When you cannot put your hands around your heart

The hour fell back last night, kindly, without my noticing. The light is bright and clear this afternoon, welcome as Dad and I raked the lawn, but dark is going to fall soon, quickly, and surprise me like a cat jumping off the top of a bookshelf. Thud. I am settling into the idea of winter.

Last night, Megan and I had a visit from a little boy who is, to date, my favourite trick-or-treater. He looked about nine, and was dressed as Spock, complete with rubber Spock ears. He could not have found two people more receptive to his costume, and as we oohed and aahed, he told us that “Not enough people appreciate Star Trek these days.” He was carrying a tricorder, a communicator and a phaser, all of which he excitedly pulled out to show us even after his friends had moved on to the next house. Good on you, kid. Own it. We gave him lots of candy (sorry parents).

Fairisle

It is Hallowe’en, and the season has almost succeeded in knocking most of the leaves off of the trees. All save a few, like the cherry tree in our backyard. Every gust of wind brings  a flock of leaves over the roof and down like diving swallows, the same arc.

On this last day of October, I will tell you that I have this cousin, and this cousin of mine is pretty fantastic. I say this blind but savante, because though I can’t remember having met him, I read him. I want to show you this. I hope he will not mind.

“The Body October”

October is a transition zone moving over

the valley corridor. The roadway,

lit by trees as they shed their skin, is still.

 

Factory air leans for it cannot leave the ground :

strange herald to the marriage of orange and grey.

October winds in the cool light, lifting the clouds

 

from the shelf, showing no rain, or rain defined

as a crystal lattice, observable in the sound of it

on October nights. This is the beginning of the year

 

in palindrome, a hinge in the present opening

all of us to a list of years, taking from then to now

and translating it perfectly. Like placing a ruler

 

against everything, the measure in the hands

of the silent draftsman. Its sky drawn in

as granite flecked with a month of migration.

- Michael deBeyer

His first book of poetry found me through an uncle in Maastricht, where Dad and I were staying in July, 2004. I had finished all of the books that I had space to bring, and so, in the ridiculously large room allotted me, I read whatever Cees could lend me under the scratchy wool blankets there. One night, there was the most fantastic thunderstorm. It left everything soaked and spongy for days afterward, it sounded as though it could easily cleave the sandstone hills of that area into pieces.

I am making post-writing resolutions right now: learn to quilt; learn to crochet; learn to sew; get Kindermusik certification; take more Spanish lessons? Or maybe another language?; get to know the people in my office better; finish Battlestar Galactica; go lots of places; apply for the next degree; grade 10 piano? or just more lessons; play music with other people; get better at explaining myself.

I am holding off on writing about the performance that I witnessed (I think witness is a good word here; I am too ambivalent about it to say that we merely “observed”) on Thursday night, but want to write a few more “real” pages before I do.

My sister once offered snacks to one of her friends asking if she wanted “homemade bread” (bread that I had baked) or “real bread.” So what is this “real” writing, anyways? The writing that has quantifiable worth, according to the credits that I pay for, I think.

Here is more from Michael, for those curious: one, two, three. The last link should be to the book from which the above poem is taken, Change in a Razor-Backed Season.

Croyez que ce devrait être très beau

The sun peeked out at dusk, and the love I had for its reddish light falling on the blue spruce in a neighbour’s yard was overwhelming.

I agree with the following, but for different reasons than the reasons it was written for:

In the strange garden of effective existence, anything is the swan, that is, potential beauty, but nothing is the peacock that entirely spreads its fan.

-Yves Bonnefoy

(Made of reason because the reasons are my own)

Bring your winters in for cleaning before the snow flies

The new Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come is to be released tomorrow. I strongly urge you to check it out.

I am currently re-reading a script that Cixous wrote for Mnouchkine’s Théatre du Soleil. Love. Here is why, in several unconnected citations:

Aeschylus: I’ll look for my dictionaries. /Experience has taught me / That pain needs numerous synonyms.

Madame Lion: Proof of telephone calls? No. I should have thought of that. One should never cry out in cries, on the air, by telephone. Everything should be cried out by letter.

Madame Lion: This non-signature shines before me like a flag. / How alone I am! Farewell my brothers and masters, / I see you bolt away. All is fear and cowardice, / There is no love. The Night is beautiful, / And they do not even watch it breathe. / I believe I am about to be born.

Mother: Later on, I will build for you / A temple with silence, / A tribunal with silence, / A theatre with silence, / But if I create all these silences / Who, among you, will cry out? / I’m going to put my words, my thoughts, my angers / Underground, beneath your feet. / But out of this earth pregnant with my secrets / The tree of cries must grow. Or else, / Never again will a human being with light-filled eyes / Come to maturity in this country.

Visual learners.

I wasn’t quite able to focus the second picture as I wanted to. I could have tried harder, but I was sleepy.

I had forgotten what fall was like here, had forgotten that I hadn’t spent fall here since 2003. That is six years, but it seems so familiar. The only unfamiliarity is that I am always cold, now. This will pass.

Symphony last night, the highlight of which was Kabalevsky’s second cello concerto. The concerto, while itself a Thing On It’s Own, was augmented exponentially by William Eddins’ conducting. He jumped, swayed, leaned, petted and smashed. It was amazing, and at points I felt as though he has strings attached to each of his body parts, and was coaxing the sound out of the orchestra. He also conducted Brahms’ second symphony from memory. I reiterate: without a score. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. Sure people may think that you are showing off, but as far as I am concerned, you have earned the right to show that off. Mom commented that the whole orchestra was right with him, completely responsive and sounding just smashing.

On the way home, I tried to explain to Mom where the fine line between genuine feeling and out-and-out showboating lies. To me, Eddins and Boulez are epitomes (in my limited experience) of conducting at its best. Eddins has a footstomp for one kind of accent and a wave of the arm to describe each crescendo he desires. Boulez twitches his pinky and (I can only assume) blinks twice to achieve the same effect. In both cases, it works. Big or subtle, the orchestra responded to the feeling that they had for the music.

When I think of negative ostentation, I think of seeing Elgar’s cello concerto performed last December, with Kait. We exited the building giggling, because while Mr. Friesen had performed the concerto effectively, he hadn’t missed an opportunity to flourish his bangs out of his eyes and practice his “ocean breath” (if you don’t do yoga, ask someone who does). It was… uncomfortable, to be honest. As the daughter of a music teacher who has taught piano herself and never hesitated to cut her students’ nails, that kind of thing does not fly with me. If it is in your face, get rid of it. If it is impeding your ability to play your instrument/see the music, if it is making you fidget in a way that distracts from your performance, it is gone. That’s what mothers and music teachers are for – efficacy. Oh, and teaching you music.

There is a difference between performing the music and performing yourself. Each can be appropriate, in different situations. Boulez’s statue-like conducting is, to me, a performance, but of the music. Lack of motion can communicate just as much as a dance.  But I am not Wagner, and cello concertos are not music-drama or gesamtkunstwerk. Cut your damn hair.

What was I saying?

6.47am and the sun is not yet up

I should have mentioned in the last post that the above poem is in alexandine meter (that is, 12 syllables to a line with a pause after the first six) with an AABB “rime plate”. I made no attempt to reproduce this.

There are few things that are better than good tea and granola in the fish-light of pre-dawn. I hope that everyone slept soundly.

Là-bas fuir

One more thing. After trying to explain a few things about Mallarmé as quickly as I could to several acquaintances the other night, I recommended his poem, “Brise Marine”, as a good place to start with his poetry, as it is one of the poems that I started with and has stayed my favourite. After that, I decided to try translating it, and then I decided to post it here.

Feel free to comment or suggest alternatives. This is only a rough draft and a crude one at that, more literal than I would like. Eventually, I hope to end up with a translation of the poem that I am satisfied with. First, the French:

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir! là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
D’être parmi l’écume inconnue et les cieux!
Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux
Ne retiendra ce cœur qui dans la mer se trempe
O nuits! ni la clarté déserte de ma lampe
Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend,
Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant.
Je partirai! Steamer balançant ta mâture,
Lève l’ancre pour une exotique nature!
Un Ennui, désolé par les cruels espoirs,
Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs!
Et, peut-être, les mâts, invitant les orages
Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages
Perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots…
Mais, ô mon cœur, entends le chant des matelots!

And now, first attempts:

This flesh is sad, alas, and I've read every book.

To flee! To steal away! There where I sense that the birds are inebriated

to be between the unknown seafoam and the skies!

Nothing, not the old gardens reflected by my eyes

will restrain this heart already wet with the sea,

oh nights! not the empty clarity of my lamp

on the empty page that whiteness defends

and not the young woman nursing her child.

I will away! Steamer with your pitching mast

hoist your anchor for an exotic nature!

An Ennui, grieved by cruel hopes,

still believes in the supreme adieu of a waving hanky!

And perhaps these masts, inviting storms,

are those that the wind tilts towards shipwrecks

lost, with neither masts nor fertile isles...

But, oh my heart, hear the song of the sailors!

Le vide papier que la blancheur défend

I am sitting in the kitchen, books on Mallarmé all around me, watching the reflection of the sunset in the trees. A semi-circular flock of birds just passed in front of the moon, a moon that is half-full or maybe even gibbous. It will be easier to tell when the sky darkens.

Fall arrived with the wind a couple of nights ago, and I obligingly began to knit my first pair of mittens, noting to a friend that I had graduated from sweater-gloves (arm warmers) to mittens when I moved back to the prairies. These first mittens are a lively green in a soft, fat, single-ply wool, mitered and long enough to fit down the cuffs of my coats.

This weekend I very nearly drove down to Bellingham for a concert. I didn’t, couldn’t, but the temptation was palpable. I could taste the air, was planning the trip out loud for several hours, could see the trees and the way the sun is on the ocean. The very next night, driving home from an opening at the art gallery where I used to work, the moon (smaller than it is today) was tempting me to drive all the way down to Milk River, down to the farm. At night, in the living room facing the Sweetgrass Hills, I can see the fat old stars even with my glasses off. I wanted to test the sky from a different latitude. Before I can really give in to this wanderlust, however, I need to finish this project.

One of the larger questions on my mind right now is: do I want to go back to grad school? Do I want another degree? Is it practical? Do I care if it is practical? I think that my frustration with my current project colours all of these thoughts. I am tired of explaining myself. I am tired of being uncertain as to whether I am “getting it wrong”, or whether I am just studying something that is so obscure that few people have the background to be able to discuss it without a lot of explanation. Something stronger is maybe in order: I hate explaining myself. Maybe it’s that I have a lot of questions and not a lot of ways to answer them. When asked what I am studying, I have almost got it down to a sentence or two: nineteenth century French poetry and its relationship to music. Which rings false to me, so I rephrase it for myself: the aesthetic theory (/attitude) of Stéphane Mallarmé, specifically with regard to music, and the success (/failure) of Pierre Boulez’s work, Pli selon pli, to translate this attitude. Mallarmé’s attitude towards music was ambiguous – he at one envied music’s capacity for wordless expression of an idea and it’s esoteric notation and pooh-poohed it as non-signifying and unspecific. Poetry, he felt, was above music (as an art) because it could suggest a thing, allude to an idea without mentioning it and yet still conjure something more specific. It could still be sure of communicating in something that an observer could hope to pinpoint and perhaps interpret, whereas music could allude and and suggest all it wanted, without necessarily convincing, without specifically evoking. That said, when he speaks about music or about poetry, you can’t be sure that he is talking about music (as we refer to it) or poetry (as we refer to it); he might be using a more archaic acceptation of these words. Music, as in mousike (from Greek), as in inspired by a muse. Poetry, as in poiesis, to make. The poetry and music he refers to he would consider as derived from the same orphic source but even as two faces of the same coin, they are separate. By this point in the explanation, eyes have glazed over.

I have narrowed my interests to two concepts specifically. First, performance and performativity. According to Barbara Johnson, poetry – Mallarmé’s poetry, at any rate – can be considered performative because it isn’t simply describing something, it is doing. It is poiesis, it is making. That is to say, a performative utterance is an utterance that literally performs the action contained within it: I declare war. It isn’t simply a description or a statement. Mallarmé’s poetic language is creative: the poem is bringing something into being, and not simply describing an individual or a place. He imagines a discontinuity between the speaker and his words; poetry is emitted from the poet when he is brutally punched in the stomach. The words are, at once, naming and exhibiting the thing that they describe and so she is sign and referent and thus independent of the kind of reality we may imagine the poem to take place within. The words at once distance themselves from these expectations and create something new. In this way, his poetry is performative. I’m not even sure that I understand this transposition, and so explaining it feels like having teeth pulled. Having read a great deal of Mallarmé over the past two years, however, I feel that there is something to it. Poetry, or at least his poetry, is not subject to the kinds of conventions, the kinds of categories that we usually employ when parsing the grammars of speech and prose.

Hopefully, if the above has even a small gleaming of sense, you can see why music – the idea of music, not necessarily the reality of it – appealed to Mallarmé. He also felt that words and writing were taken too easily, too lightly by the reading public. Anyone literate might open a book, read the words, and be satisfied that they have understood its contents. A musical score, however, must be interpreted, and that interpretation must be taught and practiced. In many ways, Mallarmé’s conception of music is (as Edward Lockspeiser would say) utter nonsense. Musical literacy really isn’t that far off from other kinds of literacy. But music remained more of a notion him than a concrete reality that had systems, a grammar and notation and literati of its own.What he appreciated, I think, was the performance – the audience and the ceremony of a musical performance, the idea of a studied interpretation.

The other concept that interests me is, loosely, mimesis. I’m still trying to grasp this one, but Derrida’s article “Economimesis” is what got me thinking about it. What I gleaned from that article was that mimesis should not be considered an imitation of one thing (I use that term very loosely) by another: mimesis is the imitation of the source of inspiration. That harkened back to a line from “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poet français” : “Tout se retrempe au ruisseau primitif: pas jusqu’à la source.” Wagner’s music was in some ways flawed or devalued due to the fact that he was simply imitating the ancient myths, replaying them, not drawing on a more ancient well-spring of inspiration; he was re-presenting what had already been presented. Mimesis, then, is the attempt at seizing the idea – in Mallarmé’s case, the object that he refuses to name and will only allude to.

What this means more concretely is that I would like to evaluate the success or failure of Boulez’s work according to that mimetic criterion: is Boulez simply transcribing the meter of Mallarmé’s poems the way he sees them? Setting a poem to music? Or is he grasping Mallarmé’s intent? Re-presentation, or re-creation? This includes the attitude towards the interpreting public (the audience) and Boulez’s ideas of what performance is or can be juxtaposed with Mallarmé’s. If Mallarmé saw Wagner as terrorizing his audience, what would he say of Boulez? If Mallarmé sought consonance and sonorous fluidity in his work, what would he say of Boulez’s dissonant, modern sound? Does this even matter? What is “the matter”: the aesthetic idea behind the work, or its delivery to a waiting mind? In this way, the question of mimesis (in this case) flows into the matter of performance/performativity.

If you have read this far, or skipped this far ahead, I hope that you can understand why I hate explaining this. I come up with more questions every time I do and end up following tangents down dead ends. I know that my interpretations of these concepts are flawed and incomplete, but the more avenues I follow, the further I spiral out of control, and so I am forced to tighten up, to pull my limbs back in and make do with simpler explanations.

The other problem (what, another one?) is that this-all seems very much like navel-gazing. Who cares if Boulez’s interpretation is proper to Mallarmé, aesthetically. It exists. It is performed, it is heard. Mallarmé is dead. But I think that the questions are relevant. These artists and their works are experimenting with boundaries in their own, perhaps dated or quaint, ways. Daniel Oster says that thought Mallarmé’s work is generally considered esoteric, hermetic and inaccessible, Mallarmé is one of the most exoteric poets he has read: he is begging to be interpreted, demanding further consideration and hoping for a kind of cooperation. How does this attitude compare with, for instance, Ann Liv Young’s treatment (/abuse) of her audience? Or the audience reaction discussed in this article: http://countercritic.com/2009/09/18/regarding-art-performance-and-the-principle-of-consent/ ? Mallarmé’s art isn’t raising a moral issue, but an artistic one. It is perhaps the degree zero of this question, before it takes on a moral or social character.

I don’t have much of a conclusion here. I could just say that I don’t believe in conclusions – zing! – but that would seem a cop-out. Maybe I will re-read this tomorrow to see if it still makes sense to me, edit it later. I hope I will. For now, back to trying to write about this whole mess, but in French. Allons-y!

“I could spend my entire life portraying such a landscape.”

The mailman is still wearing shorts, but it is coming on fall. Of course you know that; the equinox is in a few days.  The trees are breaking out in a kind of sunny yellow acne. And a bird just bounced off of the window and then skittered away and took off again, confused.

“Meanwhile, here we are, usually forgetful, occasionally aware.”

-Charles Le Gai Eaton

As if the picture of this guy wouldn’t predispose me to like his music: http://www.myspace.com/joshuajamesmusic

At first I was wary of his voice, raspy and a little reedy. A couple of songs was enough to convince me, though.

The anarcho-syndicalists of the ukulele world

Are you having a good day? Well, you are now.

http://ukulelehunt.com/2007/05/27/the-ukulele-orchestra-of-great-britain-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/