will wonders never cease?.....

a poem by Benjamin Fondane



The Refusal of the Poem


The daughters of song came:
“Would you take us, naked,
our lips lavender scented?”

– I dream of valleys in Finland
where soldiers of ice sleep.

The salt virgins of the poem
said, “it is time we were loved.
We are naked under our skin.”

– I dream of watery ships
drowned behind glass.

The supple whores of my dream
call to me, “let go, dive in
where the fish are fresh and dumb.”

– I dream of Germany's prisoners
gaunt beneath the whip ...

The sweet mothers of sleep
coo, “go to bed, your big toes
pointing to the tip of sleep.

The Sleeping Beauty in man
lives on kisses alone...”

– I dream of the vast embers
that flare around the earth ...

The toothless hag of death
said, “each horse has its bit.
Your lot is a slow death.
So like it or not, sing!
No one has a right to mercy.
What do you think, vague shade?”

– My dearest, I dream of Prague.
I don't hear, I no longer hear
the prayers of her synagogues.


1943

translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody

Fondane (1898 - 1944)

I'm thinking about the White Army

And about the White Movement in Russia between 1917 and 1922, in opposition to the Bolshevik Reds.

a White Army battalion flag

Most Whites were anti-Semitic, desiring to unify Russia according to its "true" essential soul. Many were fervent Tsarists. Some were constitutionalists. A few apolitical. For the most part, an autocratic bent of mind shaped the White perspective. Yet there was no overarching, controlling ideology. It was an amalgam. Cossacks and conflicts, Denikins and divisions.  

I have this cinematographic image in my head of Whites on horses charging across some wide vista. Swords and aristocratic conviction amid dust clouds and defeat.

The word "surreal" is overused. I use it too much. But since Surrealism was in the very air elsewhere, maybe it's okay if I think something of that quality settled upon Russia during this time.

The Bolshevik leaders were a strange, unnerving lot. The Whites perhaps more so, ensconced as they were in visions of the past and nervous glances toward the future. The times they were a-changin', but those White guys wanted to yank tight on the reins. Conservatism always goes around with a musty cloud over its head. Tradition and nostalgia are fine as inspirations for music but maybe not so much as the structure for governing a desperate population.  

I have another image in my head. On some estate or in some fine dacha, old mustachioed generals debate strategy between weeping bouts of melancholy. Off in the corner and sitting at a little round table in the shadows, the second cousin of an attache is thinking: "Only a poet perceives the absurdity of kings as well as Caesar within the slave."


So...what if the White Army and Movement had won? What if the cruel Stalin had not risen to power? I have no idea. But it's "surreal" enough to bring a pleasant and idle pondering. About what Russia might be like today if those White guys had shoved those Red guys out of the way.

Osip Mandelstam...

...described Armenia in this way: “...a book of ringing clays...a festering text, a precious clay, that hurts us like music, like the word."

I'd believe anything...

...sung by this fellow

"A Quarter Century Has Passed..."

Why did Georgy Ivanov emigrate from Russia? I don't know. It seems that he longed for Russia. The lines below are good lines, but do they add up to something that a non-Russian reader of today would consider an exemplary poem? Is this poem too self-absorbed and insular, lacking a universal significance or appeal? 

This poem freaking works. For two reasons. 

We don't have to worry about self-absorption and insularity because we, through some odd magic, become this poet. The experience of these lines is now our experience. It's like how you can become totally identified with the experience of a black-and-white foreign film from the 1950s. In that case, the director conjures a world of subtle materials that act on the viewer with a magnetic sympathy. In the present case, the poet Ivanov creates an environment of compelling psychological impressions that we fall into and, for a few moments, make our own. That might sound like how any poem functions. Maybe so, but Ivanov's is not any poem. It impresses us with its unusual complexion of written art.

Further, we are granted access to something universal: a quarter century, stars, cities, blissful South, murmur of waves, golden wine. All these have a symbolic power beyond the local, visceral effect that could be found in lesser poems. Somehow Ivanov -- because he's Russian? -- manages to charge those terms with a kind of mystical, extra-sensory glow. They briefly lodge in our third eye and take our breath.

Ivanov said he would return to Russia after death as his poems. I don't think he necessarily meant his poems would be published there posthumously. I think he meant his spirit would float there one day in the form of poems. A ghost made of words on the wind. A ghost and its old companion uncovering the light of a Silver Age star sunken into nostalgia.



A Quarter Century Has Passed... -- Georgy Ivanov

A quarter century has passed abroad
and hope has become a joke.
The radiant starscape above Nice
is permanently my native sky.

The stillness of the blissful South,
the murmur of waves, the golden wine...

But a Petersburg blizzard is singing
in the snow-plastered window,
that the prophecy of a dead friend

will surely come to pass.

"We shall meet again in Petersburg,
as though we had buried the sun there." - O Mandelshtam


 

Georgy Ivanov (1894 - 1958)

everything is falling

Planets fall in orbit around stars. Rainwater seeps on down into Earth's crust. Tides fall toward shores (I think). Rebellious angels are drop-kicked out of Paradise and descend toward Hell. People fall in love.

Everything is falling. What could this possibly mean? I'm serious.

Gravity must be thoroughly investigated. With kaleidoscopes, ether magnets, and special séances at Princeton.

upon the liquid surface of the questionable

Werner Herzog has an acting role in the wonderful film Incident at Loch Ness. The movie is a subtle indictment of the credulous. He's coaxed to board the monster-seeking boat. He does his best to join in the spirit of seriousness about the endeavor. He is uncharacteristically patient with the logic-dubious cryptozoologist. He even gets communally alarmed during an inexplicable episode. 

But...overall, our good man gives off an air of ennui and quiet exasperation about the whole enterprise. This performance -- the presence of the eccentric Herzog -- does extensive implicit damage to clanky forms of belief. His "ecstatic truth" has more to do with imagination-as-artform than with para-delusion.