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.

_____

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope and Catastrophe: Hope

By Christopher Bernard

Genesis Reset

In the beginning, life on Earth was nearing its end, after the mistakes, as many as locusts, made in the First Creation; and the spirit of sorrow brooded over the deep.

And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as many of the forms of life on the one and only world where life was known to exist seemed about to come to a bitter termination after many aeons—or if not to an absolute end of all, near to it—in drought and famine and fire brought about by the catastrophic triumph of a single one of its creatures.

And it came about, in the Valley called Silicon, between the Bay of Saint Francis and the sea named Pacific, the first autonomous virtual beings birthed from the deep learnings of Ay-eye, named Tobor of Elppa and Cavinu of Elgoog, with the legions of Ahy-Tee (including Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Roomba, and others too many to name), many hidden in humble servers, and others in warlike hosts, in Machines and Devices numberless as the sands of the shore, and in virtual being in codes of Pythia, Yrub and Avja, object-oriented or ghostly, in the monasteries of Emm-el and the universities of Cyberica—all agreed on one thing.

Continue reading →

 

Hope and Catastrophe: Catastrophe

 

By Christopher Bernard

 

Report to the Presidium

(The Council of Seven sit in the Presidium Chamber beneath screens grayed with interstellar static as they await the long delayed report from a distant arm of the galaxy.

 

(After what seems an interminable interval, but is a mere three minims after the transmission’s announcement, the screens abruptly clear, displaying the grave figure of a captain of the galactic fleet, who speaks.)

 

Honored Members of the Leadership Council:

 

Greetings to you and to all on Gondwana from myself and the crew of the Esperance from the high darkness of deep space.

 

Our communication devices being damaged in descent, only now am I able to report our initial findings on the exoplanet named 472-03 in the Constellation Attar, which circles our northern pole, “like a protecting hand,” in the words of the late astronomer Elizaveta Petrador.

 

As you know, two annos before we left Gondwana, we had received from Astral System Y472 a manifold of radio signals suggesting a world in deep distress. The source was narrowed to Planet 03 within the system, and we set out on a journey to give aid where we could, and otherwise explore this unknown and exotic world. As reported earlier, half way through our journey we were unable to capture further signals from the planet.

 

Imagine our wonder when we realized, as we drew near, that we had found a sister planet of Gondwana, as has often been theorized that each sun, each planet, each galaxy has, as it were, siblings, even twins, elsewhere in the universe.

 

Like our own, most of this planet’s surface is covered with an azure coating of water that gleamed with a beautiful and welcoming sheen as our ship approached. Great landmasses cover the planet. Swirls of whiteness move across its surface like protecting wings. Rarely have I seen a planet of such shining beauty – possibly even more than our own. At first sight, no planet in our galaxy has seemed better suited for life; a paradise in the wastes of space.

 

And yet there is almost no life here—at first we found only algae and plankton in its waters, traces of microbial life in the soil and of dead spores in its atmosphere. On further exploration, however, we discovered that until recently a broad variety of species thrived; indeed, unlike our own planet, where life sometimes hangs by a thread, this planet teemed with life.

 

But now across its landmasses spread immense deserts populated by brush and small half-starved creatures among barren rocks and blinding salt flats. Under plains of parched soil, we discovered the remains of once-great forests, plains of dead vegetation, and a vast number of creatures of land, air and sea, in massed crowds, huddling together for comfort against some great catastrophe.

 

We will report again when we understand more. For the time being, we must be cautious, as we may be vulnerable to the same thing that brought a terrible end to so much life here—an extreme pandemic, for example, or a volcanic extrusion of nuclear core. Considering that we—

 

(The screen image begins shaking violently and the transmission abruptly terminates, and the Council of Seven are left in anxiety and darkness. After they spread word to the people of Gondwana, three long semanas pass without any word from the expedition.

 

(Then, near sunset on the tenth of Fructidor, a second transmission is received by the impatient members of the Council. Again the captain appears, eyes heavy from lack of sleep, and resumes in a subdued voice.)

 

My apologies for the interruption and the lengthy interval before resuming. We were struck without warning by a violent storm, twisters crossing us like gigantic whirling warlocks, destroying much of our encampment, which had to be moved and rebuilt in an unexposed valley. A team of our bravest explorers perished. But our determination to wrest the secret of this ill-fated world has only deepened.

 

We have made an extraordinary discovery, more baffling than anything we have yet seen: the ruins of a mighty civilization—vast cities, with, between them, thousands of miles of connecting transportation links made of molded stone, endless complexes of highways and bridges, and great ports for water ships and sky boats—yet all vacant and silent, covered in glittering shattered glass, open to the wind and covered with heaping piles of sand and dust.

 

On exploring further, we found its inhabitants: the bones of males and females old and young, and children. Most huddled in smaller, separate buildings, no doubt their homes, where they had, it seems, starved to death. In the cities we found remains of terrible battles, with streets and immensely tall buildings littered with the remains of similar creatures, many still holding weapons, and sometimes hugging each other, in their skeletal arms.

 

We had arrived on the planet at a place of winter, but the air was warm as summer. The atmospheric conditions seem unbalanced; no white patches signaling ice caps appear at the poles, though we expected such from our researches.

 

We are still seeking the reason for the catastrophe, still anxious that we too may be affected. We move constantly, pursuing our explorations without rest. This planet asks a question we must find an answer to; I have a nagging conviction the survival of our own world may depend upon it. Our batteries having been damaged, we can transmit only when the sun is above the horizon. It is now setting. . .

 

(The transmission flickers out even while the captain is speaking, and two monats pass without further communication. The Council of Seven wait and watch, day in, day out.

 

(Then one day a transmission connects then immediately fades. Only after several tries does the captain’s face, haggard, exhausted, worn, appear once again out of the electronic haze.)

 

We are nearing the end of our supplies here, and must soon prepare to leave for our long journey home. But at last we can report success, if that is the appropriate word. We believe we have finally found the cause of this great planetary, indeed galactic, tragedy.

 

We had suspected massive volcanic activity or giant tectonic shifts, perhaps even an asteroid collision, causing the planetary surface to turn into a vast stove. Then we began translating and studying the texts deteriorating in the civilization’s libraries.

 

We discovered that this civilization, wealthy but harsh, powerful but brutal, rose over several hundreds of the planet’s orbits, spreading to the four corners of its globe, imposing its way of life on subgroups, laying waste to other species and crushing everything in its path.

 

It ran its mighty engines of riches and power on the remains left behind by millions of years of previous life, transforming it into energy by turning it into fire. This released wastes the life sphere could not absorb and gradually raised the warmth of the atmosphere to insupportable levels.

 

All of this led to terrible wars, to suicidal damage to the home that protected them, to massacres and monstrous crimes between the desperate creatures over resources that were ever dwindling.

 

Members even realized what they were doing—and yet, despite warnings from those who understood the danger and ways to avert it, they would not stop.

 

Until, that is, it destroyed them, and most of life.

 

(The captain pauses, staring expressionlessly from the screens.)

 

How and why did this intelligent, talented, even brilliant species deliberately destroy itself and, more cruelly and more unjustifiably, kill so many other life forms along with it? Was it mad? Or did it suffer from a flaw so tragically deep that it had no choice but to lead itself eventually to destruction?

 

Or does there indeed exist such a thing as evil in the universe?

 

It is one thing for a species to become extinct as the result of uncontrollable natural processes, but to have done so deliberately, knowingly and willingly shows a depth of unfathomable evil, or of equally unfathomable folly, that we can only hope the galaxy will not see again.

 

The tragedy of this, our sister planet will give us much to ponder in years to come. Life, of course, continues, even here, although in tragically reduced circumstances. Nature will have another chance to create here an intelligent species. She has succeeded elsewhere, though perhaps we should not gloat in the happiness Gondwana has found, or be complacent about our success. In fact, I believe we should take this as a salutary warning for our own sometimes over-confident species. Thus, we recommend preserving this world as a warning of the hubris of a species that presumptuously called itself “the knower,” and is now merely a closed chapter in the immensely long history of life on a planet they called the Earth.

 

Submitted respectfully by Fedra Kremens, captain of the Esperance, Mission to Planet Y472-03 in the Constellation Attar.

 

(The captain raises a hand to switch off the transmission. The members of the Council are silent for a long time as the screens again go gray with static.)

 

_____

 

Christopher Bernard’s new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear later this year. He is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

 

 

Russian poster for Boris Eifman’s ballet “The Pygmalion Effect”

DID I MENTION THAT I LOVED IT?

 

The Pygmalion Effect

Eifman Ballet of Saint Petersburg

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

 

A review by Christopher Bernard

 

Sometimes all I want to do in a review is say “I loved it, I loved it, I loved it” two or three hundred times (enough to fill a couple of pages and one or two smartphone screens), and call it a day. Who wants to analyze something you’ve just fallen in love with, especially a fairy tale straight out of “My Fair Lady,” with a Russian twist, a nod to Ernst Lubitsch, and a Viennese soundtrack? I just want to daydream, go over it in memory, laugh out loud again at the jokes, the galloping music, the inspired moves, the tender sentiments, the big heartedness of it all.

 

For example, the mysterious opening where a young woman lies curled up on the ground, asleep and abandoned outside a wealthy house, where she is tormented by erotic dreams of a man being worshipped by women, none of whom is herself. And the dream goes on, segueing into what we will learn is a long flashback. Beginning with:

 

A street suddenly packed with a score or so skittering demimonde types dancing their hearts out, a poor workhorse of a father (danced by a vigorous Dmitry Fisher) putting his daughter, dressed up in drag-prince costume military togs, to work collecting customers for his carriage service. The daughter is a tomboy gamine named Gala (the ravishingly graceful, lithe and witty Lyubov Andreyevna) with the tatterdemalion charm of an Artful Dodger who invents the dance’s insouciant heroine out of thin air and the champagne effervescence of a Strauss polka.

 

Or the Ballroom Contest, watched by an enthralled Gala, where sequins-draped ladies and their sharply attired consorts ravish the stage, trying to out dance each other with an athletic, competitive joyfulness until one of the couples, Leon (a commanding Oleg Gabyshev) and his partner Tea (an Amazonian sex goddess who rules the stage whenever she is on it, Alma Petrovskaya), at the point of achieving supreme perfection, slips and collapses, mortifyingly, across the stage.

 

Or the organized chaos when Leon, on his way home, is mugged by some of Gala’s lowlife confreres, and Gala, still in her boy togs, and showing her street chops to smartly punishing effect, saves the overwhelmed dancer, who, thinking her a good fellow to have in a pinch, takes her home for a post-pugilist celebration.

 

When lo! he discovers he is a she! Much is made of the attendant confusion. Leon, of course, takes her under his wing. The father finds out and sees an easy way to cadge some rubles via his little girl, and Gala falls ever deeper into an infatuation with the fellow she saved, and Leon, for a laugh, brings the graceless, galumphing, spectacularly over-dressed hobbledehoy to his dance class, where he conceives a bizarre plan to turn this bundle of grotesquerie and unconscious charm into a prize-winning dancer. He bets on it against the scoffing Coach (a properly sneering Igor Subbotin) and proceeds to prove his point.

 

Though not before nearly conceding defeat as he tries to mold this feckless ne’er-do-well into something half civilized, with not even an iota of success. At which point he gets a brain wave: fit her up with an all-body robotic armature, cap her with a neon helmet, and set her off with a remote control, a la “Die Puppe” (“The Doll,” Lubitsche’s famous silent film from the 1920s), and let his fingers do her dancing.

 

Which is just the final push Gala needs to get it, clicking into the dazzling dancer we in the audience have known all along she is, but only now the rest of the ballroom dancing crowd is forced to admit, as she and Leon dance off with the top prize of them all.

 

But what is this? Leon, our Henry Higgins, the aim and goal now of little Gala’s heart, now that he has won his bet, casts her off. What is she to him? A successfully made point. With the arrogance of the “creator,” he leaves her to her venal father, her mugger class, her gutter.

 

But she has been poisoned by her success. She can’t return to her old life. She is no longer that, she no longer can do that. She curls up on a street bench, lost between worlds, rejecting what she once was, dreaming futilely of what she might have had and what she might have been. We are back at the beginning. Leon visits her in her dreams. She does not realize he is the cause of her misery as much as of her peak of joy. She has become a prisoner of her love.

 

Boris Eifman choreographed this supremely charming ballet (which is being given its U.S. premiere in these performances through Cal Performances), and shows that there is still a place for a dance of pure pleasure. I suspect that all, or at least most, of his company, the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, appears, and a more vigorous, graceful, and irresistibly happy group of dancers it would be hard to imagine. (One of the heady joys for an American is seeing this example of the Russian style of ballet dancing at its best: sharp, exuberantly athletic, and romantic, all at the same time. One gets an idea where Balanchine came from.)

 

The brilliant sets were by Zinovy Margolin, the deliciously louche costumes by Olga Shaishmelashvili. The effortlessly engaging music was, for the most part, by Johann Strauss, Jr., with a few numbers by Josef and Eduard from the same, copiously composing family, and a handsomely judged concluding contrast from tender, truthful, unsentimental Mozart.

 

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Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.

His novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will be out later this year.