At the Ruined Monastery

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After a painting by Kaspar David Friedrich

Hell’s eye, the whole horizon,
stares back at me,
an ovoid glow,
a foggy cataract.

Demons regard me
through gnarled elms
November has stripped
into a warlike barricade
fit only for crows and hawks.

Of that proud monkish pile
one arch alone remains.
Glass shards adorn the ground
(work of the King’s men
to abolish all Popish pride)
leaving intact a skeletal
lead lattice-work,
a perfect tracery
of Goth geometry.

Do the dead beyond
train telescopes
upon the hooded pilgrims
who come in adoration
of the Sublime in ruins?

They search in vain
for a crucifix aloft
or even a trinket
of saintly yore.

Here in this misty clime
that only tourists visit now,
no word of Latin sounds.

One muffled bell I hear,
a groan, a sigh — but not
from this side. Only the dead
would have the monks return,
and only those already dead
require a bead or candle.

Most who come now,
in cowled mockery
of the sainted past
are tourists. The arch,
the trees, the eye of Hell
are background for self-
portraiture.

The dead watch.
The living mill about,
take selfies.
“A shame the English
let things go this way,”
one says. Another, to me:
“This ought to be a poem,
you know, about us
being here.”

Hell shrugs. Sky’s eye
bursts out in sunny rays.
The spell is broken.

The Night the Maenads Killed Orpheus

 

Finding the head of Orpheus. Painting by Gustave Moreau.

The wild women who worshiped Dionysius on hilltops, in rites forbidden to men, after the excesses of their ritual and drug consumption, would rage down from the mountaintop, ripping up trees and foliage, tearing wildlife from limb to limb, and demanding sexual favors from any hapless male they encountered. Their cry of Evoe! Evoe! evoked the primal dread of serpents, and the raw power of uncontrolled lust. Orpheus, the legendary poet-king who had gone to Hades in an attempt to bring back his dead wife Eurydice, spent his latter years in a state of madness, and was said to have pursued only the love of young men until the dreadful night he encountered the Maenads.

THE NIGHT THE MAENADS KILLED ORPHEUS

by Brett Rutherford

     While Maenads cry Evoe, Evoe!
     That voice that is contagion to the world
          — Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Who does he think he is,
this Orpheus? What brought
him, anyway, to be
in the very woods, at night,
through which we rage
in Dionysian revels?

He was asking for it.
Pale, in his thin robe
at risk of a night-chill,
strumming his lyre
to moon and owl,

did he not see
our hilltop circle
all lit in flames.
Was he not warned away
by the shrieking
of Evoe! Evoe!?

Who does he think he is
when we come raging down?
We tear up trees
with the strength of Titans.
Who dares, on seeing us
naked, refuse to pleasure us?

We tear him limb from limb.
Flesh parts so easily.
Bones are nothing
when Maenads rend them.

Here’s one white hand
to press to my bosom —

I have the other, the one
whose callus’d fingers
plucked melodies
at Hades’ gateway,
ah, play me now! —

I have the head,
that tousled hair
in  raven locks,
that mouth, oh kiss
it sisters, pass it round<
till it grows cold
and its lips are bitten bloody! —

I have the best part!
I ride, sisters, I ride! —

Oh share, do share!
There is enough for three! —

Who did he think he was?
And why was he here,
mouthing his half-formed
soliloquies, mourning, perhaps,
his long-lamented wife,
or making an epigram
about some boy he met
in the marketplace? —

who but an animal
among us animals,
a twitching thing
good only for mating
when the god commands?

When, in the morning,
the horrified villagers
discover the ruins
of shattered oak trees,
a disemboweled boar,
the antlered head
of a downed deer,

they might guess whose
were the severed hands,
whose torso, gored,
shows an unbeating heart,
whose sandaled feet
were tossed to treetop

but they will not be certain,
for the head was never found.

That beauteous visage
was set afloat, upon
the wood-framed lyre,
upon a brook, whose flow
goes on to river and sea,
the head from its corpse
forever parted.

Strum, lyre,
sing on, o blackened tongue,
a serenade to sea-nymphs
in the direst of Dionysian
refrains: Evoe! Ah, Evoe!

 

Fabric art at The Carnegie International

 

Most of the art on display at The Carnegie International at The Carnegie Art Museum is despicable or, at best, undistinguished. One of the standouts is this cleverly-mounted display of fabric art by a collective of women fabric artists in Argentina. We are at a time when the crafts are often far better than the "fine arts."

French moderns at Pittsburgh's Frick Museum

 

French modern paintings absconded from The Brooklyn Museum and found their way to The Frick Museum in Pittsburgh this October. It was a delight to have these works with us for a while.

Some illustrations for Orestes and the Furies

Earlier this year, I designed and published Orestes and the Furies - The Eumenidies of Aeschylus, in a lost 1839 English translation by Matthew James Chapman. To decorate the book, I created some color art depicting Greek ruins, using 18th century black-and-white engravings as a starting point. This is not AI-generated art, but instead is classic print art reimagined using a number of successive color editing tools. I believe this is the proper use of the computer in illustration and graphic design. The original engravings were made at the time when Greece was under the control of the Ottoman Empire -- note the Turkish costumes.

 

Ken Russell's The Devils

The Devils is here in a restored director's cut, every inch of nudity and blasphemy on full display.

It was a bomb hurled from the barricades of 1971. Russell's need for nudity seems a trifle silly, but he was breaking barriers that needed to be broken. Vanessas Redgrave's acting, with only a wedge of her face, and various contortions of her robed body, left me breathless. Oliver Reed was already past his prime, his rugged beauty besotted by drinking.

The second viewing revealed more to me, such as realizing that the citizens outside the iron gate denouncing the torture were the town's Protestants, at some risk to their lives. Many things were compressed to visual representation rather than speech. Smashing pagan art and toppling bookshelves in Grandier's home compresses intolerance into key gestures.

The sets by Derek Jarman make The Devils look a bit like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The white tiles and white stones and the compression of city walls, cathedral, convent, and town square into one set viewable at one wide angle shot, gave it a stage-play atmosphere, the plague scenes especially claustrophobic.

Alexandre Dumas wrote up the Grandier story twice, first in his series of historical sketches called Celebrated Crimes, and then in a novel about Grandier. It was Celebrated Crimes that first taught me about the Borgia Family, and about the Cenci. The Catholic-Huguenot struggle is also given in agonizing detail. Dumas also set some episodes of  The Three Musketeers amidst the effort to tear down town and city walls throughout France, with Cardinal Richelieu as one of the key villains. A key plot turn in Three Musketeers involves the use of a pardon-in-advance written and signed by the Cardinal, whose words have stayed in my head since the age of ten: "The bearer of this has done what he has done, by my order, and for the good of the State."

Macbeth at The Metropolitan Opera

 I hope that many of you saw the Met Opera broadcast of Verdi's 1847 opera (revised in 1865), Macbeth, from Shakespeare's violent drama about a sociopath murderer king and his even more evil wife. Lady Macbeth was ever-so-Melania as portrayed by the statuesque Lise Davidsen, and baritone Quinn Kelsey gave a chilling portrait of an assassin torn between cowardice and power-lust. Opera multiplies all emotions, so when Lady Macbeth urges her husband on to murder the old king, a guest in their own home, we see the depth of the lust for power. Later, we see the price, as madness and guilt crush them.

 

Luisa Proske's production was the young director's first outing at the Met, and it provided a rotating set of battlefields, castle interiors, court halls, and other dark wastelands.

The real Macbeth ruled briefly in the 11th century, but this production costumes all in Elizabethan finery and military armor. By displacing time, the director is able to fold in the witch-crazes that roiled over Scotland and England, and she turns the three weird sisters of Shakespeare into a huge coven-chorus of screeching witches, who are seen vampirizing dying soldiers on the battlefield. They slither around the set in most scenes and whether they are a projection of the inherent evil of Macbeth and his wife, or are meant to be supernatural agents and figments of madness -- the audience can take it literally or not as they wish.

 

"Patria oppressa! il dolce nome

No, di madre aver non puoi,

Or che tutta a figli tuoi

Sei conversa in un avel."

 

In the last act, we see a chorus of war survivors, orphans, widows, the wounded, the oppressed, and as they are costumed as the generic poor of Europe, their cries make us instantly think of Ukraine. Was this intentional, or coincidental? No one looked especially Scottish in this scene, and Verdi, swept up the politics of his time, had good cause to make this scene about everyone, everywhere. Conductor Nezet-Saguin opined that this is Verdi's greatest chorus, and it was truly sublime.

 

Further suggestions of the witch-craze come in when the furious crowd decides to add burning at the stake to Macbeth's on-stage death.

 

So many new opera productions commit violence against the story through anachronisms. Here, the liberties all worked, and this was a day to remember at the Met. Bravi!