Contractility as a Virtue - Modesty in Three Short Poems of Marianne Moore

  

  Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

Among Modernist poets, Marianne Moore shares certain qualities common to her time, with certain figures of equal or greater fame. Like Eliot and Stevens and Williams, she had a certain modesty and tact which expressed itself in the care and precision of her verse, which she thought of as an aspect of her politesse. Like them, too, she seems to have had, or felt she had, a life "outside" of literature, a position that might be regarded with curiosity or consternation today. Manners required that one's person, one's personal presence, not intrude upon the experience of art (or literature). Art wasn't about personality, she thought, but about the quiet and sensible debate that people of taste and intelligence shared with one another. Art was a pleasure designed to be experienced in the privacy of one's space. It wasn't advertising, it wasn't talking on street corners or in boardrooms. It wasn't the fussy categorical ratiocination of the academy. It derived from the human apprehension of the world at large, it was responsible for as much of tradition as it might well absorb--and the more of that the better.

 

But art--as Moore undeniably understood--is also about surprise, testing limits, and responding to the changes that history presents. Though she was a master of rhetorical flourishes, complex conceptual arguments and deliberations, it was by way of (her) highly charged, original, and exacting syllabic edifices that she was most "modern." What would Tennyson, or Browning, have made of her intricate constructions ("The Frigate Pelican," "The Fish"), or her obdurate, resistant, even petulant assertions ("Poetry," "Marriage")?

  

The taxonomic inclusiveness of her grammarian's delight in oddity, obscure facts and coinages, is matched by her great, patient skill in drawing parallels and comparisons between things so seemingly separated by "continents of misapprehension," that it defies belief! But all this is nothing without a sharp rein to control it, and it is in this aptitude that Moore's genius most serves her purpose.       

    

  

Silence

 

My father used to say,

'Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow's grave

or the glass flowers at Harvard.

Self-reliant like the cat--

that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth--

they sometimes enjoy solitude,

and can be robbed of speech

by speech which has delighted them.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;

not in silence, but restraint.'

Nor was he insincere in saying, 'Make my house your inn'.

Inns are not residences.

 

 

If the deepest feeling shows itself in silence, then the best poetry may inspire deference, admiration, or quiet delight. And that qualification--the grudging acknowledgment of a too quick definition--adjusts that feeling to "restraint." Intense feeling is by its nature unrestrained, but it is through exactly such controlled restraint that the most powerful and persuasive lessons may be realized, and expressed. There is a hierarchy of taste here which is initially assumed, and then castigated. But the deeper realization--that privacy and graciousness have limits which guide our behavior--is like a razor-sharp irony undercutting that presumption. This is an ethics of sensibility, in which character and training and practice and standards all serve an efficient purpose, gratuitous and measured. The one metaphorical image in the poem, the cat carrying a mouse in its mouth--its tail "hanging like a shoelace"--vividly captures both the wildness and care of domestic accommodation. Strength and necessity express themselves--hand in glove--beneath every locution of thought and social maneuver. 

 

 

To a Snail

 

If 'compression is the first grace of style',

you have it. Contractility is a virtue

as modesty is a virtue.

It is not the acquisition of any one thing

that is able to adorn,

or the incidental quality that occurs

as a concomitant of something well said,

that we value in style,

but the principle that is hid:

in the absence of feet, 'a method of conclusions';

'a knowledge of principles',

in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

 

 

If contractility is a virtue, then subtraction is one of its cognates. Compression--or concision--like the removal of unnecessary connections--may be expressed as apostrophized definition. Intensity of feeling is never the occasion of extremity in any Moore poem. We admire grace in compression, the "hidden" principle which is itself the very condition of modesty, though modesty is only a way of talking about nature. Every wild thing is a synthesis of function, and what we make of it may begin in decorative innocence, but will usually end in fascination, revulsion, or confusion.

  

In Moore's work, art and science, faced with the seeming wildness and occasional malevolence of nature, share the same disinterested passivity with respect to its ultimate meanings. As for manmade things, their purpose lies only in their use, not in an inner spring of vitality. 

  

  

To a Steam Roller

 

The illustration

is nothing to you without the application.

    You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down

        into close conformity, and then walk back and forth

            on them.

 

Sparkling chips of rock

are crushed down to the level of the parent block.

    Were not 'impersonal judgment in aesthetic

        matters, a metaphysical impossibility', you

 

might fairly achieve

it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive

    of one's attending upon you, but to question

        the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

 

 

The concision and lacunae generally associated with Modern verse, its insistence on image and act to serve as the carriers or transmitters of meaning, is nowhere more evident than in Moore's poems. Yet you would hardly know it, given the tortuous and labored passages in many of her best poems. The organic metaphor for such conundra or tortured passages is that, as "additions to nature," difficult poems reflect or mirror the convoluted formulae of all material things. The mechanical oppression implied in the crushing logic of enforced uniformity is one consequence of the conformity of duty, an unimaginative existence, the grimness of an unexamined life. The poem is an argument for the improbability of unlikely simile, of comparisons which stretch our sense of meaning to the absolute limit. If a steamroller were to roll over a butterfly, we might have the same feeling of pointless compression. 

   

Modesty, patience, care, restraint, decency. Pride, courage, daring, intelligence, sympathy. If--given Moore's dictum--you possess these virtues, and on the other hand, you demand the raw material in all its rawness, you are interested in poetry.     

        

    

Atget & the Abiding Mystery of Absence

Eugene Atget [1857-1921] occupies a privileged place in the history of photography. Popularly regarded as a pioneer in the medium, he began to photograph in middle age, but regarded photography primarily as a way to make an honest living, though it's clear that he understood the artistic potential of his staged still-lifes of the architecture and landscape, the shopfronts and streets of Paris, selling his prints to artists as documentary source material. For thirty years, between 1897 and 1927, he continued to make prints, using an applied emulsion on glass plates. The equipment was bulky, heavy and inefficient by today's standards, and the slowness of the film coupled with its narrow range (steep straight line of tonal variance) meant that he couldn't make much out of high contrast subject matter, particularly compositions including open sky or space. Nevertheless, he was able to produce prints of great clarity and straightforward elegance.

Aware that many of the scenes and structure around him would eventually be demolished, he sought a record of them through his image file, and was even commissioned by the Paris Bureaus and the Carnavalet Museum to preserve and record landmarks in the city.

Atget's photographs were salvaged from oblivion largely through the efforts of Berenice Abbott, an American photographer living in Paris in the Twenties, who acquired a large cache of his prints and negatives, eventually placing these in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Her effort at promoting his work and preserving it is one of the great acts of curation in the history of art.

Because Atget's materials were old-fashioned, even outmoded, his images have a patina of age about them. Their deep sepia tinge, the glowing highlights, and burnished surfaces, and a persistent sense of absence--an effect of the lack of people--make them seem slightly stagy. Given the very slow speed of his film, candid unposed views of the movement of people or conveyances would have been impossible. This studied pace, often taken in the early morning before anyone was out and about, may seem deliberately to memorialize them. There is a nostalgic cast, even a sad resignation in their tarnished urban endurance, the vestiges of a civilization in majestic decay, of sadness welling up out of the stones and crumbling pavement. Atget's style is manifestly documentarian in approach, but the impression his images leave is anything but dry. Historically, but for a few exceptional instances which include automobiles or "modern" advertisements on walls or shopfronts, many of the views would have looked much the same a hundred years earlier. Crude wagons, river barges, cobbled passageways survive through the centuries like timeless landmarks.

When we look at these perspectives, their "emptiness" confirms that all those who lived inside them have perished, leaving only the abandoned evidence of a proud culture, their traffic and ephemeral concerns. This illusion is a quality both generic to the images themselves, and a characteristic of our belated regard. We are not drawn into the world these images portray, but held in a frozen stasis of indecision. We are distanced from them not only by the fragile antiquity of their means, but by their apparent refusal to embrace the commerce of reality. Paris becomes like a vast, huge museum of scenes, none more canonical or deliberate than any other.

Ansel Adams once remarked that the first time he saw these images--probably in the early 1930's--he was astonished by their evocative power, but that when he saw them again, decades later, he couldn't understand what had once moved him so much, they seemed lifeless and blank. Both apprehensions are correct, of course. They are empty, their technique is reductive, their approach tacit, neutral even. But it is just these qualities which, combined with the lack of a human presence, gives them their ghostly mystery. They're like a meditation upon absence, and recovered memory, except that in a sense they're an acknowledgment that nothing will be saved in the end, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, riding at the back of a train, reality receding faster than we can construct a valid simulacrum for it.

As I've discussed previously on this blog, silver process chemistry (and other allied processes in the early decades in the history of the technology of photography) is an organic reaction. Light sensitive surfaces are more than a metaphor for actual seeing. Our eyes are in fact light sensitive surfaces, which report successive sequences of imagery to the brain (Bergson). Slow down the brain's ability to process these sequences, and seeing is revealed as a riffle of planar positives passing through time at a rate we recognize as the actual speed of objects moving through space. The earthy, gelatinous emulsion, within which the silver salts are held in suspension, is like the numinous protoplasm of consciousness, a dense soup of nutrient matter, whose sepia-toned finish covers everything in a sheen of sensual, erotic tannin.

In the early decades of Modernism, design, architecture and city planning were obsessively focused on streamlining, simplification, and clarity. Le Corbusier and Gropius wanted to raze Europe's dense, crumbling old cities and put up high-rise egg-crates, whose inter-connections would be criss-crossed with right-angled grids. Life would be direct, pure and efficient. This initiative was popular in Germany and Russia and America in the 1920's, and had many names, but its net effect was the same. The charming picturesqueness of the Ancien Regime represented a world rapidly disappearing under the wheels of mechanization and determined improvement.

The American artistic émigré community understood perfectly: The quaint structure of pre-modern Europe, its foundation of cobbled old stone, genteel decay, and pompous traditions was the perfect backdrop for their disdainful fatalism and sophisticated play. Europe, unlike America, had tradition, and a long past, its cities and countrysides emanated the fertile cultivation of hundreds, thousands of years of thought, effort, human vanity and ingenuity.

Its vaguely exotic atmosphere of half-familiar accents, darling old-fashioned habits and appliances, captured (in the nick of time) by the salty old sentimentalist, is like a waxwork souvenir. The brash, raw American society that Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos saw and described with evident pity and contempt in their naturalistic pastiches--they either embraced this or reviled it. And in a way, both options are different versions of the same choice.

Europeans were only too happy to pander to successive waves of American tourists and seekers of inspiration. The Europe that had fascinated and beguiled James and Wharton, may have seemed more fragile and doomed after World War I, but in photographs, the evidences of its former glories could be sewn into the fabric of the myths and legends that had survived them. Balzac and Stendhal and Maupassant and Flaubert had supplied the narrative(s). Atget would husband the disintegrating old world's monuments and tattered precincts into the modern world--a world without memories, without conscience, without remorse. The emptiness of his photographs is a testament to the alienation of the modern temper. Empty streets, shops, parks, arcades, cul-de-sacs, cafés, staircases, squares, gardens, palaces, canals, churches. . .all empty, all eminently photogenic, and many, many gone now.

A Cloudy Day - New Drink for the Overcast Mood

Global warming is in its early stages, but we're seeing effects that might seem contradictory. Weather, for instance, has become increasingly unpredictable, unseasonable, and even deceptively cold or wet in some places. While the icecaps are evaporating, or melting into the ocean, we seem to be getting increasing amounts of annual rainfall, at least this year. Another storm is heading our way this Friday, and our annual totals will certainly exceed those of last year, which would make two years of wetter weather in a row.

I wouldn't mind the additional precipitation, if it weren't for the worry this causes us in our present house. The drain system we installed when we had it built on this lot included an elegant water gathering system, with a large sump pump to direct the accumulated roof and ground water uphill to the street drain (we live on a hill). Our drain system hasn't been working for several years, and requires manual operation, which can be daunting during a rainstorm, standing over the catch basin holding the manual pump down into the 9 foot deep cavity. Murphy's Law dictates that any water pump system will usually fail "during a rain-storm" and that's a rule worth remembering.

So we spend less time outdoors, and try to stay warm and dry (assuming that our custom skylights aren't leaking). Here's my antidote to a grey, overcast afternoon, a concoction to cheer one up in the face of seasonal doldrums.

As usual, by proportion--

3 parts brandy

2 parts Coq d'Or cognac

1 part triple sec

1 part macadamia nut liqueur

1 part sweet lime juice

Stirred moderately and served up. Coq d'Or cognac is a cheap kind of French calvados, suitable for mixing (not straight). Macadamia nut liqueur is a smoky, caramel-like mixer. Sweet limes are not quite like limes--more like lemons but somehow "juicier" and sweeter.

Here's to drier times and clearer skies.

Rumors of a Takeover - Peet's Days Numbered ??

Reports surfaced over the last couple of days that Peet's Coffee Company had entered into "talks" with Starbuck's Coffee over a possible takeover by the behemoth Seattle chain. Starbuck's, as is common knowledge, was started by people who had gotten their wings working for Peet's in its earlier days.

Starbuck's is a classic expansive franchise machine, increasing its reach and domination over the coffee market, since it was sold (by its original founders, who had come back and bought Peet's, to continue to run it as a high quality business) in 1984 to another partner, Howard Schultz, who proceeded to run it like any aggressive international corporation, setting aside quality and judicious scale in favor of high profile promotion. Starbuck's stellar performance year over year has been phenomenal, attacking markets throughout the country, and around the world.

It's true that the idea of marketing high-quality coffee is still a relatively new idea in many places. In Europe, quality coffee traditions go back a long ways, but in America in the 20th Century, mass marketing and distribution of cheap, low-quality pre-ground coffee beans had been the norm, until the European model was brought to America beginning in the 1960's. There are still people who would regard a cup of Starbuck's coffee as a culinary treat, not realizing how close that product is to the Hills Brothers crank-case oil their parents and grandparents had drunk decades before.

Peet's insistence upon acquisition of the best quality beans, their meticulous roasting procedures, and their dedication to freshness (an absolute necessity for flavor), was characteristic of a small, customized, controlled operation. That kind of intense devotion to product quality is difficult to achieve at higher and higher levels of scale. The further from the source the beans must be shipped, and the larger the production facility, the more difficult it is to maintain that quality.

In addition, as corporations grow, their attentions shift from quality to marketing. In order to feed the ambition for expansion, short-cuts and "economies of scale" are employed to increase profit margins. If you can sell inferior product with a higher promotional budget, it's more efficient than simply trying to hold the line on product quality--especially if the customers you're serving don't know the difference. With a product like coffee, it's easy to fool customers into thinking that what they're consuming is high class, if you're the only game in town.

As Bay Area residents for nearly our whole adult lives, we've seen boutique coffee retailers come and go, but Peet's has always maintained a level of taste and professionalism that set them apart. Over that time, as regular Peet's customers, we've had periods of preference in which we drank their French, Columbian, Major Dickason, and nowadays Garuda named beans for over 40 years. When Starbuck's began to move into our market, I tried it several times to see what all the excitement was about. It didn't take me long to realize that Starbuck's Coffee was inferior--always quite bitter, usually over-boiled and/or continuously heated (or "re-heated") over the business day. Unlike Peet's, Starbuck's emphasized "mixed" drinks, or sweet concoctions designed to conceal the bitter brew under mountains of sugar, dairy products, chocolate, vanilla, caramel, cinnamon and nutmeg, even selling milkshakes. Along the way, Starbuck's has created a clientele base which now thinks of coffee primarily as a fluid staple (like milk) upon which variations are invented. Many, if not most, Starbuck's customers now regard real rich coffee taste as too intense and pure. In other words, they've been weaned away from true coffee flavor, to a degree that they've become inured to bad, cheap coffee, and now prefer it. This is the corporate officer's dream--selling cheap, inferior goods at premium prices to people who can't tell the difference, and are brand faithful!

Those of us who still value the quality of product regard with apprehension this rumored takeover. Starbuck's is a growth-oriented operation. Its customers are generally dupes who lack discrimination, who "have no taste" in the classic, generic sense of that term. It would be a tragedy to Peet's loyal customers, to have this excellently run business consolidated into Starbuck's large, faceless corporate operation. Starbuck's doesn't have the customers' best interests in mind; they want to knock off one of their chief rivals, and squeeze out its guts, and eat it alive. In America, capitalism is no longer about competition, but domination and consolidation, economies of scale, and power. If Peet's goes down, it might take another generation before we saw a new start-up to take its place. Or it might never happen at all. We could see a return to the days of Folger's and Hills Brothers canned crud. It's not a pleasant prospect.

______________

Addendum: 3/30/11

Last night, Howard Schultz was interviewed by Charlie Rose [3/29/11]. Mr. Schultz had been on Rose's show twice before, in 1997 and 2007. Schultz is a business whizz, having risen from poverty in Brooklyn to a position as the CEO of Starbuck's Coffee, one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. He talks a fast, slick line of MBA patter, all about how he "redeemed" the company after its first growing pains, and raised its status to a position of prominence not just in America, but around the world. Schultz, however, is not a "product-based" investor, but a man interested primarily in building "consumer loyalty" through the creation of "retail environments," offering "product mixes" and branding expansion--none of which, really, has anything to do with the taste of coffee (or the price of beans!). In other words, Schultz is a marketing expert, uninterested in the details of the quality of his product. And this is reflected in the approach of his business. Schultz is an egotist, almost continually amused and pleased by his own clever take on the world, and his very good fortune. The former owner of the Seattle Supersonics, he sold the team to a group of investors in Oklahoma City, and the team was moved. The City of Seattle resented this, and Schultz's reputation took a nosedive in Starbuck's mother city. If Schultz does indeed persuade Peet's to sell itself to Starbuck's, we can expect the quality of Peet's coffee products to be compromised through the application of Schultz's marketing approach.

Schultz represents the very worst of the new breed of monopolistic corporate management types. Not content to run a competent business serving a loyal clientele, he wants to take over the world. In an environment in which every CEO thinks his days (and those of his company) are numbered unless he keeps expanding its reach, relentlessly, it hardly seems worth the trouble to produce anything simply for the joy and decency of doing so. We want capitalism to present opportunities to people, but the chaotic, pernicious, aggressive brand, represented by Schultz and his ilk, doesn't serve its customers; it "creates" customer bases, and milks them. Starbuck's a Blob, whose identity is based on selling rather than serving; it's a perversion of the entrepreneurial spirit.

The Lesson of the Japanese Meltdown

As the world's population continues to expand exponentially into the 21st Century, humankind's demand for food, water, space, shelter and energy multiplies right along with it.

In America, perhaps the only bastion of care against the relentless advance of the development and exploitation of nuclear power as an "alternative source" for energy generation, we have seen a retrenching of the pitched battle between the forces advocating an expanded use of nuclear power, and those questioning its ultimate safety and viability.

25 years after the disaster in Chernobyl, the consciousness of the danger and threat of nuclear accidents and non-disposable waste among the American public has been receding. President Obama--widely characterized as a liberal by the media during his political career--even went so far quite recently as to endorse the idea of new nuclear power plant licensing.

The technology of nuclear power generation has changed little since its inception in the 1950's. The concept seems relatively simple, but because of the difficulties involved, and the highly volatile and nefarious character of radioactive materials, it's an inherently risky business. Basically, it involves the setting into motion of a low-grade atomic reaction, controlled and insulated against escape (leaks). Everything that comes into contact with, or near, the actual reactive chemistry, becomes permanently and dangerously contaminated. There is no known way of "neutralizing" the "spent" radioactive materials from nuclear reactors, which lasts in this poisonous and contaminating form for thousands of years. No sensible solution to the problem of our growing "shit-pile" of radioactive waste has ever been brought forth. In the United States, "stock-piles" of this waste continue to build up, while jurisdictions argue about where and when it can be "dumped."

Primitive humans simply threw garbage into the backyard, or just outside the village. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, society has been struggling with the spectre of a burgeoning mass of "disposable" matter, which threatens to overwhelm our capacity (environment) to deal with it. Things which will rot or decompose are more easily managed, since the familiar material transformation of organic materials back into inert or harmless residue can be managed with eventual success. But with the rapid increase in the creation of "synthetic" materials, of which radioactive material is the most stubbornly persistent over time, we're looking at custodial obligations which will certainly outlive us by several millennia. This is an unreasonable faustian bargain to enter into, and everyone realizes this. Counting on some scientific breakthrough down the road to "solve" this growing problem is sheer unfounded speculation. We know that given the rate of deposition of this material, there's no way we can eventually "jettison" the stuff into outer space. We're stuck with this poison, essentially, forever.

The unfolding disaster in Japan, following the compromise of several seaside nuclear power generation plants along its Eastern seabord, from earthquake and tsunami, has proven that any "confidence" we may have had about the presumed safety of this plant technology is imprudent and unfounded on reality.

Officials speaking on behalf of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear generation plant in California, asked to respond to the probable risks of a parallel incident here, responded with contempt that "our facility is built to withstand any seismic event up to 7.0 on the Richter Scale," and pooh-poohed the dangers of a similar disaster occurring there. And yet the whole California coastline is right within the "ring of fire" fault lines of the tectonic plates, where earthquakes, volcanic activity, and related phenomena are inevitable. We do not yet have--and may never have--the means to predict accurately when or where such events are going to occur. As I speak, we may be on the verge of a seismic event anywhere between Los Angeles and Seattle, which would endanger the lives of millions, and utterly bring to ruin the works of man over thousands of square miles. It is irresponsible, given what we know about the risks of handling and managing radioactive materials--among the most dangerous and resistant materials, right up there with Anthrax and the Ebola Virus--to believe that the "trade-off" of risk versus benefit, would justify the construction of any more such power plants in the immediate future (100 years).

If science were to advance to a stage that permitted us to generate nuclear power without creating the mountains of intractable waste associated with our current technology, that might be one argument in its favor. But prudence dictates that the simplest road to energy "self-reliance" and a moderate temperance of our consumption of the planet's limited reserve, is to reduce our demand. Advocates of those who want to reduce the advance of global warming suggest that a switch from fossil fuels to nuclear power is a "transitional" strategy to husband humanity into the next phase of its development. But if demand keeps outstripping supply at the current rate, no amount of conservation or elaboration of available sources is going to be able to meet it.

The single central force driving consumption on the planet is population. The high levels of consumption of resource associated with highly developed societies, such as the United States, are unsustainable, especially if that model is replicated in other parts of the world. Human greed and desire being what they are, it's unreasonable to presume that people around the world, seeking to enjoy the prosperity of the West, are likely to voluntarily "moderate" their demands and expectations in the interests of prudent regard for the future. People are selfish, and can always be counted upon to postpone difficult decisions and sacrifice in exchange for temporary gains and pleasures.

We know from ecology that the biomass on the surface of the earth is a finite, interconnected and inter-operative system. As we eat away at, consume, and befoul that system, the effects will multiply and spread throughout. If we go down the road of nuclear power generation, we can expect increasing numbers of "incidents" or "accidents." And given our limited ability to handle the problems associated with it, particularly the growing mass of waste, we are promising our descendants that the burden we place on their shoulders will significantly reduce their chances for a viable life on this planet. It's a promise we shouldn't be making.

The Japanese earthquake and resulting tsunami are expected to have a sharp effect on public opinion in the rest of the world, about the desirability of expanding our investment in nuclear power. If we are prudent, and careful, it is possible that people may finally acknowledge, given the choices between greatly increased risk, and moderation of demand, that the second option is, at least for the immediate future, the sensible one.

Let us hope that this unfortunate disaster in Japan becomes the occasion for a soul-searching reexamination of our commitment to a growth-oriented energy policy. That would be the best outcome of all. Disasters often cause such reappraisals. The price we pay for not learning from defeat and failure is more defeats and failures. Ultimately, a constantly expanding population, accompanied by a constantly expanding economy (GDP) can't be sustained. We can have a time of reckoning, or we can ignore the evidence and go on pretending.

Another Autonomous Submission

By Rote

By Toby Wrote

Mouth feel commands shelf space.

The overpass curves round the access spur, spilling HOV’s into the fast lane.

Free range homeless mimic Burning Man with fake piñatas.

The nasal hum of the power grid.

Shasta melt.

The announcement over the intercom at the BART station in the voice of Stephen Hawking.

Cross-eyed spiders can't sing.

Late middle-aged lady, attractively dressed, adroitly hops off the bottom of the escalator as the step slides under the floor beneath her.

Green parrots infest the arboretum.

Snowy white powder resembles sugar. Clean landfill covers superfund site.

Plastic windows, aluminum sash.

The Sapphic Drift. The Charles Bukowski bobblehead.

Fainting in the injection line.

Twiggy stuff, a fashion horse. Dunces of the KKK.

In our dreams, embarrassment, anxiety and regret outnumber pleasure 10 to 1.

Fate and Death, two juvenile Doberman twins.

I have arrived, but someone has stolen my identity (suitcase).

How actual experience inevitably seems "out of context."

Lazy Susan revolves smoothly on its bearings, offering up thin slabs of raw fish beside radishes ingeniously cut to resemble the Sydney Opera House.

The flightless bird is a dinosaur.

Old plastic slide-rule peeking out of his breast pocket.

The sweet flypaper of life. Stress or shock may "scar" the culture.

Iridescent green hummingbird with scarlet head needles the rosemary.

Glass steps on a glass floor.

Viruses don't "want" to kill you, but they do.

I pledge allegiance to the institution, and the exploitation for which it stands.

Before and after the starter's gun, time squeezes shut.

Laugh-track from I Love Lucy obscures voice-over announcing President’s assassination.

The anxiety of affluence.

The race is not to the swift, but to the corrupt.

The oncoming glare of blinding brights is a sedative, numbing as the fatigue motel.

Gore-tex label hanging by a thread.

The first version was so good, why spoil it with a sequel?

Is memory a search-engine?

Thought prisms.

These are the animals we'll be eating next Winter.

Rowing backwards at night in a dream.

If language decomposes at the same rate as attention, poetry might become as impatient as a video clicker.

Stray, random impulses--nervous, cynical, bland--zip across like "nigger"-particles in a cloud-chamber of semi-comatose awareness.

Whose little dog are you?

Ultimately, the self trades alienation for a cell phone.

Tow truck stranded on the bridge, we're due to flounder at three.

Maybe an "outsourced consciousness"--rented tux that doesn't fit.

The end of the book as we know it.

It's a Dada light show, punctuated by litter and glitter and four-dimensional dance bands.

Venice plaza with in-line skaters selling pink-cotton-candy to Charles Laughton.

Cocktails in the bank-vault. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Gidget's pregnant.

At the American officers' club swimming pool in Iraq, just come dressed as you are.

Dislodged a Praying Mantis clinging to my pant-leg.

Noodling to bond as father-and-son.

Sock-suspenders on prosthetic limb hanging in window of Paris atelier.

File under death threats.

Prokofiev's Le Pas d"Acier - the Revolutionary Spirit

It would be difficult to overstate the atmosphere of cultural excitement and even optimism that accompanied the first years of Communist rule in Russia. Throughout the arts--literature, music, architecture, painting & sculpture, dance, cinema--there was a feeling of anticipation and freedom, as the lid of suppression of the Czarist years was lifted. To be sure, there were many injustices promulgated on the figures and traditions of the recent past, and many talented individuals were unfairly persecuted. As later occurred in Nazi Germany, many of the best minds and creative types escaped to the West, and would continue to work for decades in exile. For those who stayed, the disillusionment that accompanied the waves of Stalinist repression would cause many to regret having chosen to cooperate rather than flee. No one escaped the political convulsions of the period: Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, among the most well-known, all had their careers and lives disrupted by the transformations wrought by WWI and WWII, the Russian Revolution, the Depression and the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Sergei Prokofiev [1891-1953] had grown up under the twilight years of the Czarist regime, and this early period followed a fairly predictable pattern for a musical prodigy, performing and composing while still a child. Nevertheless, the young Russian had rebellious urges, and he chafed at the old harmonies and compositional styles of his teachers. By the age of 20, he had already begun to compose in dissonant, chromatic harmonies, and by 1914 he was traveling to Paris to work with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. As Russia entered WWI, he avoided conscription by studying organ, and continued to compose bold new works, such as the Classical Symphony (Symphony #1), his first two piano concertos, the piano suites Sarcasms and Visions Fugitives, the Scythian Suite, The Love of Three Oranges Suite, etc. Even today, these exciting, staccato, ultra-suave pieces sound fresh and novel.

One of my favorite Prokofiev compositions, and one which captures as much as any other piece I've heard from the heyday of the early Soviet Era in the arts, is his Le pas d'acier, or The Age of Steel, a ballet score composed for Diaghilev and written in 1925-26, which was premiered in Paris in 1927. The theme of the ballet centers on life in the then-decade old Soviet Union and features staging with factory machines and sprocketed wheels, the setting for a danced romance between a sailor and a young girl factory worker. The ballet was judged a success by the Parisian audiences, but was not performed again after 1931 until 2005 at Princeton University, in a version called faithful to the original, never-performed concept of a celebration of Soviet workers lives, instead of a mockery of them, which was the version seen by audiences of the early 20th century. It would probably be a stretch, even by those whose sentiments lie in the direction sympathetic to Communist ideologies, to claim that a ballet celebrating a factory worker romance could be considered serious entertainment. But along the valence of possible kinds of treatment of such subject matter, music is an abstract enough medium to support a concept of a stirring celebration of almost any kind of political dogma (i.e., celebrating Napoleon's military successes, or a sailor's night with a prostitute during a weekend's wartime shore leave, or a diplomatic encounter between major heads of state).

The first part of the ballet seems as inspired and stirring as it must have to Parisian audiences in 1927--full of thrusting declamation and charged ironies. The second part, which seems at first to pause in thoughtful consideration of lesser concerns, such as (perhaps) love, its sad, dreamy aspect in keeping, perhaps with the hardships endured by those commanded to live out the fantasies of bearded 19th Century German intellectuals who foresaw a future of grimly ordered indoctrination and rote obedience to "the demands of history." Humankind's elusive and flexible sensibility could hardly be contained within so narrow a view of behavior and aspiration. The music then turns brash once more, in a kind of fireworks display of diversion and noise (almost a note of peril coming in), before it once more turns thoughtful and quiet at the end.* The third section weaves the two melodies from the first two separate movements in a kind of thematic struggle, as if to suggest counter-tendencies contending for dominance. The music is suggestive in places of Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Rite of Spring ballets, especially in its primitivistic "Russian folk-like" themes, and contrast-y metallic brass and screeching string settings, its insistent 2/4 time signature, and eclectic mixture of moods and tones. The overall effect of the orchestration and its intense character is unlike anything that would have been thought of in the 19th Century. It is not impressionistic, though it employs many impressionistic effects. It is not "confident" music; the depredations of war and revolution run right through its aesthetic center, leaving dashed hopes and half-hearted crusades and dreams in its wake, culminating in a great wave of rising notes, as a sort of interrogatory. Is this the future? Is this what we deposed the Czar to achieve?

A work which began in apparent resolute commitment ends in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Is this a reflection of Prokofiev's personal disillusionment with Soviet era censure and paternalistic manipulation, or sour grapes for a future of artistic fulfillment and honor seized from him by the Revolution in his native country? Prokofiev left Russia in 1918 for America, where he thought his chances as an "experimental" "decadent" artist might have greater chance of acceptance. When he left, the People's Commissar for Education told him "you are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life. We ought to work together, but if you want to go to America I shall not stand in your way." But things did not work out very well for Prokofiev in America, and he returned to Europe to work on ballets and concert works which premiered in European--it was a very fruitful time for him.

But eventually he became nostalgic and homesick for Mother Russia, and in 1935 he returned to the Soviet Union, a choice which he probably eventually regretted, since it was at this very time that the severe oppression and even persecution of Soviet artists had begun in earnest. Prokofiev and Shostakovich found themselves the objects of a severely regressive censorship, intended to channel their work into propagandistic straight-jackets. Nevertheless, Prokofiev did his best to cooperate, participating in nationalistic promotions such as Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, and the Zdravitsa (or "Hail to Stalin" to celebrate the dictator's 60th birthday). Hidden within some of his more serious works, are other hints, such as the central movement of his Seventh Piano Sonata, which opens with a theme evoking the words "I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart. Nightingales... sing their song of longing from their dungeon's depth... everyone delights, yet no one feels the pain, the deep sorrow in the song," thought to express his true feelings, about his plight as a servant to a corrupt, murderous regime. More ambitious works would follow, but after WWII, the position of the artist in Soviet Russia became even more problematic. His Spanish wife Lina was imprisoned for "espionage" (sending money to her mother in Spain). and was not released for several years.

In a great irony of history, Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day, March 5, 1953. Notice of his death in the leading Soviet musical periodical was relegated to page 116, while the first 115 pages were devoted to the death of Stalin. The verdict of history will certainly include Prokofiev among the most impressive and popular composers in history. Like other artistic figures from that era, he was forced by sentimental commitments to nation and culture, to compromise his forward-thinking creative drives and tendencies in the interests of self-preservation and the permission to express himself in his chosen medium. But his creative genius was irrepressible. His unmistakeable lyrical gift, and wide emotional range over a broad spectrum of kinds of works, demonstrates that he would have been--as the French are fond of saying--a great musician at any point in history. This is only a glimpse into his life. His work is available in hundreds of recordings. But Le pas d'acier may be one you didn't know about.

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*This noisy section was deleted from Prokofiev's "Suite" version that is often heard in performances today.