Ligature

Eastside Road, December 22, 2014—

LOOKING BACK OVER the year, as I do the week before Christmas most years, I find a forgotten poem written last month — November 11, in fact; Armistice Day. The occasion: thoughts on Carel Fabritius's painting The Goldfinch, a favorite painting of mine. (No: I haven't read the currently popular novel of that name, and don't intend to.)

Ligature

retained

the finch

like all prose

to a thick block

not read for suspected freedoms

turned and then returned

a fine wire

gold perhaps

restrained



all this

for his song

unwilling inevitable

thrown at silence

gone now



returned

gold perhaps

the thick prose

song yellow sharp song

instinctive response to the silence

turned trilled like footsteps

nervous imprisoned despair

gold perhaps

refined

Now to see if I can't finish the music that goes with it…

Commonplace: Judt on collective vs individual rights

“

THE ATTRACTION of the notion that the ethical resides in the individual is that it reduces it to a decision-making process or a set of evaluations of interest, or whatever it might be, that cannot be collectivized and therefore imposed.

But it can lead to another problem, the magnifying upwards of ethical categories from individuals to collectives. We think that we understand quite clearly what we mean when we say that liberty is a universal human value, that the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of choice inhere in individual people. But I think, ever since the nineteenth century, we have moved rather too easily from one man's freedom to speak of collective freedoms, as though these were the same kind of things.


But once you start talking about liberating a people, or bringing liberty as an abstraction, very different things begin to happen. One of the problems with Western political thought since the Enlightenment has been this movement back and forth between Kantian ethical evaluations and abstract political categories.

—Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, p. 291

”

Two Rakosi Songs

SOME LITTLE WHILE ago, in July 2007, I wrote here about Carl Rakosi's poem "Cenozoic Time," and Michael Kincaid's book Solar Margins.

The other day we visited an old friend not seen for years, a singer, and I took her some old songs also not seen for years. On getting them ready I discovered the file for one had become quite corrupted. Fortunately I have a recording of it, and was able to reconstruct the score to "Riddle" by listening and transcribing.

Here, then, is the score to my Two Rakosi Songs, composed in 2003. You can listen to the first song, "Cenozoic Time," here; and you're welcome to download the score for nothing, and print it out if you like, and perhaps even sing it, or give it to someone to sing.

---

Last time I said I'd post my farewell column from my days on the Oakland Tribune here. It's occurred to me, though, that I really ought to ask permission to do that from the newspaper, and the person I need to talk to is apparently on vacation for another week, so that matter is going to have to wait. Sorry.

What is Being, as Carl asks.

Ponge

JUST A QUICK NOTE to recall Francis Ponge, the great French poet and homme des lettres. In the mail today a letter from an assistant to his daughter, asking if I have a letter from him. Well, yes, I do, somewhere, but who knows where.

In the late 1960s I became besotted with his limpid, crystalline, captivating writing through the medium of his Le savon, which appeared in Lane Dunlop's translation (Soap) in a small, elegant book published by Grossman/Cape Goliard. I found it in Robert Yamada's excellently stocked Co-op Bookstore on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, and before long I was on the store's board of directors, so besotted was I.

I bought every edition I could find of Ponge, and in 1970 wrote out a translation of his Douze petits écrits, working in the announce booth at KQED with my kit of colored inks and Brause penpoints (and a Rapidograph or two). A few years later my good friend (whom I see perhaps decennially) Rolando Castellon decided to publish a selection in his occasional periodical Cenizas, and then printed out a number of copies in facsimile. I thought I'd bind them all, by hand of course, in facsimiles of my original notebook, itself bound in cardboard and passepartout-tape. It's one of several, many, too many unfinished projects.

I wrote Ponge asking permission, of course, and received a generous and gracious reply, which furnished an end-paper to the projected edition.

Here's a teaser (control-click on it for a bigger view), a two-page spread, ending the first of Ponge's Quatre satires: i: le monologue d'employé. Much of the original is too delicate to survive scanning, but you'll get the idea. The idea was to present the original French text and progressive translation attempts, correcting and revising as they go, with illustrations meant to set the mind loose.

Read Ponge; read about him. Google "ponge soap grossman" and read the first six or seven results. I put him squarely at the center of 20th-century literature; the literature of the present century would profit from knowing him, and his place.

Sinfonia Muta

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, February 4, 2009

I POST THIS SONG here, not because it's particularly important, but because I hope thereby to get back in touch with the author of the poem, Nicu Lutan, who we met in a restaurant in Milan where he was waiting tables.

An engaging fellow, Nicu is anything but reticent. He saw to it that I had a broadsheet celebrating him and his poetry and, most of all it seemed, his connection to famous people. But I found him genuinely likable. And the more I looked at one of his short poems the more I liked it:

il silenzio sta
come un orco enorme
pronto ad ingoiarmi
non gli do retta
e lo strangolo
col mio canto d'amore per te

which my computer helpfully translates as

Hush it is like a orco enormous ready to swallow to me I do not take notice to it and I strangle it with my song of love for you

(I don't know why computer doesn't know that orco means "ogre, bogeyman".)

Well: Enjoying a grappa after dinner I sketched out a little musical setting of the piece on the table-paper. I left it for him, taking this photo with me. I've looked him up and found him here, but the e-mail link on the web page doesn't work any more. If anyone runs across him, will you put him in touch with me please?

The thing about the thing itself

SILLIMAN'S BLOG STEERS ME to a note (from five months ago) about Wallace Stevens's poem Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself. I've always admired Stevens, and I particularly respond to this poem; when my mother died I used it in a version of the Requiem that I wrote for chamber choir with solo oboe.

I've rarely read a discussion of a poem I disagree so strenuously with as Nada Gordon's discussion of this. She reproduces the text in full on her blog, freeing me from the temptation to do so here, and then she writes

It’s a confusing poem, probably deliberately so, and I felt after reading it and discussing it that it doesn’t transcend its own contradiction: the cry “seem[s] like a sound in [his] mind” but he maintains, in that weird conditional tense (and with a potentially ambiguous pronoun reference) “It would have been outside”.…

The poem seems perfectly clear to me; it's about the coming of death, the ultimate "thing itself"; death whether literally or as the embodiment of any realization of the complete whatness of something. The poem is no more "confusing" than the difference between seems and is; and "would have been" is not "conditional tense" [sic] but laconic spoken English. Wallace Stevens is so readily thought a mandarin that his most direct discourse is analyzed into opacity; it's an example of the danger of reading intellectual complexity into material that is, in fact, perfectly straightforward.

Le Marteau sans maître

FERE ALIQVVBI HIC ILLVD SCIO

I'VE BEEN MULLING OVER this music for a couple of months now, Pierre Boulez's cycle Le Marteau sans maître; I write about it today quite unprepared — for one thing I can't recall where I put the score — but under some urgency, as a performance is scheduled next Monday in San Francisco, and it doesn't hurt to call some attention to it.

(Alas I won't be able to hear it: I'll be in Los Angeles.)

I've been thinking about the piece because of a strange string of coincidences. Six or seven weeks ago, just before we left on a longish trip to Italy, we had dinner with a couple of friends in Healdsburg. Richard gave me a little bundle wrapped in paper, a cube whose proportions looked oddly familiar. At the bottom, tied to the package but not within its wrapping paper, was a booklet. The package turned out to be a stack of identically proportioned miniature scores in the familiar Eulenberg yellow covers, mostly standard-rep pieces. The "booklet," however, was the first edition of the miniature score to Le Marteau sans maître.

Even more exciting, it had Gerhard Samuel's signature on the cover; and inside its pages I found the program to the performance he conducted in Berkeley, at the University of California, in 1962. I had heard that performance: the exotic sounds and elusive construction of the piece had been an epochal moment in my awakening to music. Without exaggeration I would have to say that that concert, with two others — an all-Webern concert, also at UC, a few years earlier, and a Cage-Tudor concert in San Francisco a couple of years later — was what led me to music.

Not having a recording of Le Marteau sans maître on hand I turned to the Internet, downloading the Lorelt re-release, with mezzosoprano Linda Hirst and the Lontano ensemble conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. I listened to it casually two or three times before leaving for Italy in late October.

I just listened to it again, this time in a different context: a letter arrived today from another friend who writes about Debussy and Berlioz and the impact on their music — as he suspects — of their language, whose supple scansion imparts a completely different sound, or aural mentality, I might say, than that of Germanic composers of their time. Douglas is particularly keen on this subject: he's spent a number of years investigating the metrics (and melodics) of classical Greek poetry; his Latin is also up to subtle investigations; and he loves the free expressivity of the poets of those languages, so unlike the dum-de-dum (as he puts it) of poets working in English and, especially, German.

I think, but have no reason to — undoubtedly this is sheer projection — I suspect that Boulez composed this music poised between contemplation and invention, but always with the sounds of his ensemble and the sounds of Char's poems at the front of his mind. Since we're overstating cases, let's not be afraid of bold generalizations: the Germanic mentality is fond of measuring things, and drawn to substances; the Gallic mentality is more likely to contemplate things, without touching or manipulating them you might say, and is drawn to surfaces.

(I suspect there's a lot to be discovered in considering the intersections of the Greek-Roman and German-French dualities, two scales whose opposite ends declare changing allegiances to those of their counterparts. But I'm not going further with that at the moment.)

If you don't know Le Marteau sans maître, you're not going to hear it, or for that matter learn much about it, here. You have to hear it. The nine sections, totalling a little over half an hour, set for various combinations an ensemble of only six musicians (voice, alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone-xylorimba, percussion), has a supple, lyrical, sinuous, glittering appeal; the composer György Ligeti called it "feline."

The music is relentlessly complex on the page. I telephoned Anna Carol Dudley, who sang it in that 1962 performance, and she confirmed there'd been at least fifty rehearsals. She spoke of the music as being unnecessarily difficult on the page: it goes by so fast, and has so many notes and such complex rhythms, that in the end an audience can hardly know whether a performance is accurate or not.

But that has nothing to do with listening to the music. It is, instead, a testament to the composer's attitude toward craft, to his procedure, and his awareness of his historical moment as it intersects with his own individual responses to the material he's working with — those six musicians and René Char's Surreal poems.

Le Marteau sans maître is the subject of an unusually intelligent and attractive discussion on Wikipedia. (Wikipedia's entry on Boulez is equally intelligent.) Tony Haywood contributes a thoughtful review of the Lontano recording on the Internet, too, geared more to the layman; Wikipedia's extensive source citations will lead the really curious researcher much further.

Le Marteau sans maître was influential in its day, half a century ago; more so in Europe, of course, than in the United States, where "difficulty" is quickly evaded. One of the ironies of the world of concert music is that the standard repertory of Beethoven and Brahms has been hammered into popularity by the music press; the same forces have sneered at the complexities of Modernist music from Schoenberg to Stockhausen, and recoiled from what it sees as the eccentricities of "mavericks" from Satie to Scelsi.

A gullible public has been trained to mistrust and dislike the music it rarely has a chance to hear. A week of Le Marteau sans maître, the Modern Jazz Quartet, a little bit of Gerry Mulligan and even Chet Baker, early Stockhausen pieces like Kontra-Punkte (which I'll hear next Tuesday in Los Angeles) and Refrain, and Cage's music from the mid-1940s through the 1950s, and anyone with an open mind and a receptive ear would be persuaded that this music is, in fact, the Debussy and Satie of our own time (or a decade or two ago). We've been deprived of a great deal.

Further on flarf

FLARF IS A WORD new to me; I found it yesterday, in the course of reading further, among the many comments posted to Ron Silliman's blog, about Issue 1, the huge "anthology" of "poems" that included one attributed to me. One of Ron's commenters referred to it as a "fauxthology," a word I like.
"Flarf" apparently refers, originally, to a specific kind of writing: poems — let's beg that question for the moment — generated by a computer routine that trolls the Internet for source material and then, using various algorithms, chops up the material it finds and reconfigures it into lines with the appearance of poetry.
There's lots to like here, beginning with the neat trick by which the figurative "net" of the Internet is used to sieve material on the Internet.
Recursiveness. Matt Matsuda, I think it was, suggested that our culture like all previous cultures will die of acceleration: but our own culture's death will result, I think, from an accelerated recursiveness, and flarf may be a straw in the wind.
In any case it's a procedure with an honorable source going back to the cut-ins of William Burroughs and, beyond them, to the "random" generation of literature by Marcel Duchamp, of art by Hans Arp. It's inevitable that the literature of our time would be spelled with the double "l" of litter; Joyce got to that one in Finnegans Wake.


Flarf is automated Oulipo, and that's a contradiction in terms; surely any real Oulipo outcome must proceed from deliberateness. Perhaps the ouvroirs of potential literature — or should it be translated "literary potential"? — are taking over the consciousness of the workers within; perhaps that's what interconnected computers are doing to us all.
Fine with me: let bots do their mindless thankless work all they like; if some of the result is amusing, or poignant, or possibly even provocative, so much the better. But there's more to this affair than simply flarf.

Issue 1 has resulted in metaflarf by activating a sizable community; many of its 3,164 "contributors" are apparently readers of Ron's blog, or have been mentioned in it; and the sixty-odd comments that have appeared so far on his complaint about the fauxthology amount to flarf criticism, in both senses of the term.

While I've never been a fan of the concept "intellectual property," which sounds to me like a contradiction in terms, there are two things about a completely open public domain that bother me. One is the possibility of one's own work being forwarded or distributed inaccurately — with errors, whether deliberate or not, attributed to one's original work. The other is the possibility of one's own name being attached to things one has had nothing to do with, as is the case with Issue 1.

In this case, or at least in my own case, no harm done: no one would remotely think of me as a poet, or of the "poem" reproduced here yesterday as something I would or might have written. But if I were a poet, as Ron Silliman (to name only one of the thousands of "contributors") is a poet, then a casual reader may easily have made that mistake, and formed an opinion of the poet completely outside the poet's ability to influence. This, it seems to me, is an intolerable situation; it goes beyond hoax in the direction of fraud.
So I revise my feeling of yesterday that Ron goes too far in his anger with this event. His outrage is justified, and the perpetrators of the event can't be excused with the explanation that their work is art. I've never before been comfortable with the idea that artists, however outrageous their work may seem, are hoaxers. But then I've never before had to deal with anything quite as postmodern as this event seems to be.

Flower Alphabet

YESTERDAY I READ THIS POEM in a year-old annual brochure from the local Community Foundation and it knocked, as they say, my socks off:

Flower Alphabet

Another flower
blossoms on the
coming of spring,
dandelions or
even roses, all
flowers starting to
gain beauty.
High above
I gaze down on
justice and nature,
kind and natural
lands filled with
majestic flowers.

No flower left
on Earth ugly,
pacing themselves, a
quilt of
roses even
sunflowers pace
toward the best
udder place.
Vegetables or fruit such as
watermelon. The hum of flowers like a
Xaxaphone.
Your flower white and black a
zebra's majestic flower.

--Mike Nicol

I confess it was only the word "udder' that woke me up and made me realize what was going on here; even the title hadn't alerted me. What a careless reader I can be! But "udder" isn't out of place, not here on Eastside Road, or in Windsor, either, where the poet was (at the time of writing the poet, last year) a sixth grade student at Cali Calmécac Charter School. Many of the fields hereabout are worked by cows, some of them dairy cows.

We have a field full of -- not cows, but Mariposa lilies, also known as Mariposa tulips, or golden nuggets. Calochortus luteus. I always thought they were named for Mariposa county, thinking they must have been particularly plentiful there: but it's simply named for the butterfly (mariposa in Spanish), which it resembles.

I don't know much about wildflowers. I don't know much about Cali Calmécac Charter School or, for that matter, Mike Nicol. I called the school; last evening Nicol called me to give me permission to reprint the poem here. I asked if he was still writing. Yes, he said, but not so much poetry these days; he's working on a novel.

This is the kind of thing gives one hope for the future. Justice and nature, kind and natural lands! What a line!

Mount Analogue

IN 1968 I BOUGHT, second-hand, spurred by what information I no longer recall, a copy of the Vincent Stuart edition of Roger Shattuck's translation of René Daumal's Mount Analogue: An Authentic Narrative. It came to mind again a few weeks ago in a conversation with grandson Simon, 18, who has been climbing mountains in Ecuador. I'm no mountain climber: the closest I've come to the sport was an ascent of Chamechaude, in the French pre-Alps, back in 1976: but mountains are in mind right now, as I'm contemplating a stroll in the Alps this summer.

Chamechaud, seen from the north, 1976

So I took Mount Analogue down from the shelf the other night and read through it again. It's such a strong, brilliant, clear book that virtually every detail I'd recalled from 1968, as well as the general quality of the book, came right back into focus. Daumal was, some think, the finest French author of his time; certainly the most promising. Born in 1908, possessed of a brilliant mind, he was publishing by the time he was twenty. By then he'd experimented with all sorts of drugs, had internalized everything the Parnassiens and Symbolists could offer him, had begun serious study of Indian thought and literature. From then on his principal physical battles were with tuberculosis, and he died in 1944, only 36 years old, in mid-sentence: Mount Analogue is incomplete.

Perhaps it could never have been completed. The mountain of the title is enormous, dwarfing Everest, situated in the South Pacific, unknown because of its capacity of bending space, thus rendering it both invisible and insensible to instruments. It provides the link between Earth and what one could be forgiven for calling Heaven, and its difficult ascent, available only to superbly conditioned adepts, has a physical property of reinforcing an egoless desire for Transcendence.

The novel describes the plans of the author and, even more important, one Father Sogol to outfit an expedition to the mountain. Eight explorers meet to discuss its probably location, then set out, with four crewmen, on the yacht Impossible, to find it. Sogol combines science and logic to succeed in the search; we visit the island; we learn of the unique communities that have grown up on its shores; we begin the ascent — and then the manuscript fails us.

But it doesn't matter. Sogol is so striking, the descriptions so detailed and winning, and the mood and humor of the book so serene and, in a word, good, that in its imperfect state Mount Analogue is perfect enough.

Several online reviewers have mentioned Jules Verne in describing this book. Oddly, Verne never came to my mind, though I enjoyed Verne hugely when I was a boy. Instead I thought of Melville's Mardi, similarly philosophical and idealistic; and of Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, whose central figure, Martial Canterel, may have inspired aspects of Daumal's Father Sogol.

I thought of Duchamp, too: the artist's language-play and absurd physics — think of infra-mince, the impossibly small values like the weight of sighs — prefigure Sogol. (And, of course, draw on Roussel.) Daumal was a ’pataphysicien, often a very amusing one; but he was also extraordinarily earnest, without ever lapsing into sermonizing.

My edition of Mount Analogue carries a fine introduction by its translator, who notes

[Daumal] had to struggle with the temptation to which poets are prone: the tendency to conceive of life and reality entirely through language. Mount Analogue, in its simplicy of expression and universality of meaning, probably represents Daumal's ultimate reckoning with the problem of language, vehicle and obstacle.

And in fact, early on, Daumal refers to the subject:

The different branches of symbol interpretation had for a long time been my favourite field of study… Furthermore, I had an alpinist's passionate love of mountains. The convergence of these two contrasting areas of interest on the same object, the mountain, had given certain passages of my article [a study of the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies] a lyric tone. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may appear, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry; I venture this remark as a suggestion ot critics and aestheticians who seek to illuminate the depths of that mysterious language.)

The description of Father Sogol's studio is meticulous and striking: it's festooned with hanging scraps of paper on which are written

a veritable encyclopedia of what we call "human knowledge". A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table…, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae,…

and so on for an entire paragraph. Sogol thinks and speaks while pacing among these pendant notes, with

an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external objects and for establishing new links between ideas which appeared totally unrelated.

Daumal reveals certain laws and principles: that of considering a problem as solved, in order to get sufficiently past the problem to be able to deduce its solution. And the "chameleon law," according to which behaviour is governed by "inner resonance to influences nearest at hand."

Daumal got up from his writing-desk, we're told, in the middle of that final incomplete sentence, to answer his door: a friend was visiting to encourage him (knowing of his illness and likely impending death) to draw up some notes describing his plans for the book's conclusion. They are included in this edition, and one of them answers the perennial question, Why climb?

Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, always take note of difficulties along the way; for as you go up, you can observe hem. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well.

…

When you strike off on your own, leave some trace of your passage which will guide you coming back: one stone set on another, some grass weighted down by a stick. But if you come to an impasse or a dangerous spot, remember that the trail you have left could lead people coming after you into trouble. So go back along your trail and obliterate any traces you have left. This applies to anyone who wishes to leave some mark of his passage in the world.

A delicious book, firm and thoughtful and detailed, humorous and poignant (without intended poignancy, bien entendu!), exceptionally wise, aware of its antecedents and careless (and innocent, as far as I know) of followers. I can't imagine being without my copy.

De los álamos vengo, madre,de ver cómo los menea el aire

THERE'S A PROBLEMATIC DIALECTIC in poetry (I associate it with Ron Silliman) between language poetry and the "School of Quietude." I think it's analogous to that set up in the first quarter of the previous century between the followers of Schoenberg and those of Stravinsky. It's a trap, this dialectic, and I fall into it all the time.

Now here's my friend (I wish we were closer; we're too far apart, spatially) Alvaro Cardona-Hine who sends me among other things his delicious little Spring Has Come (Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2000), a collection, as its subtitle puts it, of Spanish Lyrical Poetry from the Songbooks of the Renaissance.

It's deceptive and disarming, this collection, chastely set out, often simply a couplet on a page, his translation below, lots of white space:

En aquella peña, en aquella,
que no caben en ella.


In that hillock, that one,
there's no room for so many.

His introduction investigates the interesting controversy among scholars, beginning a century ago, as to the origin of these lyrics, and proceeds to allude to that marvelous moment in cultural history when christians, moors, and jews (my downcase is meant merely to propose egalitarianism, making common what is proper) lived together peaceably in what I just read somewhere else is truly a convivium, a much nicer word than similar greek terms too bound to the kind of partying restricted to the wealthy (symposium comes to mind).

These lyrics, Alvaro proposes, have deep roots; and I respond they probably always existed. He suggests the couplet quoted above was sung spontaneously by a farm woman. Perhaps: man or woman, the singer was probably out in the fields, and probably had that hillock, or those hillocks, the real one and the metaphorical, in view.

Daniel Wolf implied the other day a divide in music between that which

Borrowing a bit from linguistics, there are basically two ways of creating novelty: the first is to create new, never-before-uttered expressions that are, nevertheless, entirely competent expressions within the received language, its lexicon, and its rules; the second is to create expressions which are, under the terms of of the received language, non-competent, if not impossible. The choice is between saying something which simply has not been said and heard before and saying something which was heretofore impossible to say or hear. The histories of repertoire in music, art, poetry, etc. are marked by a certain oscillation between the two.

and I've been thinking about that, too; it's one of the traps that I fall into all the time, not that it matters except that when you're in a trap you (by which I mean I) don't get any work done.

(And that's just one of the divides; let's not even think about the one between both the musics Daniel mentions and the greater body of music which doesn't concern itself at all with "creating novelty," but is perfectly willing to go on endlessly repeating the past.)

Some time ago I opened a lecture, ostensibly a reading of Wallace Stevens,

I am committed to two notions often thought to be mutually exclusive: regionalism and modernism.

which is of course another idiotic dialectical trap (the lecture was an escape from it: it's in my book , even recent cultural history, commas included in the title, book available at Frog Peak Press, please order a copy).

Clearly the singer of that lyric about the hillock was a regionalist, not a modernist; modernists don't work in the fields. We'd all hoped postmodernism would get us past these distinctions, or to be a little more precise get us past the fences around such distinctions; would at least build little stiles permitting field-hands to hop across into libraries, and scholars to find their way back to the fields.

Well, as Alvaro promises in that title, floating over his oddly attractive Spanish Woman (for, yes, he's a painter, too, a gifted one), Spring has come, postmodernism arrived not without its own problematic wars but we've most of us weathered them, and can now find "novelty" in musics and poems and paintings and even examples of scholarship which might once have seemed, well, Quiescent.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday digitizing old tapes, and made a CD for myself of the result. It includes:

Four Mahler songs: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen; Ich atmet' einen linden Duft; Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder; and Revelge
Dallapiccola: Concerto per la notte di natale dell'anno 1956
Shin-ichi Matsushita: Canzone da sonare
and an unknown piece for orchestra,

twenty-two minutes long, spare and unpredictable, full of the kind of ambiguity Wolf discussed in a paragraph noted below (Aug. 28), the once-seeming-important distinctions of surface and depth so fully resolved as to be rendered not only meaningless but incomprehensible. I listen to it now, wondering what that last piece is, and who discovered the sounds and wrote something out to allow others to hear them.

The four pieces make a completely satisfying CD. Its sounds emerge from a collection begun over forty years ago, and last visited nearly twenty: but the sounds clearly engraved themselves into some part of my person, setting synapses so strong as to snap back at the least encouragement. Are these too traps from which to emerge? Or fences whose divisions must be overcome?

Do these sounds sing quietly and insidiously like the remembered (consciously or not) songs that have floated around in Spain since the days of the Iberians, songs that wind up in, among other places, music like Joaquín Rodrigo's Cuatro madrigales amatorios? That piece delighted me long ago when I discovered it among the commissioning series put out by the Louisville Orchestra; it proved that those ancient lyrics could find fresh expression and material even then, fifty years ago, in the heart of Modernism.

De los alamos vengo, madre...

I hear those lines so often, looking across my own fields toward my own young poplar.

And to close once again with Alvaro's translation:

Gavilán de noche,
¿qué viento corre?



Hawk, you that fly with the night,
is it windy?

¿cómo los menea el aire; how's the wind blowing?

Edges

Lindsey among the Matisses






THOUGHTS OF MORTALITY crowd the aging mind; I'm sorry; I can't help it. Not even an unusually distracting week seems to keep them away—not Molière thumbing his nose in Ashland, not the Boston Red Sox losing pathetically in Seattle, not the serenity of an hour's walk in Castle Crags, not the sweet pleasures of stone fruit at Andy Mariani's orchard, not the steely edge of a Martini with a newly discovered gin (made in Portland, I forget the name), not the pleasures of the table and good company at Incanto out on Church Street.

Especially not Matisse, whose bronzes anchor an oddly troubling exhibition at SFMOMA. You can't argue with these pieces; they're great articulations in the history of Modernist sculpture, only slightly damaged by comparison with a couple of greater Degas pieces in the same rooms. And I don't even cavil at the curatorship, eager though it is to explain things, to draw inferences, to assume certainties, to insist on linearities.

Years ago a tiny bright woman who was then a public relations officer at the University Art Museum gave me one of the great lessons in the laughably casual education I was piecing together in the visual arts when she mentioned even more casually that she always fastened on the edges in paintings. Edges; profiles; contours: they exist in only two dimensions, meaning they have no substantial existence at all; yet they define, link, and clarify.

Matisse was a fine draughtsman, like Picasso; his contour drawings are both masterly and affecting. It is a defiance to trace a line; the audacity of drawing is breathtaking. I think Matisse kneaded his clay in penance, denying himself the cruel pleasure of the pencil's inspired aggression, its cheeky assertion of his gifts.

Several times the wall narratives suggest these sculptures are best seen in the round, while traveling round them. A point hardly worth stating, you'd think: yet surprisingly few visitors seemed to be doing this while we were there. They seemed to spend about as much time reading labels as looking at sculpture—and those with headphones seemed often to be focussing on nothing, gazing into near space while listening to whatever secret sounds were thankfully theirs alone.

Walking around a sculpture is how I like to see it; often walking slowly around with one eye closed, concentrating on the constantly changing edge between the sculpture and its space. Walking around the sculpture I myself am drawing, or at least assisting in an act of drawing, dragging, pulling the constantly changing edge into a contour drawing in four dimensions, height, horizontal distance from the sculpture's center, constantly changing acceleration in the direction of my own footsteps; and time, of course. Drawing, contour drawing, in time.

If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, then sculpture is pregnant with music. It's a long time since I've kneaded any clay, but I think Matisse, and Degas, and the private Rodin, when they were shaping their dimensional drawings in clay, were occupying time in an essentially musical—better, composerly—way. By that I mean a non-teleological way: time occupied not in order to arrive at the conclusion of some premeditated process, but as reflection on experiences and productions that have gone before, as contemplation of the possibility of some unforeseen eventuality which will nonetheless turn out to take its place within an organically logical system, you might say, identifiable in some way with both the material and the person.

Music and the production of sculpture: constant reconfigurations of material: life and the passage of time. That's what I meant by "mortality." On the whole, as I told Lindsey the other day, I think mortality is a good idea. And in any case I have very little to say about it; it is a constant, a given.

Some of this thinking is probably triggered by the recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangeo Antonioni; more by the recent deaths of two people I knew, not as well as I'd like to have: Ned Paynter, who was on the news staff at KPFA when I was there more than forty years ago, and Marvin Tartak, gentle and witty pianist and accompanist par excellence.

When death comes to mind—and death is never far from contemplations of mortality—I always think of three things. Mozart, of course:

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!

and Duchamp:

Besides, when someone dies, it's always someone else...

and, to put beside these essentially Epicurean views of the subject, this poem by Lincoln Fitzell, which has quietly whispered to me for nearly fifty years:

PRAYER

Earth the mother, earth the death,
We owe to you this tragic breath,
And dark and wide if we should fall,
We pray that you may keep us all
More gently sleepers of your night,
Than we were children of your light.

Mozart: letter to his father, 4 April 1787, translation by Emily Anderson
Duchamp: aphorism, found also on his tombstone, as I recall and translate (probably faultily)
Fitzell: "Prayer," in Selected Poems (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1955)
gin: Cascade Mountain from Bendistillery (thanks, Giovanna)