Why not some Jean-Philippe Rameau?

From Alfred Schnittke's unusual soul...

...comes this Yellow Sound:

empty zones

Poetry makes nothing happen.

~ W.H. Auden

That seems to say poetry is impractical, not utilitarian.  For sure, poetry with a political agenda is artistic waywardness. I think Auden's statement also says something else, and deeper.

From Joseph Brodsky's poem "New Life" comes this:

                                    Ultimately, one's unbound
           curiosity about these empty zones,
           about their objectless vistas,
           is what art seems to be all about. 


Poetry that brings neutral abyss to presence -- the great unanswerable question behind and allowing phenomena -- has an indelible aura of the artistic about it.  

Reading a poem that's not an implicit question toward the metaphysical ("curiosity about these empty zones") is like reading a bucket of rusty nails being shaken -- it grates on sensitive nerves. Even love poems can injure the reader's mind, when those love poems are unaware of "objectless vistas" as the backdrop for Eros.

In the depths of language, where artistic poets ponder and write, it's almost as if language is quizzing itself -- the status of its nouns, the time of its verbs, the drama of its syntax -- in order that an opening onto universal context might occur, zoneness per se. 

Some people who write poems declare stuff. But rhetoric evaporates poetic ectoplasm, leaving stanzas ghostless and brittle. Art doesn't like it when that happens. Art likes it when zones appear supple with time and ghosts, emptied out of neurosis and opinion. A painting by Yves Tanguy might clarify what I'm talking about. Tanguy isn't declaring or confessing in paint; he's making nothing happen: 

I Await You (1934)

Back to poetry.

In Brodsky's diptych "Venetian Stanzas," we find the poet moving through the difficult questions of a waterlogged and watermarked city.  

When I try to read these two poems with a focused attention, I get lost in Brodsky's figures of speech. I can't quite get or visualize what he's saying in particular. But when I read them in a half-focused state, letting the stanzas wash over me, I get a sense of them in general.

Behind and within Venice's material presence lurks a hollowness -- a volume of time haunting stone, fabric, people, everyday objects, and water. These stanzas pry open a melancholy space through which the poet ambles physically and spiritually. Into zones of decadent substance grieving the inscrutable weight of the word "is." A masquerade of exhausted history. Our poet is a medium translating the city's perplexed old moods into shapes of human irony. Structure as gesture of always facade, perception as zone of never knowing.

At night -- walls, windows, and the intrigue of rooms. In morning -- shadows just so beneath harbor sunlight and bird wing, the recoil of sentient flesh from the moisture of too much immanence. Venice and the poet both wearily cling to paradoxes of land and water, time and space, substance and being. Those paradoxes form into the empty zone of presence and a possibility of written art.

Eventually, the poet questions his own physical and metaphysical situation as such, honing in on its status of extraneity:

          I am writing these lines sitting outdoors, in winter,
          on a white iron chair, in my shirtsleeves, a little drunk;
          the lips move slowly enough to hinder
          the vowels of the mother tongue,
          and the coffee grows cold. And the blinding lagoon is lapping
          at the shore as the dim human pupil's bright penalty
          for its wish to arrest a landscape quite happy
          here without me.  


In Wallace Stevens's poem "The Idea of Order at Key West," we find the poet under a shore singer's spell of evocation, bringing to thought the "veritable ocean." The sea is a vast phenomenon of symbolic energies:

          The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, 
          Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped 
          On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres 
          Of sky and sea.  

But something else has washed into and fused with consciousness -- that song toward a vaster empty zone beyond. A vocalise of mysterious beauty. And from this comes awareness that the profoundest role of poet is to sound the uncanny question:   

                                      It was her voice that made 
          The sky acutest at its vanishing. 
          She measured to the hour its solitude. 
          She was the single artificer of the world 
          In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, 
          Whatever self it had, became the self 
          That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, 
          As we beheld her striding there alone, 
          Knew that there never was a world for her 
          Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

*    *    *

City and Sea as analogs to open abyss, empty zones filled with enigma and latent with death. 

a review of Sebald's A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

"A Long Account of Calamities"

a Wallace Stevens poem

To The Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking, 

Vocalissimus, 

In the distances of sleep? 

Speak it. 

Leonard's a deep guy

There's a blaze of light 
In every word 
It doesn't matter which you heard 
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

an intellectual on the road

In Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed (variously Demons), you will find the character Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky. He's an older fellow, an intellectual. He lives mostly inside his head, where the ideal, the abstractive, and the theoretical quiver in consciousness. He lives, therefore, just beyond the actual, in a more liquid or gaseous state than the solid. 

In that respect, I see his intellectualism as a kind of artistry. On the impetus of allusive and expansive thinking, he floats toward possible spheres of interpretation. The life of mind has, over time, opened up a tangential space for this critic at large, for this spirit known as Stepan Trofimovitch. A peripheral "geography" is where the artistic abides. But let's not get carried away. He's an intellectual, not an artist per se, even if his musings and one famous work change time into different substance.  

We find Stepan Trofimovitch in the novel during his later years, when he's a chronic free boarder with the aristocratic Vavara Petrovna. In her manor and with dramatic flair, he soliloquizes perceived slights and gesticulates intrinsic egoism. But he's more eccentrically charming than insufferable. Just a fading candle flame from an older era. 

In Part Three of this novel, there is a Chapter 7: "Stepan Trofimovitch's Last Wandering." After a falling out with Vavara Petrovna, he sets out on the road. Dazed, feverish, and crestfallen, he yet proceeds with a misty hopefulness -- a Don Quixote on a not quite firm mission. Here's an excerpt:

The cart reached him; it was a fairly solid peasant cart. The woman was sitting on a tightly stuffed sack and the man on the front of the cart with his legs hanging over towards Stepan Trofimovitch. A red cow was, in fact, shambling behind, tied by the horns to the cart. The man and the woman gazed open-eyed at Stepan Trofimovitch, and Stepan Trofimovitch gazed back at them with equal wonder, but after he had let them pass twenty paces, he got up hurriedly all of a sudden and walked after them. In the proximity of the cart it was natural that he should feel safer, but when he had overtaken it he became oblivious of everything again and sank back into his disconnected thoughts and fancies. He stepped along with no suspicion, of course, that for the two peasants he was at that instant the most mysterious and interesting object that one could meet on the high road.

“What sort may you be, pray, if it's not uncivil to ask?” the woman could not resist asking at last when Stepan Trofimovitch glanced absent-mindedly at her. She was a woman of about seven and twenty, sturdily built, with black eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and a friendly smile on her red lips, between which gleamed white even teeth.

“You . . . you are addressing me?” muttered Stepan Trofimovitch with mournful wonder.

“A merchant, for sure,” the peasant observed confidently. He was a well-grown man of forty with a broad and intelligent face, framed in a reddish beard.

“No, I am not exactly a merchant, I ... I ... moi c'est autre chose.” Stepan Trofimovitch parried the question somehow, and to be on the safe side he dropped back a little from the cart, so that he was walking on a level with the cow.

“Must be a gentleman,” the man decided, hearing words not Russian, and he gave a tug at the horse.

“That's what set us wondering. You are out for a walk seemingly?” the woman asked inquisitively again.

“You . . . you ask me?”

“Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots don't seem to be from hereabouts. . . .”

“They are army boots,” the man put in complacently and significantly.

“No, I am not precisely in the army, I ...”

“What an inquisitive woman!” Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. “And how they stare at me . . . mais enfin. In fact, it's strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done them no harm.”

The woman was whispering to the man.

“If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable.”

Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.

“Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired; but how am I to get in?”

“How wonderful it is,” he thought to himself, “that I've been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it.

So much other stuff goes on in this whole novel that someone might ask, "Why are you focusing on this little scene with the two peasants?" It's because I find myself on occasion wondering about the further and farther lives of minor characters.

The two cart peasants are confronted with the riddling presence of an...intellectual! They are also being unconsciously influenced by the intellectual narrator. And behind him, the artistic intellectual author, who has placed those two peasants in an unusual circumstance. They must be feeling ghosts! 

Will they later laugh or whisper about that preposterous stranger on the road? The appearance of Stepan Trofimovitch will surely alter, in the weeks ahead (especially for the woman),  an opinion that things are firmly quotidian. 

The world is odder than it appears. How thoughtful of Dostoevsky to bestow on non-intellectuals an extraordinary encounter with someone from the life of reading and thought. The shock will surely vibrate into their own later years.

And how will brute nature -- rain, snow, wind, stone, stream, wheat -- extruded into the human shapes of two cart peasants affect Stepan Trofimovitch? Will his last dream as he soon lies dying spiral around the weirdness of a contrary mode? Will he sigh out his last toward the enigma of peasants, those who eyed him with suspicion?