some nice Chekhov passages

From his novella The Steppe:

But when the moon rises, the night becomes pale and dark. It is as if the dusk had never been. The air is transparent, fresh, and warm, everything is clearly visible, and you can even make out the separate stalks of the weeds by the roadside. In the far distance, skulls and stones can be seen....

Broad shadows drift across the plain like clouds across the sky, and in the incomprehensible distance, if you look at it for a long time, misty, whimsical images loom and heap upon each other....It is a little eerie....

The boundless depth and infinity of the sky can be judged only on the sea or on the steppe at night, when the moon is shining. It is frightening, beautiful, and caressing, it looks at you languorously and beckons, and its caress makes your head spin....

...your soul responds to the beautiful, stern motherland, and you want to fly over the steppe with the night bird.

Troika in Steppe, 1882 -- Ivan Constantinovich

going deeper into poetry

While I was off Facebook for two months, I had an anti-epiphany followed by a discovery.


anti-epiphany

Having produced another "book" of poems (In Lieu of Opium), I realized I had run out of steam. I realized how far I am from reaching my ideal of utterance. And even the thought of trying to write another poem began to feel like a bizarre and alien enterprise.

Thinking about my poems, I believe I came close a few times to my ideal of theme, perspective, and execution. Alas, I'm not profound enough to make the kind of poem I want to make. Even describing my ideal seems to be beyond me. I know it when I see it.


discovery

I stumbled upon the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. I was quietly flabbergasted. Deeply affected. This is it! I want to spend a calm, thoughtful year reading and rereading his poems. I want to spend time living in and between his lines.

And I might want to write little things, from time to time, about his poems. That might be a way for me to gradually formulate and express my ideal about poetry. Whatever I might have to say will not be prescriptivist. It will merely establish the peculiarities of how I experience world-through-art.

A human being!

Yesterday morning, the Direct TV guy came to install a larger dish and an updated box. This fellow was so neat. He was professional and polite. But he was wonderfully peculiar. It was as if unnerving voices were whispering in his head. He projected a tenseness, almost quivering with vague spiritual unease. He was enveloped in a penumbra of distractedness. And he had a clipped, reluctant sense of humor.

I would have enjoyed having a non-Direct TV conversation with this young fellow. But how could I or anyone overcome his internal quivering? Suspicious energies were pouring off him and puddling around his hurried steps. He was efficient. He moved in a nervous blur. He seemed like one of my nightly dream characters come to dubious life.

Afterwards, it struck me that no novel could have prepared me for this Direct TV guy. And no literary critic's exposition could touch his persona. He is of no type. He is himself. No writer could capture the essence of his flustered, vibrating soul. Novels give us characters that are nice to spend time with. Critics try to tease out universals from the interplay of characters and their locations in plot. But real life and real people are different. Real people, like my Direct TV guy, are unique and thoroughly unexpected. No novel could contain him.

I'm glad he came yesterday. He refreshed me with how wild and preposterous is the world.

a remarkable phenomenon

One day in 1995, I had my radio tuned to the classical FM station. A string quartet began playing -- a CD selection from the Takács String Quartet's recording of Haydn's Op. 76 string quartets. I will never forget the impression made on me, not only the brilliant music but also the unique sound of these four players.

This was before I had a computer and access to online ordering of CDs. My local record store didn't have this CD. So I phoned my mother, who lived in the Kansas City area. She went to several stores trying to find this CD for me. Alas, it turned out that this CD from 1990 was out-of-print:






I came across this the other day, about a new traversal of Haydn's quartets by the Takács:


Haydn from The Rest is Noise




What strikes me as remarkable is that, despite the passage of over 20 years and the replacement of the first violinist, this ensemble's sound has remained basically unchanged. It's unique overall timbre remains intact and distinctive. No other string quartet sounds like them.

There is a largeness to the sound. And the first violin still has that slight nasal quality, which is so damn wonderful -- a quality that is almost a color, like rich mahogany.

Haydn was a pure genius of string quartet writing. He took the existing nascent form and shaped it into profound expressions.

Chekhov's characters

Anton Chekhov

I've been reading Chekhov's short stories. I'm impressed by his characterizations. Especially in the story "Enemies."

Kirilov and Abogin are astonishing to me. I won't call it verisimilitude, because I've never known anyone like these characters. For me, it is simply the pleasure of discovering and spending time with new types -- a poor doctor and a rich narcissist. Their portrayals are as transfixing as those by Dostoevsky, maybe more so.

At Abogin's fine house, Kirilov erupts from his state of incomprehension. Abogin, previously respectful and smooth, is taken aback and flares up with umbrage.


Chekhov's "Enemies"

a congruence

I read this evaluation of Tomas Tranströmer's poetry:


Tom Sleigh's evaluation


This sentence, in particular, jumped out at me:

Tranströmer's sense that memories have eyes that look at us from their own vantage point independent of our attempts at remembering insists on the objective quality of the past while acknowledging the contingent nature of memory.


That sentence reminds me of something profound my friend Yael said to me. It was in a different context than memory as such. But the gist is similar. In both cases, a mysterious, embedded significance is to be inferred. Beneath awareness, certain people, impressions, and moments are always "alive." And I think even pieces of our night dreams become second-order memories that take on a kind of independent existence. Those things are always casting glances at us (and thinking about us) from great depths.

I'm pleased to have discovered this congruity: an aspect of Tranströmer's poetry and a consoling insight from my friend.

falling through the tones

Olivier Messiaen's Christian mysticism, which inspired his music, makes no impression on me. The notion of Eschaton has, for me, a vapor of nihilism about it.

So what I get from Messiaen's music is not anchored to religion. Nonetheless, his music does have for me a dreamlike, almost-mystical quality.

Lately, I've been pondering the death of loved ones. Despite all my pondering, I still don't know what it means. Life with their presence has given way to life with pervasive absence. It simply does not compute.

When I listen to this piece of music by Messiaen, something odd happens to me: my anguished pondering ceases. I simply fall through the tones of this haunting score. My sadness and incomprehension are stunned into a kind of indifference. Or a stupefaction. The sense of it is something like a dream. A brief transcendence. As if memory and time itself are falling between the notes...toward a realm of muted sighs.