoon, with some moments to savor and much to have enjoyed. But I wouldn’t have been prepared for what followed.

What followed? “Beyond the Shore” followed. But wait: this is a work, choreographed by Nicholas Blanc (long a staple at the San Francisco Ballet) and co-commissioned by Cal Performances, and so having a special relationship with the Bay Area. The dance is set to a thundering, highly theatrical score by Mason Bates (perhaps best known here for his work, a few years back, with the San Francisco Symphony), “The B-Sides,” originally commissioned by the Symphony. Blanc describes his dance as about “exploration as a metaphor for human nature,” which is certainly a good thought to hang on to as we are thrust into a series of dance adventures, one for each section of the music, as thrilling, compelling and complex as I hope to find in this or any other dance season, climaxing in a profoundly astonishing and deeply moving  pas de deux by Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Guttierez that took me to places dance has not taken me in a very long time indeed, in a section called “Gemini in the Solar Wind.” This was inspired by (and for once, the word is just, for this was in the deepest sense an inspiration) the famous 1960s Gemini spacewalk, recordings of the NASA communications from the walk being cleverly, and oddly movingly, incorporated into the music. The dance was a haunting and vivifying experience, demanding much of the entire company, which met the challenge with limber and dramatic success.

After being vaulted into outer space by “Beyond the Shore,” we put on the razz and came back to earth in the concluding, dance, “The Times Are Racing,” by Justin Peck, a choreographer I have had mixed feelings about till now but this time was completely won over. A sneaker dance if there ever was one, this work starts in a throbbing mob cluster of bodies exploding into a swirling disco-thon to a jammy score from Dan Deacon (moving from ironic, to joyous, to hopeful, to joyous, to ironic, from his hit album America) with an array of young dancers who seemed like they’d jettisoned ten years from the assertive maturity of the Blanc, and dressed up, or down, in sports punk togs from Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony, splashed with defiance – “Fight,” “Rebel,” “Change,” “Obey,” and of course “Defy” – and knocking them flat with a trip-hop stew of dance styles I soon gave up counting. Starting at a race, it only got faster, wilder, crazier, though whittled down at moments to knock-’em-out solos, especially from Edson Barbosa, that knocked out the audience too, till, speeding by like it would never stop, the dance spun out to succeeding heights of crazy, then spun back in on itself, whooshing back into its cluster like a deblossoming flower before collapsing in total exhaustion.

What a dance. What a performance. What a company.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.

The Silence

by Christopher Bernard

The silence seemed delicious. No one would have thought

the streets could be so still.

The whiplash hum of the cables,

slapping and whining in the slots

or clashing, electrically, above the streets,

the moaning and whimper of the busses,

the gnarled complaints of cars,

the arthritic squeal of a truck,

vanished, like the crumpled quiet of barroom talk.

The barroom talk, too, silenced,

with the garrulous, loud Pandora,

the restaurant ramage quietened

to a held breath by the cashiers.

The tap-tap of a single pedestrian.

The whisper of the wind in your ear.

The buzzing of a heavy bumble bee.

The full-throated aria of a mockingbird,

blithely ignoring sheltering in place,

singing his heart out at the top of a tree.

Under the silence, a trembling,

the lifting of a finger

turning in the wind,

like a cock on a weather vane.

West. South. East. North. East.

South. East. South. West. North.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to appear later this year.

Eunice Odio (sculpture by Marisel Jiménez; image from Oregon Arts Watch)

AT JOURNEY’S END

The Fire’s Journey

Part IV: The Return

Eunice Odio

Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinosa

Tavern Books

A review by Christopher Bernard

            “2ND MAN

            Where, where is the house of your words?

ION

Behind your heart.”

                                    —The Fire’s Journey, Part IV: The Return

Eunice Odio, considered by many the greatest Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century, wrote what we can now see is one of that century’s most remarkable poems – her complex, elusive, deeply imagined epic of creation, The Fire’s Journey. It has taken several generations for Anglophones to be introduced to this extraordinary poem; with the publication of this translation of the epic’s concluding section, we are finally able to get a sense of the full magnitude of Odio’s accomplishment.

To briefly recap: the first three parts of this epic depict, and in some ways enact, the creation of the world from primordial chaos, and of both the poet narrating the epic (introduced in part two) and of the world’s poet-creator, Ion, named after a central character in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in which the philosopher presents his understanding of poetry as a kind of inspired madness and the role of the poet as a necromantic artificer and a tutor, wise in his madness and mad in his wisdom, of the ways of the gods.

The third, hitherto longest, section depicted the heroic making and remaking by Ion and his faithful servant, Dedalus, with the help of a host of gods, of a great cathedral, an edifice against the void that threatens creation at every instant of its existence.

The fourth part depicts the return of Ion and Dedalus and the other creator gods and goddesses (Om, Tiara, Thauma, Efrit, Demon) to the city of humanity to celebrate the creation of the world after a great victory has been achieved (it is not entirely clear what this “victory” is of, or against what, though it may be the victory of creation itself against chaos and nothingess). On their way to the city, they meet a group of men carrying an angel who seems, somewhat ominously, to have been killed by the masters of the city. In a Lazarus-like act, or an allusion to Jesus, they resurrect him:

He is a crippled angel, he is a man;

not a whole man, but broken in pieces;

half a man that rage spun cut by cut,

large in wounds and small in hope . . .

Ion, returning to his human form, hopes to be recognized by his mother, his uncle, and his brothers (curiously, Ion’s father is never referred to directly, though an ultimate being irregularly appearing, called “The Guardian,” may be him), but even his family does not see him for what and who he is (the second brother speaks):

You’re left, mother, with the son

who disturbs you piece by piece;

you’re left with your recovered son

in whom you never rest

the one you love in secret

without joy and without pause;

in whom you whirl, crying in pain.

In consequence, Ion, who, as a creator of the universe, is also the creator of himself, must now reject his family:

            Mother, . . .

            . . .

            Stay in your place,

            Stay there, living, besieged by the dead.

            Stay there, kissing me from within.

            A new word annihilates me,

            another sets me free

            another one is born in me, allowing a new birthing;

            I am become birth-light once again.

            I emerge.

            .  .  .

            I keep on until the end,

            journeying in rapture.

But on their way to the city, the creators make a harsh discovery: though those they meet are eagerly awaiting the coming of the creators to celebrate them and all of creation, Ion and Dedalus are not recognized; they are spurned, laughed at, denied. They then discover the harshest reality of all. The city of men where they hoped to celebrate, and justly be celebrated, has been conquered by an oligarchy of demons: god of the dead Erebos, three-headed Cerberus, Syriac devil Beherit, and Hybris, named not coincidentally for the Greek word for the overweening arrogance that leads to catastrophe. Humanity has been corrupted, and the euphoria of creation is poisoned by the reign of evil.

Ion and Dedalus are cast out of the city. After their long labor creating the universe, they are stripped of joy and pride, mocked, and left destitute in the wilderness:

DEDALUS

Lord, you are sad. You have nothing left

nothing

but your solitude.

.  .  .

ION
You, my populous solitude

my soul’s pluranimous movement,

the thirst that sustains me,

mother, child, my brother pulse,

the bread’s skeleton,

an unbroken visitor

.  .  .

Guarding

keeping watch

at the gates of the earth.

“The return” of the title means different things: Ion’s return to the city of men, his return to human form from his time as spiritual creator, the return to “reality” from the inspired insanity of the rhapsode, a return to darkness after the blazing light of creation.  It is also a kind of return to the primordial questions of existence, to void and chaos confronting the painful articulations of reality, to the adventure of being that is always about to begin.

Thanks to Keith Ekiss and his associates, Anglophone readers now have a chance to be enriched by this strange and challenging poem, Blakean (as the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz recognized) in its range and originality, a myth of origin of endlessly ramifying depth, a spiritual and verbal journey rich with promises of discovery, and a look into human and ahuman reality depicted in a masterpiece that deserves a wide readership in any language. One can only wonder why it has taken so long for us to learn about it. But surely it has been worth the wait, since the result is this masterly translation.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to appear later this year.

• HOT L CIRCUS

Hot l

Cirque Éloize

Zellerbach Hall

University of California, Berkeley

A review by Christopher Bernard

When is a hotel like a circus? And when is a circus like a hotel?

Both are dreamy places of encounter and chaos where strangers tangle in embrace and flight and our fates are in our hands briefly before they journey on to other lands, and everything is apparently controlled but anything can happen at any time; where lovers meet and lovers part, fortunes are made and fortunes are lost, but only Fortune rules; where the daring young man on the flying trapeze is suddenly an ancient porter bowing for a tip, or the master of ceremonies becomes a harassed maître d’, or a junior maid suddenly saves the show.

They are little worlds both, where we can be whatever we pretend to be, put on glamour and tinsel when we make our entrance to the grand lobby or the big tent, and for a beguiling moment take on the substance of a dream.

In Berkeley over a recent weekend, Montreal’s Cirque Éloize revealed just how much poetry, humor, fantasy, imagination and grace can be mined from these parallels, in Hotel, brought to the Bay Area by Cal Performances, and the company’s 15th original creation, premiered in 2018 to celebrate their 25th anniversary.

Cirque Éloize has been called Cirque de Soleil’s (also headquartered in Montreal) “slimmer, sexier sister,” which is not far off. But what Cirque Éloize is in itself is what counts here: a compact, inventive, multi-talented troupe (they are all, at one point or other, equally skilled acrobats and dancers, actors and impressionists, contortionists and musicians) who can give the impression of a small army of véritables artistes with a distinctly French Canadian aesthetic: alternately sadly tender, old worldly nostalgic, sharply witty, bravely romantic, and robustly pratfally, sometimes within the same few gestures.

I’ll admit that, at the afternoon show I attended, there was a moment near the beginning when I wasn’t sure if there was a bit of scene that wasn’t working out, or a technical glitch, and a couple of minutes passed (an eternity on stage) when the troupe seemed to flounder as bits of pumped-in music whispered and died several times before sounding with complete security. But this was the sole hitch in an otherwise tight performance.

The setting was a hotel lobby with a peripatetic entrance door (moved about on wheels and proving a prop of many uses) and a long bar cum counter at the back under a diamond-shaped alcove and triangles of neon tracing bright lines above the stage. The lobby morphed through a collection of glittering identities: from a 1920s Grand Hotel, to a 1940s lounge for a Gilda-like torch singer, to a disco-fever ballroom from the 70s, to an 80s Jane Fonda gymnasium, before flipping back to its Art Deco roots, with, trooping through it, a cavalcade of archetypes of the modern caravanserai: the swooning lovers, the attentive groom and his glamorous bride, the hotel’s jack-of-all-trades handyman, the mischievous maid, the shady, “chameleon” figure who lurks in all such places where strangers mingle, a pair of twins who confuse everyone, and a maître d’ who imagines himself in control of things no matter how often fate instructs him otherwise.

The meat of the show was series of acts, by turns acrobatically controlled and comically chaotic, building to a series of climaxes, each bettering the last, until the audience was heated to a compound of clapping, whistling, hooting, stamping celebration.

Several moments bear special mention: Cory Marsh’s work on the Cyr wheel (a large hoop, like an over-sized hula hoop, worked from the inside; an act not strictly original, but I haven’t seen it quite so imaginatively choreographed and performed); Vanessa Aviles’ graceful work on “tissu tension,” long rope-like scarves hung from the flies; Jérémy Vitupier’s death-defying (and head-endangering) acrobatics and miming with a piece of luggage at least one person in the audience won’t soon forget; Una Bennett’s wittily risqué work on aerial rope, inspired (and well-timed) trumpet riffs, and a Metropolis-reminding spinning of multiple hula hoops from neck down to shins, commanding a scene where hula hoops reigned, indeed rained; and, helping bind the whole, sizzling vocals by Éléonore Lagacé, especially near the rapturous conclusion, when she commanded as much with guitar as with a voice that surprised the house with an unpredictable (unless one remembers the old phrase: “chaotic, like a Spanish inn”), highly theatrical, deep voiced, and deeply satisfying, swathe of flamenco vocals, sung con mucho duende.

The creative team was led by Cirque Éloize’s president and creative director Jeannot Painchaud and director Emmanual Guillaume, and the atmospheric musical accompaniment, both live and piped in, was composed, arranged, and compiled (including a magical performance, by Antonin Wicky, of one of Chopin’s most exquisite and moving nocturnes) by Éloi Painchaud.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.

A Micronaut at Last

HOIL: An Unfinished Elegy

by Iván Argüelles

With an introduction by Jack Foley

Goldfish Press

A review by Christopher Bernard

Celebrity, “cultural attention,” fame (“that last infirmity of noble mind,” as Milton said in “Lycidas,” another elegy), is fickle, often very strange, sometimes preposterous. Andy Warhol may have been an optimist: in the future everyone will be famous for no more than fifteen seconds, with anyone famous for longer than that in serious danger of being trolled by the envious until they wish they had never been heard of.

Yet there was, at one time, a point to fame: the holding in memory by a culture, a nation, a people, of exemplary beings whose deeds inspired the rest of us to strive to shape ourselves into something truer, nobler, finer—proofs of what a person is capable of for good. We have examples enough of the contrary, their “fame” one more proof of our eternal human folly.

The noble spirits among us go almost unseen, unregarded; condescended to with a nod here, an award there, but taken for granted for the sake of the mad men, the mirrors of our weakness, who genuinely fascinate us. We are of course free either way—but, born ignorant, needy and weak, and needing as we do to learn everything from the darkness of our beginning, we require examples to teach us which to choose: nobility, infamy, indifference, golden mediocrity? Or?

One criticism of democracy has always been that it pretends the ordinary person, the “common man,” capable of few or no superlative acts, nor claiming to be so, is an ideal. And yet perhaps it is one, an ideal worthy of respect and value: the basic decency of the ordinary person—once the adolescent manias have been seared off via an acid bath in reality, leaving a rooted awareness of vulnerability, our ultimate powerlessness—is surely closer to the reality of the human condition than the brief exhilarations of conqueror, genius and saint.

The exceptional person inspires us to demand more from ourselves, sometimes more than is possible—they can be as cruel to those around them who are less able to endure it, as toward themselves. The ordinary person reminds us that our limits are as absolute as our promise; that the greatest of all human beings will be never more than human: that all of us live in bodies that are born, are vulnerable to vicissitudes we can neither prevent nor even know the existence of till they strike us, and that perish as completely as if they had never been.

Which makes it all the more revelatory of our painfully contradictory position—as vulnerable, mortal, and limited beings of flesh, blood and bone who at the same time have the minds and spirits, the gifts of gods, demons and angels, and the will, in our small way, to use them—when we see a direct expression of the nobility of our spirits meeting the nothingness and cruelty of our bodies, and the meeting does not end in stalemate, but in an eloquence that, while only a partial victory, is nevertheless a sign of the holiness of existence, of life and mind, of humanity and the world.

Such a revelation I believe can be found in this book. For the poet Ivan Argüelles has given us a book of great beauty and emotional power, heart rending and moving, because we see enacted in it a human nobility in stark confrontation with ultimate human weakness—in woe and wonder, bafflement, grief, and a strange and grateful joy.

Early in 2018, the poet and his wife lost their son Max. Max had suffered for almost four decades from encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain contracted when he was ten years old. He spent most of his life with his parents, moving from crisis to crisis, in and out of hospitals, severely challenged in mind and body if not in spirit. In recent years, the poet had also lost his brother and identical twin, José Argüelles, about whom he has written eloquently. But this new death, though long expected, clearly wounded at an even deeper level, calling up an anguish not only over the loss of what was, from all accounts, a loving and gentle soul, but over the mystery, the apparent cruelty and senselessness of his son’s fate.

The result has been an anguished outpouring of poetry, a despairingly eloquent questioning of life, the universe and the emptiness suffusing it, of himself, the world, and the void; of “the Unknown,” as he puts it—a hopeless yet determined quest for an answer he knows, believes, suspects, and fears cannot be found. The poems have been collected into this, his most focused and moving book – “HOIL” was a word of unknown meaning that (according to the poet) Max wrote on various drawings in his early childhood, and thus especially appropriate for this book.

In these poems Argüelles displays what anyone who knows his work would expect: a seemingly limitless inventiveness of startling imagery, a gift for paradox seducing assent, surrealist elisions of logic that seem as natural as breathing, and a near perfect ear—coupled with a mastery of condensed statement that demands, and rewards, close attention, to say nothing of a depth of personal feeling and illumination, vulnerability, in some ways unique to his poems here.

There are poems “spoken” by Max:

I can’t tie my shoe strings

my pulse is fluttering madly

black spots devour my left eye

and people randomly assembled

all with someone else’s hands

what are they doing and saying

where is the illuminated globe

and the scissors that cut the wind

                                    —from SHORT CIRCUIT

And poems spoken to him:

tell me you’ve just gone

to a temporary Elysium

where flowers are made of paper

in colors that last a day

a place where they burn water

because death does not exist

tell me that on the other shore

your hands are still making

shadows that the blind can feel

                                    —from MAGIC MAX

There are poems about Max:

great and splendid the mornings when

in your magic chair you greeted the first light

. . .

and with joy bush herb grass tree leaf

beloved of bug and bird alike you blessed

. . .

and when you reached your happy hand forth

to greet and bless the homeless and hungry

who in their morning passage came to you

a benediction in their grateful smiles

                                    —from SAINT MAX

And about his child’s game of traveling through outer space, powered by a favorite toy:

                       
. . .  I was a miconaut

in my plastic toy sailing the galaxies

                                    —from MAX: A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

There are poems about the basic mystery of being:

all the schools of thought

fit into a blade of grass

the heat and magma of the past

the very turbulence of the cosmos

a dew drop a petal in the wind

all expressions of the seen and felt

are nothing in the sweep of time

. . .

             . . . the rapacious gods

flash their gaudy crowns

parading magnificent see-through

bodies like shadows of alabaster

they too are nothing but absence

                                    —from IN PERPETUITY

. . . and the mystery of death:

where does one go when the door shuts

are there windows inside or a trap-hole

hidden in the ceiling or secret words

to transport the soul to its next destiny

. . .

does it feel like an ancient ruined temple

the feel of moss the scent of damp grass

blind statues representing the gods

of futility and longing . . .

. . .

is it easier to sleep again to forget what

it was that was being sought—a hand?

                                    —from AVERNUS

There are poems made up, partly or all, of questions with no answers:

how many is number? who talks to the comb?

who are the zero? what letter comes second?

who counts the echoes? who sets light in the glass?

who emerges in the cloud? who sleeps with the child?

who wakes in the well? who pronounces the moon?

                                    —from THE PURVEYOR OF SOUND

And poems about the anguish of this death:

the discarded comb

the useless shaving brush

and what the mirror no longer holds

distance of immeasurable hours

nowhere now in the spent landscape

of discarded talismans

                                    —from THE REMAINS

you have become sleek a streaking flash

in the night heavens which we scour looking

for the brilliant dust of your swift passage

into eternity a micronaut at last

                                    —from MICRONAUT II

And there are poems about the responsive questioning and questionable responses of poetry:

when they wrote that page

who was at the window watching?

who could restrain the hands of the wind?

it came from a chasm of ink

illegible words of a rotating night

errors in punctuation and syntax

what could be the one way forward

if not opening the side door

and going directly into the woods

                                    —from FATE

Above all, there is the embrace of mind, spirit and heart of a noble soul (when will fame come?) speaking from the depths of sorrow and grace:

you reached out for a handful of air

to define your true being the essential inner you

great internal blossoming of sand and rock

imprinted with the hearsay of the archaic

enormous unfolding waves of letters

missives from secret gods hidden in liquid gold

what their mouths were telling you in a language

of fever and ancient fingerprints HOIL
which you wrote in your mysterious passage

to the underworld riding the enigmatic thunder

                                    —from CHILD-OF-MY-HEART

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear in 2020.

The Tower                                                  

By Christopher Bernard  

                                    

                                                A card held high above the crowd,

                                                stiff with prediction from the deck.

                                                The monumental avatar

                                                of danger, wreck, catastrophe,

                                                disaster, liberation: the tower

                                                rived by lighting, crowned with fire.

                                                A Roma girl holds it high and free:

                                                it tells of fortune: catastrophe

                                                promises possibility.

                                                Annihilated or redeemed?

                                                Destroyed? Or saved? Shout and blare

                                                rock the roads. The mob is there,

                                                motley, young, and angry crammed

                                                between the city and the sea. 

                                                The crowd surges like the tide.                                  

                                                March treads, chants shout,

                                                in a bizarrely cheerful stampede

                                                in chaotic polyphony.

                                                The beautiful young, the desperate young

                                                entombed in beauty, take the bow

                                                cutting the sea of their elders’ calm,

                                                the doldrums of death on the dead reefs;

                                                they shout at the old half in their graves

                                                as if such shouts might us all save.

                                                They march. They march. They shake their signs,

                                                their smiles are bitter, their eyes are kind.

                                                Their parents slip, contrite, ashamed,

                                                a mass at the back; good followers all,

                                                as they always were—now in parade

                                                behind their young, behind them all              

                                                (a crowd that always followed the crowd),

                                                sleepwalking toward a murderous sea

                                                that might be their posterity.

                                                And yet they march. They march. They march

                                                under the tower toward the future’s sea.

                                                Together they go, in the maze of the city,

                                                in hope and despair, in courage and woe.

                                                “Where do you come from? Where do you go?”
                                                the girl seems to ask in courage and woe.

                                                “We march under the tower of fire and woe.

                                                We march to the future inscribed in the Tarot!”

                                                And they march. And they march.

And that Roma girl

                                                casts her spell upon us all.

                                                “We march toward the future.

What will we find?”—
                                                Its smile is bitter, its eyes are kind.

                                                                                                —September 20, 2019

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in 2020.

                                                                                                  —September 20, 2019

  _____   Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in 2020.    

OF DREADFUL CONSEQUENCE

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Word for Word Performing Arts Company

And Z Space

San Francisco

A review by Christopher Bernard

“ ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends that plague thee thus!

Why look’st thou so?’ With my crossbow,

I shot the ALBATROSS.”

The new theatrical adaptation of Coleridge’s haunting poem by San Francisco’s Word for Word and Z Space could hardly be more timely. It opened on the day of the mass global Climate Strike of September 20; some in the audience still carried dust from local marches on their shoes.

The famous poem tells, in the form of an extended ballad, the tale of an old seaman who stops a young man on his way to a family wedding to tell him a story he is compelled to tell over and over again, of a mysterious and tragic voyage he made in his younger days south to the Antarctic wastes, where he shot and killed an albatross, despite the bird having led the ship back into open sea, thus sparing it wreck in frost and ice, and about the terrible punishments thereupon visited upon himself and the crew for this crime against nature.

Word for Word’s beautiful, sometimes harrowing, adaptation underscores the many prophetic aspects of the poem; not only for its, and our, terrifying future, but also those deeply rooted in our civilization: the humanism of the Greco-Roman world and the special creation of man and his role as master of nature claimed for him in the Old Testament; the humanism that has long defined Western civilization and that, turbocharged by the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the multiple industrial revolutions of the last two and a half centuries, has made us world-conquering and now world-destroying.

There is one question that anyone who has read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has asked. The question has nagged for the more than two centuries since the poem first appeared. Students, teachers, critics, lay readers of all kinds ask: why on earth did he do it?

Why did the Ancient Mariner shoot the albatross?

It is not explained in the poem—indeed, the idea of motive is never raised. It seems an act of wanton thoughtlessness, boredom, whim. Yet, to a brutal fate, to avenging spirits and “a rotting sea,” to mass death and, for those who survive, a life worse than death, leads (in director Delia MacDougall’s memorable phrase) this “thoughtless act of dreadful consequence.” A seemingly random, unfortunate, but surely trivial deed has results beyond anything that seems morally or even practically explicable.

There is, perhaps, only one humanly understandable, if not respectable, reason. He did it, not because he thought that it was right or necessary, from superstition or fanatical zeal, or even from sheer malevolence—out of pride, cruelty; what we might call “malignant narcissism” or “toxic masculinity.” It was an act neither of misguided virtue nor of willful evil. He did it for one reason alone: because he could.

Our world of relentless disruption has come about for reasons not far different: the Mark Zuckerbergs, Steven Jobs’, Travis Kalanicks of the world have upended our existence time and again because they could. Some young man working in a midnight bedroom may yet find a way to blow up the world just because he discovers that, with this little thread of code populating every computer in the world with a single click of his mouse, he can.

Word for Word follows its customary method of dramatizing texts by presenting them literally “word for word”; in this instance, enacting the entire poem on a stage representing a minimalist skeleton of the Mariner’s ship, and flanked by sweeping ramps, like two arms embracing the vessel, that rise to a shrine-like alcove where figures of transcendence briefly appear—the “spirits” that inhabit the poem, including that of the albatross. The stage is a bit like a schematic image of a woman’s body, with head, arms, and womb: mother nature from which all things come and to which all things must in the end return.

Among the most notable performers of this evening were Lucas Brandt as both the Wedding Guest to whom the Ancient Mariner tells his inescapable tale, and the young mariner of the awful deed and spectral sea tragedy (most of the cast take double roles); a splendid Darryl V. Jones who takes the part of the Sun (who has indeed a defining role in the poem, as bringer equally of life and death) and also as the Hermit who shrives the mariner at the end of his long journey (Jones also wrote the idiomatic music for the Hermit’s song); and the lovely Leontyne Mbele-Mbong as a crew member and second of two disembodied spirit voices. Charles Shaw Robinson presented the Ancient Mariner with mournful authority.

The two directors, MacDougall and Jim Cave provide, in the program, particularly eloquent “director’s statements,” demonstrating an unexpectedly comprehensive understanding of Coleridge, who in later years became an influential philosopher some of whose ideas left traces on American transcendentalism, existentialism, and ecological philosophies. The directors, performers, and production team braid together their skills like good hemp cable to help the poet’s words, ideas, and warnings cross the generations to reach us with as much urgency as theatrical power.

It is well accepted that we are in the midst of destroying much of living nature that has thrived for tens of millions of years on planet earth, like the mariner’s shooting of the albatross, just because we can. Before our time no matter how much we were able to destroy each other, cities, cultures, entire civilizations, we could not, in effect, destroy everything. But now the world has become our toy; like many a child, we have been busy taking it apart to see how it works. And, like many a child, we are now crying because we don’t know how to put it back together again.

At the very beginning of this adaptation, in a brief prologue, the “spirits” that are as vital to the story as the benighted humans, and acting together as a benignant chorus made up of everyone except the tragic protagonists, present a short speech not to be found in the poem; it is repeated, word for word, at the poem’s conclusion. Who invented it? No one is saying. It is modest, kindly, ingenuous, and deeply moving, ending the performance on a note both questioning and hopeful. One can only be grateful, as we have never been more in need of hope.

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Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear in 2020; his third collection of poetry, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will also appear in 2020.