Roger > Books: illustrated-review‎ (110)

Opera is not forbidden to women. That is true. Women are its jewels, you say, the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima

Opera is not forbidden to women. That is true. Women are its jewels, you say, the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima donna, no opera. But the role of jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing. The emotion is never more poignant than at the moment when the voice is lifted to die. Look at these heroine. With their voices they flap their wings, their arms writhe, and then there they are, dead, on the ground. Look at these women who fill the theater, accompanied by penguins in uniforms that scarcely vary: they are present, they are decorative. They are present for the dispatch of women like themselves. And when the curtain closes to let the singers take their last bow, there are the women kneeling in a curtsey, their arms filled with flowers; and there, beside them, the producer, the conductor, the set designer. Occasionally, a . . . But you wouldn't know how to say it: a produceress? A conductress? Not many women have access to the great masculine scheme surrounding this spectacle thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character.

One can also die of youth—of too much flame wasted when everywhere is cold, when no stove is hot enough to warm what is inside and life slips away quietly, without warning. You can did like that, on tiptoe, while all around you everything swirls and whirls. This time there are no parents around. In La Boheme all the characters are desperately young. No one is evil; it is the opera of innocence. A woman loses her life in it, of course. But it is as if there were no responsibility, as if nothing happened other than this great cold, freezing them all, which one of them, a woman, cannot withstand.

She will just barely have time, coming to her senses when everyone thinks she is already dead, to get up again and sing the famous, rotten love-death. It is a confused discourse in which death, the sea, waves, light, and heaven produce an apotheosis for her that is mystical and musical, in which it is her turn to die alone, despite the final chord when the chromatics are resolved in the only major key in the opera.

One day I became aware that opera did not come to me from my head. And, although I have often used the word heart, it was because of some leftover sense of propriety and prudence in a world where women are still held—in respect or contempt. Opera comes to me from somewhere else; it comes to me from the womb. That is no easygoing sexual organ. The uterus, which is where hysteria comes from, is an organ where the thought of beings is conceived, a place where powerful rhythms are elaborated; a musical beat that is peculiar to women, the source of their voice, their breathing, their spasmodic way of thinking. There and there alone history is expressed in the first person. There buried centuries are revived, just as Michelet, Diderot, and Freud in certain flashes that were quickly picked up on, were able to see. The hysteric knows how to rediscover the rebellions against Rome in her womb, as well as mythical Sabbats; these days the hysteric is able to make herself consumptive, just like in the last century, and die of it if it is necessary. But this past is no bittersweet nostalgia. As the present forms of numerous and disorganized movements in which feminine revolt is incoherently expressed prove, it is the thrust of the future. The projection of the future depends on this return of the womb. And the imitation dead women who haunt me sow bits of a world in which, perhaps, one day I shall feel free. […]

Just as you always stretch your arms when you leave the darkness, these women will always sing.

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Frederick, Lord Leighton: Hero Awaiting Leander

The outside of her garments were of lawn,
The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;
Her wide sleeves green, and border'd with a grove,
Where Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis, that before her lies;
Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,
Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.
Upon her head she ware a myrtle wreath,
From whence her veil reach'd to the ground beneath:
Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves,
Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives:
Many would praise the sweet smell as she past,
When 'twas the odour which her breath forth cast;
And there for honey bees have sought in vain,
And, beat from thence, have lighted there again.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?

He kneel'd; but unto her devoutly pray'd:
Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said,
"Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;"
And, as she spake those words,
                    came somewhat near him.

Though neither gods nor men may thee deserve,
Yet for her sake, whom you have vow'd to serve,
Abandon fruitless cold virginity.
The gentle queen of love's sole enemy.
Then shall you most resemble Venus' nun,
When Venus' sweet rites are perform'd and done.

As in plain terms, yet cunningly, he crave it:
Love always makes those eloquent that have it.
She, with a kind of granting, put him by it,
And ever, as he thought himself most nigh it,
Like to the tree of Tantalus, she fled,
And, seeming lavish, sav'd her maidenhead.

The more he is restrain'd, the worse he fares:
What is it now but mad Leander dares?
"O Hero, Hero!" thus he cried full oft;
And then he got him to a rock aloft,
Where having spied her tower, long star'd he on't,
And pray'd the narrow toiling Hellespont
To part in twain, that he might come and go;
But still the rising billows answer'd, "No."
With that, he stripp'd him to the ivory skin,
And, crying, "Love, I come," leap'd lively in.

Breathless albeit he were, he rested not
Till to the solitary tower he got;
And knock'd, and call'd: at which celestial noise
The longing heart of Hero much more joys,
Than nymphs and shepherds when the timbrel rings,
Or crooked dolphin when the sailor sings.
She stay'd not for her robes, but straight arose,
And, drunk with gladness, to the door she goes;
Where seeing a naked man, she screech'd for fear,
(Such sights as this to tender maids are rare,)
And ran into the dark herself to hide
(Rich jewels in the dark are soonest spied).
Unto her was he led, or rather drawn
By those white limbs
                    which sparkled through the lawn.
The nearer that he came, the more she fled,
And, seeking refuge, slipt into her bed.

Sweet Hero, left upon her bed alone,
Her maidenhead, her vows, Leander gone,
And nothing with her but a violent crew
Of new-come thoughts, that yet she never knew.

"Fondling," she saith, "Since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale;
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

"Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest, and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park.
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark."

Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter:
All is imaginary she doth prove,
He will not manage her, although he mount her;
That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy,
To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forgèd lies.

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Ten thousand bodies lie fallen in the mud, while above them, another twenty or thirty thousand are still fighting, still alive. The bodies become deformed. Blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body and suddenly something bursts. A foul-smelling stream gushes out on top of the mud. The birds circle, pulling out eyes, the worms rise to the surface. That's what the soldier sees in battle: the bare bones of his friend, the amputations, the perforated skulls. What he has seen remains on his retina. Nobody who has contemplated such horror can ever be the same again.

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Gérome: Pygmalion and Galatea

        de duro est ultima ferro.
protinus inrupit venae peioris in aevum
omne nefas: fugere pudor verumque fidesque;
in quorum subiere locum fraudesque dolusque
insidiaeque et vis et amor sceleratus habendi.
[vela dabant ventis nec adhuc bene noverat illos
navita, quaeque prius steterant in montibus altis…]

        Hard steel succeeded then:
And stubborn as the metal, were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook:
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
[Then sails were spread, to every wind that blew.
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new…]

Last comes the Age of Iron
And the day of Evil dawns.
Modesty,
Loyalty,
Truth,
Go up like a mist—a morning sigh off a graveyard.

Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain—a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye teeth.

[Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots…]

For now through prostrate Greece young Bacchus rode,
Whilst howling matrons celebrate the God:
All ranks and sexes to his Orgies ran,
To mingle in the pomps, and fill the train.

The god has come. The claustrophobic landscape
Bumps like a drum
With the stamping dance of the revellers.
The city pours
Its entire population into the frenzy.
Children and their teachers, labourers, bankers.
Mothers and grandmothers, merchants, agents,
Prostitutes, politicians, police,
Scavengers and accountants, lawyers and burglars,
Builders, laybouts, tradesmen, con-men,
Scoundrels, tax-collectors, academicians,
Physicians, morticians, musicians, magicians,
The idle rich and the laughing mob,
Stretched mouths in glazed faces,
All as if naked, anonymous, freed
Into the ecstasy,
The dementia and the delirium
Of the new god.

'Twas now the mid of night, when slumbers close
Our eyes, and sooth our cares with soft repose;
But no repose cou'd wretched Myrrha find,
Her body rouling, as she roul'd her mind:
Mad with desire, she ruminates her sin,
And wishes all her wishes o'er again…

Midnight. Mankind sprawled
In sleep without a care.
But Myrrha writhed in her sheets.
To cool the fiery gnawings throughout her body
She drew great gasping breaths.
They made the flames worse.
Half of her prayed wildly—
In despair under the crushing
Impossibility—and half of her coolly
Plotted how to put it to the test.
She was both aghast at her own passion
And reckless to satisfy it.

Like a great tree that sways,
All but cut through by the axe,
Uncertain which way to fall,
Waiting for the axe's deciding blow,
Myrrha,
Bewildered by the opposite onslaughts
Of her lust and her conscience,
Swayed, and waited to fall.
Either way, she saw only death.
Her lust, consummated, had to be death;
Denied, had to be death.

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      "What is vilest about this," he went on, "is that in theory love is something ideal and elevated, whereas in practice love is something low and swinish—something shameful and disgusting to mention or remember. You see, it was not without reason that nature made it shameful and disgusting… and, as such, it should be recognized and known by all. But we, on the contrary, pretend that what is low and shameful and disgusting is beautiful and elevated."

      "They emancipate woman in the colleges and in the law courts, but they still look on her as an object of enjoyment! Train her, as she is trained among us, to regard herself in this light, and she will always remain a lower creature. Either she will, with the assistance of conspiring doctors, prevent the birth of her offspring—in other words, she will be a kind of prostitute, degrading herself not to the level of a beast but to the level of a thing—or she will be what she is in the majority of cases, heartsick, hysterical, unhappy, without hope of spiritual life."

…and now young women depart from all over Europe in droves for holiday shores where they screw, presumably enjoyably, with males who wait for them like Inuits for migrating moose.
      Hedonism rules, okay?
      What has happened? Birth control has.

He frightens me. I've never heard music
like this man's, this sobbing
in the midst of triumphal chords,
such ambrosial anguish,
jigs danced on shimmering coals.
Oh, I can play it well enough-hell,
I've been destined to travel these impossible
switchbacks, but it's as if I'm skating
on his heart, blood tracks
looping everywhere, incarnadine
dips and curves . . .
I'm not making sense.

You're making ultimate sense
he seems to say, nodding
his rutted, heroic brow.

      "They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata," he finally went on to say. "Do you know the first Presto? You do know it?" he cried. "Ugh! That sonata is a terrible thing. And especially that movement! Music in general is a terrible thing. I cannot comprehend it. What is music? What does it do? And why does it have the effect it has? They say music has the effect of elevating the soul—rubbish! Nonsense! It has its effect, it has a terrible effect—I am speaking about its effect on me—but not at all of elevating the soul. Its effect is neither to elevate nor to degrade but to excite. How can I explain to to you? Music makes me forget myself, my real situation. It transports me into a state that is not my natural one. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not really understand, that I can do what I can’t do. […]
      "Indeed it is a terrible power to place in anyone’s hands. For example, how could anyone play this Kreutzer Sonata, the first Presto, in a drawing room before ladies dressed in low-cut gowns? To play that Presto, then to applaud it, and then to eat ices and talk over the last bit of scandal?

• 1971. A Russian film compilation that combines a concert performance of the sonata by Grigory Feygin and Lubov Timofeyeva with a variety of old black-and-white footage, some but no means all of which seems to come from earlier filmed versions of the Tolstoy. [16'20"]

• 1994. Scene from Immortal Beloved. Bernard Rose's film starring Jeroen Krabbé and Gary Oldman shows various episodes in the life of Beethoven. This one is especially interesting. The narrator (Krabbé) attends a rehearsal of the sonata played by George Polgreen Bridgetower (see above), and is buttonholed by the already-deaf Beethoven (Oldman). Anachronistic or not, the words that the composer speaks are taken almost verbatim from Tolstoy!

• 2008. Film by Bernard Rose. From the director of Immortal Beloved, this is updated, and clearly takes liberties with the original, but the trailer at least is closely edited to wring maximum passion from the combination of Tolstoy and Beethoven. [1'43"]

• 2009. Stage adaptation by Nancy Harris as a dramatic monologue. The trailer is to the Gate Theatre production by Natalie Abrahami who, according to the New York Times, brings in the music (and the musicians) "in seemingly random fragments at first, which coalesce into something transcendent." The result, so far as I can tell, is to distill the essence of both Tolstoy and Beethoven into a single compelling act. [1'20"]

• 2015. Ballet by Andrew McNicol. The first three-quarters of this trailer involves three principal dancers with the violinist and pianist playing onstage. I find it elegant rather than passionate, but it is the only version that acknowledges the pre-Romantic nature of the sonata. Then towards the end, the music is replaced by the Janacek String Quartet, and everything changes. Unfortunately, the clip is very short, but this is the section that I would really like to see. [3'17"]

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      The story of Das siebte Kreuz is rather simple: there are seven men who have been imprisoned in the fictitious Westhofen camp, who have decided to make a collaborative escape attempt. The main character is a Communist, George Heisler; the narrative follows his path across the countryside, taking refuge with those few who are willing to risk a visit from the Gestapo, while the rest of the escapees are gradually overtaken by their hunters.
      The title of the book comes from a conceit of the prison camp. The current officer in charge has ordered the creation of these seven crosses from the trees nearby, to be used when the prisoners are returned—not for crucifixion, but a subtler torture: the escapees are made to stand all day in front of their crosses, and will be punished if they falter.

As Franz was pedaling past the neighboring Mangold farm, they were in the process of setting up ladders, poles, and baskets under their mighty Mollebusch pear tree. Sophie, the oldest daughter—a strong girl, a bit stout but not fat, with delicate wrists and ankles—was the first to jump up on a ladder, at the same time calling out something to Franz. Although he couldn't make out what she'd said, he turned around briefly and laughed. He was overcome by a feeling of belonging. People who feel and act feebly will have trouble understanding him. For them, belonging means having a particular family, a specific community, or a love affair. For Franz it meant simply belonging to this bit of soil, to its people, and being a member of the morning shift cycling to the Hoechst plant, but above all it meant belonging to the living.

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Géricault: Cuirassier blessé

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Géricault: Cuirassier blessé

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Suzanne Hoschedé (d. 1899)

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Suzanne Hoschedé (d. 1899)

And beyond the overgrown surface of the lily pond sunlight shimmered in the row of poplars, filtered through the green tent of the willow tree, shone on the open hillside, the sloping roofs and sheets hung out to dry in sunlit courtyeards. It bounced from the glass panes of the greenhouse, settled into the dust where hens pecked and strutted, drank the dark stains from the drips of wet washing and water tossed out of doors. It crept up on cool zinc milk churns, standing in shadow, and lost itself in the dark thickets of yew trees standing guard over house and garden. Indoors it fell across waxed floorboards, faded bedspreads and cushions, showing up dust in rooms where the maid had not yet been. It dried out Lily's cobweb, and turned some of the climbing roses limp on the trellis. It hummed in the wings of insects, shone on the long line of the railway track, blistered the paint of window shutters, and formed a haze, a mirage above the long gass of the pasture so that the line of trees down by the river had become dim, seemed about to dissolve in bright light, a green incandescence against the faded sky. […]

Lily picked up a single petal, stroked its soft pink skin now brown at the edge, and tried blowing it into the air. It dropped on her pinafore, so she picked up a handful and tossed the whole lot into the air. She watched them fall slowly, flutter, catching the slanting light. Everything smelled fresh and damp now, as though the sun, where it came through the trees, was still cool and distant. She found beads of water caught in a curl of leaf, hanging from the tips of fern, cupped in a flower. But it was in a damp corner behind a heap of drying dead flowers and cut grass that she found the most astonishing sight of all, a cobweb strung between two posts, she hardly dared breathe for fear of disturbing it, a thousand drops of water gleaming in the tension of its fragile hold.

He studied the surface of the water, following the lily pads arranged like islands, an archipelago, seduced by the apparently random pattern until it was caught in the encircling clasp of the bridge, held there, like the belt round the curve of a woman's middle, or my hands, touching. Ah, I have you, he thought, smiling, all of you trapped, earth, water and sky. You thought you could escape, now that I am getting old, that you could run away, now I am slowing down, too old to track you down across wild landscapes. You did not think I could seduce you by luring you into my own back yard.

Almost square, a total balance between water and sky. In still water all things are still. Cool colours only, blue fading to mist grey, smooth now, things smudging, trees fading into sky, melting in water. No dense strokes now, bright light playing off the surface of things, small, playful. I have broken through the envelope, the opaque surface of things. Odd that it should have taken so long to reach this point, knowing it, as I did, to be my element. I was blinded, dazzled by the rush of things moving, running tides, spray caught in sunlight. Looking at, not through. The bright skin of things, the shimmering envelope. But now, before the sunrise, no bright yellow to come between me and it, I look through the cool bluegrey surface to the thing itself.

      "They told me that she was dead, and I didn’t believe them. Why did she believe it? Why didn’t she keep looking?"
      "My darling, becau

      "They told me that she was dead, and I didn’t believe them. Why did she believe it? Why didn’t she keep looking?"
      "My darling, because she is an adult."
      Sophie ducked behind her hair. Her face was hot and tight and angry. "That’s not a reason."
      "It is, my love. Adults are taught not to believe anything unless it is boring or ugly."
      "That’s stupid of them," she said.
      "Sad, child, but not stupid. It is difficult to believe extraordinary things. It’s a talent you have, Sophie. Don’t lose it."

      The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the musical score of a Beethoven symphony. It had drifted almost a mile from the ship, and was the last to be rescued. The man who lifted it into the rescue boat was a fellow passenger, and a scholar. It is a scholar’s job to notice things. He noticed that it was a girl, with hair the color of lightning, and the smile of a shy person.
      Think of nighttime with a speaking voice. Or think how moonlight might talk, or think of ink, if ink had vocal cords. Give those things a narrow aristocratic face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs, and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out of her cello case and up into safety. His name was Charles Maxim, and he determined, as he held her in his large hands—at arm’s length, as he would a leaky flowerpot—that he would keep her.

      The cello they bought was small but still too large to play comfortably in her bedroom. Charles unstuck the skylight in the attic, and on the days on which it did not rain, Sophie climbed onto the roof and played her cello, up amongst the leaf mold and the pigeons.
      When the music went right, it drained all the itch and fret from the world and left it glowing. When she did stretch and blink and lay her bow down hours later, Sophie would feel tougher, and braver. It was, she thought, like having eaten a meal of cream and moonlight. When practice went badly, it was just a chore, like brushing her teeth. Sophie had worked out that the good and bad days divided half and half. It was worth it.

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Philoctetes on Lemnos, by James Barry, 1770

So the trick you’re going to have to turn is this:
                Sweet talk him and relieve him
Of a bow and arrows that are actually miraculous.

But, of course, son, I know what you are like.
I know all this goes against the grain
And you hate it. You’re a very honest lad.
But, all the same, even you have to enjoy
Coming out ahead.
                Do it my way, this once.
All right, you’ll be ashamed
                but that won’t last.
And once you’re over it,
                you’ll have the whole rest of your life
To be good and true and incorruptible.

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A scene from the play by François-Xavier Fabre, 1800

         You could do it all in a day.
One single day. You can stow me anywhere.
The hold. The stern. Up under the prow.
Wherever I’m the least bother to the men.
Come on now, son. It’s in you to do this.
You’re not going to leave a wounded man behind.
I’m on my knees to you, look, and me not fit
To move hardly. I’m lamed for life. I’m done.

Philoctetes.
        Hercules.
                Odysseus.
Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.

                People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
                Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.

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A production of Heaney's play in Seattle

Not yet, my Philoctetes.
First listen to me.
You hear the voice,
You see the face, of Heracles.
My care for you has broght me down from Heaven
To reveal the will of God to you
And stay you from your present journey.

        Human beings suffer,
        They torture one another,
        They get hurt and get hard.
        No poem or play or song
        Can fully right a wrong
        Inflicted and endured.

        The innocent in gaols
        Beat on their bars together.
        A hunger-striker’s father
        Stands in the graveyard dumb.
        The police widow in veils
        Faints at the funeral home.

        History says, Don’t hope
        On this side of the grave.
        But then, once in a lifetime
        The longed-for tidal wave
        Of justice can rise up,
        And hope and history rhyme.

        What’s left to say?
        Suspect too much sweet talk
        But never close your mind.
        It was a fortunate wind
        That blew me here. I leave
        Half-ready to believe
        That a crippled trust might walk

        And the half-true rhyme is love.

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But the really surprising thing about the painting is the way in which the figure of the gypsy is tilted forwards as though seen from above, in shallow relief. This device connects her pictorially with the 'flattened' vase and mandolin. There is something highly reminiscent of a Synthetic Cubist still life about this spatial invention, over twenty years before Juan Gris painted his Guitar and Fruit Dish (1921).

The image is simple. Five naked women disport themselves in various poses with a bowl of fruit in the foreground. The manner of realization is far from simple and is surprising, even today. Staccato, zigzag and arching lines make for a wild rhythm that takes over the whole picture surface. All traces of perspective have been eradicated. Flaring white brushstrokes shatter the tonal coherence of the painting. The art-historical discussion of sources and influences has been largely short-circuited by the idea of an unholy marriage between Cézanne and African art, even though the most cursory glance reveals nothing of Cézanne and only the occasional detail that might be said to be African in feel. The truth is—and it is evident throughout the painting—that there are many conflicting points of reference for the painting. Picasso was trying to recover the primordial life force through painting, and he looked to many so-called 'primitive' sources for his inspiration: Assyrian stone reliefs; funerary carvings from the early Athenian period; Boeotian bronzes and Cycladic figurines as well as African tribal sculpture, masks, and fetish figures.

With its hacked countours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing paining after three quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of the favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces. Picasso began it in the year Cézanne died, 1906, and its nearest ancestor seems to have been Cézanne's monumental composition of bathers displaying their blockish, angular bodies beneath arching trees. [See detail below]

By leaving out the client, Picasso turns viewer into voyeur; the stares of the five girls are concentrated on whoever is looking at the painting. And by putting the viewer in the client’s sofa, Picasso transmits, with overwhelming force, the sexual anxiety which is the real subject of Les Demoiselles. The gaze of the women is interrogatory, or indifferent, or as remote as stone (the three faces on the left were, in fact, derived from archaic Iberian stone heads that Picasso had seen in the Louvre). Nothing about their expressions could be construed as welcoming, let alone coquettish. They are more like judges than houris. And so Les Demoiselles announces one of the recurrent subthemes of Picasso’s art: a fear, amounting to holy terror, of women. This fear was the psychic reality behind the image of Picasso the walking scrotum, the inexhaustible old stud of the Côte d’Azur, that was so devoutly cultivated by the press and his court from 1945 on. No painter ever put his anxiety about impotence and castration more plainly than Picasso did in Les Demoiselles, or projected it through a more violent dislocation of form. Even the melon, that sweet and pulpy fruit, looks like a weapon.

Then the great conifers
Ruffled at home on the high hills.
They had no premonition of the axe
Hurtling towards them

Then the great conifers
Ruffled at home on the high hills.
They had no premonition of the axe
Hurtling towards them on its parabola.
Or of the shipyard. Or of what other lands
They would glimpse from the lift of the ocean swell.

If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big.

They read about myrrh-tree transplanting expeditions depicted in the reliefs at Karnak, three thousand five hundred years ago. They read about trees that migrate. Trees that remember the past and predict the future. Trees that harmonize thier fruiting and nutting into sprawling choruses. Trees that bomb the ground so only their own young can grow. Trees that summon air forces of insects to come save them. Trees with hollowed trunks wide enough to hold the population of small hamlets. Leaves with fur on the understides. Thinned petioles that solve the wind. The rim of life around a pillar of dead history, each new coat as thick as the maker season is generous.

Then, when their hour was come, while they relate
These past adventures at the temple gate,
Old Baucis is by old Philemon seen
Sprouting with sudden leaves of spritely green:
Old Baucis look'd where old Philemon stood,
And saw his lengthen'd arms a sprouting wood:
New roots their fasten'd feet begin to bind,
Their bodies stiffen in a rising rind:
Then, ere the bark above their shoulders grew,
They give, and take at once their last adieu.
At once, "Farewell, O faithful spouse," they said;
At once th' incroaching rinds their closing lips invade.
Ev'n yet, an ancient Tyanaean shows
A spreading oak, that near a linden grows.

For there is hope of a tree, if it
goes down, that it will sprout again,
and that its tender branches will not cease.
Though the root grows old in the earth,
and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent
of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.
But man, man wastes away and dies
and gives up the ghost, and where is he?

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
[image]

When I answered that I came from 'far away',
The policeman at the roadblock snapped,
                'Where's that?'
He'd only half-heard what I said and thought
It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is—both where I have been living
And where I left—a distance still to go
Like starlight that is light years on the go
From far away and takes light years arriving.

[image]

While the Constabulary covered the mob
Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
Only the bullying sun of Madrid.
Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.
At night on the balcony, gules of wine,
A sense of children in their dark corners,
Old women in black shawls near open windows,
The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.
We talked our way home over starlit plains
Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil
Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

'Go back,' one said, 'try to touch the people.'
Another conjured Lorca from his hill.
We sat through death counts and bullfight reports
On the television, celebrities
Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.
Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May'
Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms
And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
And knapsacked military, the efficient
Rake of the fusillade. In the next room
His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall—
Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking: Saturn
Jewelled in the blood of his own children,
Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips
Over the world. Also, that holmgang
Where two berserkers club each other to death
For honours's sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

[image]

There they were, as if our memory hatched them,
As if the unquiet founders walked again:
Two young men with rifles on the hill,
Profane and bracing as their instruments.

Who's sorry for our trouble?
Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves
In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?
Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

[…]

From a cold hearthstone on Horse Island
I watched the sky beyond the open chimney
And listened to the thick rotations
Of an army helicopter patrolling.

A hammer and a cracked jug full of cobwebs
Lay on the window-sill. Everything in me
Wanted to bow down, to offer up,
To go barefoot, foetal and penitential.

And pray at the water's edge.
How we crept before we walked! I remembered
The helicopter shadowing our march at Newry,
The scared, irrevocable steps.

[image]

Let go, let fly, forget
You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.

[…]

        You are raking at dead fires,
rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people's stuff is a cod's game,
infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself that you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'

[image]

My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides
Of the lea ground where I sit all seeing
At centre field, my back to the thorn tree
They never cut. The horses are all hoof
And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.
Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time
Up and over. Of the chair in leaf
The fairy thorn is entering for the future.
Of being here for good in every sense.

[image]

            If I had a thousand tongues,
If I had a hundred mouths and an iron voice,
I could neither spell out the foul catalogue
Of those crimes nor name their punishments.

        "foliis tantum ne carmina manda,
ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis;
ipsa canas oro." finem dedit ore loquendi.

[on] leaves however not songs send / lest disturbed [they] fly rapid playthings [of] winds; / yourself sing [I] pray. End [he] gave [by] mouth speaking.

"Yet one thing I ask of you: not to inscribe
Your visions in verse on the leaves
In case they go frolicking off
In the wind. Chant them yourself, I beseech you."
So saying, Aeneas fell silent.

– u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – –

ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.
 
Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.

Meanwhile, at the far end of a valley, Aeneas saw
A remote grove, bushy rustling thickets,
And the river Lethe somnolently flowing,
Lapping those peaceful haunts along its banks.
Here a hovering multitude, innumerable
Nations and gathered clans, kept the fields
Humming with life, like bees in meadows
On a clear summer day alighting on pied flowers
And wafting in mazy swarms around white lilies.

By the time the story reaches its climax in Anchises' vision of a glorious Roman race who will issue from Aeneas' marriage with Lavinia, the translator is likely to have moved from inspiration to grim determination: the roll call of general and imperial heroes, the allusions to variously famous or obscure historical victories and defeats, make this part of the poem something of a test for reader and translator alike. But for the sake of the little one whose "earthlight" broke in late 2006 [his granddaughter and dedicatee], and the one who sighed for his favourite Virgil in the 1950s classroom [his old teacher], it had to be gone through with.

It was a matter, in other words, of a relatively simple "mythic method" being employed over the twelve sections. The focus this time, however, was not the meeting of the son with the father, but the vision of future Roman generations with which Book VI ends, specifically the moment on the river Lethe where we are shown the souls of those about to be reborn and return to life on earth. "Route 110" also ends with a birth.

Those evenings when we'd just wait and watch
And fish. Then the evening the otter's head
Appeared in the flow, or was it only

A surface-ruck and gleam we took for
An otter's head? No doubting, all the same,
The gleam, a turnover warp in the black

Quick water. Or doubting the solid ground
Of the riverbank field, twilit and a-hover
With midge-drifts, as if we had commingled

Among shades and shadows stirring on the brink
And stood there waiting, watching,
Needy and ever needier for translation.

 

And now the age of births. As when once
At dawn from the foot of our back garden
The last to leave came with fresh-plucked flowers

To quell whatever smells of drink and smoke
Would linger on where mother and child were due
Later that morning from the nursing home,

So now, as a thank-offering for one
Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,
I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads

Like tapers that won't dim
As her earthlight breaks and we gather round
Talking baby talk.