was this a just war,
an old men’s war?
a war of merchants who wanted their weapons
used
so that the great treasures of two kingdoms passed|
o,
into their hands, Vulcan’s malevolent sons?
O the why and
wherefore of war, what reckoning
your heirs will make of it,
beside a ruined tomb!
He is the Emperor
of
the known universe:
Rome, that is,
and of every place
worth
having.
The gods are best
pleased
by ever-more-exotic
sacrifices.
No lowly
chickens here
in Rome whose temples
all but outstrip
Olympus.
Give up the cattle to Jove,
and to that upstart
Mithra;
meek lambs and smelly rams
fit only for
Judean
hecatombs. No,
only the best for Nero,
the
whole menagerie
if need be, to assure
his
eventual,
glorious godhood.
Today he picks a
stately
bird, a solitary feeder
that keeps to its own
corner
in a flush of pink feathers.
Hook-nose wary,
it
is a half-arm taller
than his Centurions.
He waits at the
altar.
It is all legs and
beak,
draws blood from the priests
as they hold it
down.
Nero approaches
with the drawn blade,
intones
the prayer,
slashes the place
where gangly neck
and
pink body converge.
The head comes
off.
The body leaps up
and out of the priest-hold,
spurts
blood
all over Nero’s toga.
No one moves; no one utters
a
syllable; all of Rome’s heart
skips a beat. Crowds
part
as the headless
horror,
runs out and down
the temple steps,
across the plaza, a blood Aetna
bespattering
the paving stones.
Crowds part for its passing
until it
reaches the Tiber
and plunges in.
The Emperor
stands,
the knife in hand,
his toga bloodied, ruined.
The
priests avert their eyes.
Centurions watch
as less-than-god
hands
wipe blood on white linen;
they look at one
another
and with a not-quite smile,
the same thought occurs
to each of them.
Artists are people
to whom coincidence
adheres, filings to their magnet
consciousness.
My painter friend Riva points out
a small
montage, a hulking splotch
with linked chains and a few
squiggles.
“It won some prizes,” she tells me,
“But
as for what it means —“ she shrugs.
My eyes reel into its
story-window:
I see Prometheus chained, a Grand Inquisitor
in
purple robes, and there, the white wings
of the gloating
Zeus-eagle. “I can write this,”
I tell her. “Take it,”
she said.
Another time she
shows me an etching,
a crinolin’d ghost shape a-dance
before
a barren landscape. It sits
the bottom-most discard in a bottom
drawer.
“That is the Empress Carlota!” I cry,
“And
that is Queretaro where Maximilian died.”
So off I went and
wrote a play.
On a graveyard walk
she stops, leans down
and picks up a squashed shard, some
scrap
of one car’s fender run over by another.
“I’ll
make something of this,” she told me.
I carry it home in my
bag, then place
it absent-mindedly on dresser-top.
Months
later, she visits and spies it,
atop a wood frame. I pick it
up
to hand it back to her. Our eyes dance
upon the
seeming-shapeless object,
and then to what’s inside my
glass-framed box:
the Indonesian fruit-bat I nicknamed
“Claudius.”
The shape of the found object precisely
fills
the silhouette of the preserved fruit bat.
We smile.
This is how the universe works us.
Small wonder, then,
that I am reading Egypt,
the lore of Thoth and Hermes, his
totem
animals the Lower Kingdom’s lordly ibis,
the Upper
Kingdom’s wise baboon,
when tea with Riva reveals a water
color
mystery, a scimitar shape emerging
from a blue-gray
mist, a river fog,
a scythe, perhaps, with a hand to weild
it.
“No!” I said. “It is upside-down.”
And there,
in lordly solitude,
stood the Egyptian ibis. I have it
still.
Riva is gone, her mind first, and then her body,
the
ka and the ba on out-of-kilter journey
across to
the Land of Reeds in the West.
So now the ibis panting is in its
place
at my compound shrine of Hermes-Thoth:
the ibis with
kneeling scribe before it,
the ibis-headed god himself in
sculpture;
the sacred baboon;
the head of Hermes; two small
pyramids,
a hippo, and The Book of Coming Forth by Day.
2
I asked a Greek
who’d been to Egypt,
an Alexandrian admittedly, about the
ibis.
“Don’t mention ibises! Those filthy birds,
worse
than the legendary Harpies, be sure.
Not just the stately
water-strider
you see in those temple scrolls — no!
Packs
of them in every garbage heap,
fish-trash and butcher dumping
place.
They eat what jackals would scorn to swallow.
They
eat anything! They gorge themselves
until their innards can take
no more —
guts forty yards long, I can assure you —
until
they’re fat as a pampered goose.
The ibis knows no repose from
gluttony:
stuffed full, they go off to the water.
Then,
cheeks and bill blown up,
they give themselves water enemas.
The
stench amid the reeds
is not to be believed.
No one will eat an
ibis, I tell you,
and fishermen at night have seen them
beak
to belly in oral copulation
(You can look it up in Strabo,
too!
I’m not making this up.)
Now what this says
about the priests of Thoth,
those ibis-headed ministers
and
their mystery rites
is best left to the imagination.
Would
you eat at table with a man
who had such habits? One cup
his
lips had touched could fell a village.
I’m not one to leap to
conclusions
but I prefer my gods sunny, Greek, and clean.”
What if all the awful things that are happening are exactly what the one percents wants to happen, including near civil war and a nuclear "accident?" Here is my latest, and gloomiest poem in the series "Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn." It is satire, but in satire there is often a sad kernel of truth. Some people really wouldn't mind ending civilization, if "their kind" survived.
AUTUMN OF THE OLIGARCHS
Come
September,
those dirty brown oak leaves
tumbling around
like homeless persons
are not acceptable here.
Oak-leaf
clusters, preserved and dried
in tones of cheerful red and
orange
will make a suitable display
for our early-harvest
luncheon.
The noise is worth it — those tawny
Mexicans
leaf-blowing till every last derelict
of maple,
birch, alder and sycamore
are hosed and bagged, and tucked away
—
worth it to have a picture-perfect lawn
neat as a golf
course.
Come October,
and
every last leaf will be gone.
The acorns shall have been
harvested,
bird-nests removed.
Those pine cones
falling like hand-grenades:
one can scarcely keep up with
them,
but go they must. The traps shall be set
for the
aberrant beaver, the rabbit,
the ever-destructive mole.
As
for the birds, the Ornithology Club
has come up with an
“approved” list —
we’ll have drones with rifle-shots to
cull the rest.
All of our poorer relatives patrol the woods
for
deer and fox and all unwanted mammals.
The Approved Cat and her
progeny, keep clear
the house and ground of rats, and mice, and
voles.
As for the squirrels — anarchists all! — we
make
their lives a misery with a pack of Approved Hounds
until
we find a way to breed those rodents sterile
(a break-through
that will come in handy
as we down-size — just think,
a
whole continent all for the taking, all over again,
but I get ahead
of myself —
Come November,
green
turf, stripped-bare trees like telephone poles,
the grounds
secure, the fences electrified,
we’ll settle in for the fall
and winter.
There will be inconveniences, of course.
Next
to the martini, an iodine tablet.
Old Master paintings all moved
to a solid bunker
(Best of the Met slipped out by
sleight-of-hand);
the dinosaurs and those quaint old dioramas
of
Arctic and African species (fakes all in Manhattan
as long ago
we stealthed away the originals).
Deep in a cave we have the
best of the best
and we can visit any time, on trips to the
vaults
where we’ve moved all our solid assets.
When
things calm down, the missiles spent
and the Geiger-counter
clicks are down to drip-drop;
when the cities are cleansed and
the suburbs leveled —
just you wait for the turkey day to end
all turkey days.
Done by Thanksgiving, the generals assured
us,
just the one percent (us) and about five percent (them),
the
ones we chose. By God, we’ll have stuffing,
cigars and brandy
by the fireplace, a starry night.
Come December,
sure
as hell it’ll be a White Christmas.
I wish I had just dreamt this, but I saw it on YouTube. White supremacy, from Mom.
MOTHERHOOD
Trailer park
slattern, blonde,
holds close two flax-haired children.
“We
need another genocide,”
she says to the camera,
more
opioid mama than Viking
shield maiden.
“You know that
means killing?”
the reporter asks.
She nods. “I
know. We need
to have another genocide.” —
“You
know that means killing women,
and all their children with
them?” —
Her eyes drop, then raise. “I know that.” —
“So why do we need another genocide?” —
“Them!”
she shouts, pointing at progeny,
“So my children will
have a chance.”
Husband, off camera: “That’s my woman.
Ain’t she something?”
A photo tour of Carnegie Mellon University's Porter Hall/Baker Hall, the work of architect Henry Hornbostel from 1905-1914. Architect Naomi Yoran, who designed the 2002 addition to the connected halls, gave me a guided tour and showed how the new addition was created to blend in with Hornbostel's original design. Connecting the two structures is a glass, modern "bridge," from which distinct details of Hornbostel's design can be viewed up close. Details include a spectacular, almost Art Nouveau Guastavino-tile covered curved staircase; and sconced lighting in wide corridors creating ceiling light patterns, steel-reinforced corners and doorways, with doors recessed. The new addition, unlike the original buildings, has a basement, where the Giant Eagle Auditorium was placed. Several pyramidal skylights admit light into the lobby of the basement area. At the top of the round stairway I found two antique proof presses, relics of the Carnegie Institute's printing school. It will take a long time to exhaust the fascinating geometries of this building, just one of Hornbostel's Pittsburgh treasures. Thanks to Naomi Yoran for the guided tour!
Back when I owned a Neupert harpsichord in the 1980s, I did more improvising than playing, and I wrote down a theme and variations inspired by my various attempts to play music from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. This collection of Elizabethan keyboard pieces for virginal (a smallish harpsichord string sideways) or organ are the first real solo keyboard music in England. Composers like Orlando Gibbons and John Bull and William Byrd graced its pages. Any number of the pieces seem to be based on lute music, and one frequently finds pieces all notated in C Major, but using the same accidentals to create various chords that might have been played on the lute (just my guess on why this is so). A number of the pieces also have a lot of close-fingered melodies with imitation back and forth across a small span. So the theme I created has that same feel. It's not really a promising theme for variations but I had fun with it. A "skipping" variation uses dotted notes. A C-Minor variation was a devil to notate. Some bridge passages came from who-knows where. Then the theme is adapted into 5/4 time and the harpsichordist gets some trills and runs. The main theme returns at the end, played slowly, and ornamented with trills.
So here it is, for your enjoyment. An English Fantasia on SoundCloud
I wrote these program notes for a concert given in Providence in 2012 by the Jerusalem Quartet. This is an intense, short, and very weird string quartet, but worth the effort it takes to get to know it.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975). String Quartet
No. 7 in f#, Op 108 (March 1960)
Allegretto
Lento
Allegro
Written
in the same year that Shostakovich was forced to join the Communist
Party, this quartet is spared the tragic dimensions the composer put
into his Eighth Quartet, a virtual suicide note in music. Although it
cannot be separated from the times and circumstances in which it was
composed, this is an intensely personal work, an elegy for the
composer’s first wife Nina, who died in 1954.
The
work was premiered May 15, 1960 by the Beethoven Quartet in St.
Petersburg (then still Leningrad), and had its Moscow premiere at the
Moscow Conservatory on September 17 of the same year.
It
is the shortest of all of Shostakovich’s quartets, and there is the
risk of writing notes that take longer to read than the quartet takes
to listen to! But as is often the case with great music, composers
can compress much into a small interval of time.
The
composer had a life-plan for composing string quartets, intending to
compose one in each major and minor key, doing for the quartet
literature what Bach did for the keyboard in his Well-Tempered
Clavier. That said, the Seventh Quartet should have been in Eb
Major, following the scheme the composer was using. Instead, the
quartet is set in the moody and passionate key of F# Minor, which
puts it in company of Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony and Mahler’s
withering Tenth Symphony.
Shostakovich
often includes coded content in his work, and when you hear the first
theme in the opening Allegretto, a kind of sardonic, skipping melody,
you will immediately hear three repeated eighth notes, followed by a
rest, quite literally a “knock at the door.” In German folklore,
Death knocks three times at the door or window of a dying person, to
the horror of family members watching at the bedside. Considering how
many nights during the Stalin years, the composer expected a
different kind of “knock at the door” that would take him to the
Gulag, this gesture is richly suggestive. We are meant to recall
terrible times. (In the Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich alternated the
door-knock with the notes D-Eb-C-B, which are D-Es-C-H in German
notation for the composer’s initials, meaning, “Knock-knock-knock!
Shostakovich!”) So no matter how engaging the violin’s utterances
might be, the knock at the door is embedded in the theme.
There
is a break into hurried sixteenth notes, and a key change to Eb (the
“home” key Shostakovich planned to use originally!) with the
cello carrying the line, some very chromatic passages passing
it back to the violin, and then a bridge passage played in block
chords.
This
bridge brings us back to F# Minor, with the main theme played
pizzicato. This adds further to the grotesque atmosphere. It has the
air of a hushed conversation, and the pizzicato requires leaving out
the grace notes, so that the effect is a coded conversation, out of
earshot of Those Who Watch and Listen. The movement ends with
extensions of the “knock at the door” motif.
The
Lento is an eerie, almost minimalist movement, with no key
signature, played with the strings muted (con sordino). The
second violin plays an unsettling succession of arpeggios, which look
like a wave depicted on an oscilloscope. Viola and cello play
glissansdi at one point, adding to the weirdness of the
atmosphere. What is going on here? The clue, I think comes from the
biography of Nina Shostakovich. She was an experimental physicist who
spent months each year on Mt. Alagez in Armenia, engaged in cosmic
ray research. Like many Soviet researchers, she was exposed to
massive doses of radiation from radioactive materials, and from
poorly shielded X-ray equipment. She died from a radiation-induced
cancer. This music sounds to me almost like a science-fiction sound
track depicting radiation. I would venture to give this Lento
movement the nick-name “Death by X-Ray.”
The
final Allegro has, for most of its length, no key indication.
It is highly atonal, and since it is riddled with intermingled sharps
and flats, it must be a daunting task to play. Even though the
musical materials are spun out from motifs in the first movement, it
would seem to be a Dance of Death, with the skeletons from the X-Ray
now hammering away at a fiendish dance. The theme is passed among the
viola and the two violins as a canon, the strictest type of fugue
imitation (a melody played against itself, not against a second
theme). Even though what we hear would give Bach convulsions, it is a
Baroque concoction as conceived by a wrong-note revolutionary. This
is angry music depicting a universe that kills capriciously. Then,
abruptly, the “home key” of F# Minor asserts itself, with muted
strings. As the quartet slows down and softens to its conclusion,
there is no fist-shaking against Death (what is the use?), just a
quiet slipping away, life sitting at life’s deathbed, and a hint of
the ominous three-note “knock at the door.”
I wrote these notes in 2005 for a performance by the Chiarra Quartet in Providence, RI. At this time, there were still people claiming that Shostakovich was a "good Communist" and a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union. At the time I left Providence in 2015, I was still getting in arguments with musicians and academics about this. Hard to believe, but political fantasies die hard, and the facts be damned. Here are the notes, and I shall link to a YouTube video of the quartet as well.
Dmitri
Shostakovich (1906-1975) String Quartet No. 8 in c minor, Op 110
Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
Largo
No work in the
string quartet literature is more intense or more emotionally
devastating than Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. It was long assumed
that this quartet was about
“The Victims of Fascism and War.” So says the epigraph in the
published score. So said all the program notes, and some of them
still say so. There is no denying the tragic sweep of this work that
seems to cry out like a dirge for millions of souls extinguished.
But since the
publication of Shostakovich’s memoir, Testimony,
in 1979, and more so the publication of the 1998 volume Shostakovich
Reconsidered, we now know that the Eighth
Quartet — however nobly it has served as a tombstone of the
Holocaust and World War II — was composed as a purely personal
self-epitaph, a suicide note in music.
The quartet’s obsessive use of
the four-note “DSCH” motto which spells out Shostakovich’s name
(Es is Eb and H is the note B in German notation); and its extensive
quiltwork of quotes from other Shostakovich music have always seemed
odd in a work that supposedly had a “public” purpose. At the very
least, the work has always been understood to contain “I suffered
too” as a sub-theme, including as it does quotes from works that
were banned for public performance through the Stalin years. What was
the Soviet Union’s “most loyal son” of composers doing and
saying?
It may come as a
surprise to many that Shostakovich did not become a member of the
Communist Party until 1960, his 54th
year. According to his wife Irina, he was finally blackmailed into
joining. In Testimony,
Shostakovich says, “When I wrote the Eighth Quartet, it was also
assigned to the department of ‘exposing fascism,’ You have to be
blind and deaf to do that, because everything in the quartet is as
clear as a primer. I quote Lady Macbeth,
the First and Fifth Symphonies. What does fascism have to do with
these? The Eighth is an autobiographical quartet; it quotes a song
known to all Russians: ‘Exhausted by the hardships of prison.’”
It was not until
1990 that Shostakovich’s colleague Lev Lebedinsky further confirmed
the Eighth Quartet’s link to this low point in the composer’s
life: “It was his farewell to life. He associated joining the Party
with a moral, as well as a physical death… [H]e had completed the
quartet and purchased a large number of sleeping pills, he played the
Quartet to me on the piano and told me with tears in his eyes that it
was his last work. He hinted at his intention to commit suicide.
Perhaps subconsciously he hoped that I would save him. I managed to
remove the pills from his jacket pocket and gave them to his son
Maxim, explaining to him the true meaning of the Quartet.”
The composer’s
son, Maxim, at a conference in 1992, added, “My father cried twice
in his life: when his mother died and when he came to say they’ve
made him join the Party. […T]his was sobbing, not just tears, but
sobbing.” Lebedinsky also reveals that “a much-trumpeted Party
plenum” was called to present Shostakovich for one and all to see
as a born-again Communist, and the event “deteriorated into a farce
due to … the unexpected absence of the composer!” Abject
apologies were made, and Shostakovich was dutifully enrolled as a
Party member, but clearly one to be watched.
In the limited
space we have to describe tonight’s work, it has seemed more
compelling to tell the truth
about this staggering composition than to engage in musical analysis.
Moreover, those who know Shostakovich’s music in depth are
“insiders” to this music, which resonates with themes from four
of his symphonies, several other chamber works, and the opera Stalin
hated, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District. Better perhaps, to let the DSCH
motto take over and view the work as a phantasmagoria of musical
threads, woven with passion and musical genius. Since Shostakovich is
one of the truly great quartet composers, this work deserves to be
examined as pure music — but not now, and perhaps not for a long
time to come. Accept this quartet as a message in a bottle, a cry of
despair, a warning that collaboration with evil destroys the soul.
A house so beautiful that you almost burst into tears the first time you
see it up close. I spent half a day yesterday at Falllingwater and it
is everything they say it is, and more. The pity is that one cannot
linger. We were on tour number 29 of the day and when we left, tour
number 60 of the day was setting out. The walks and hikes in the woods
are not hurried, however, so one can linger and enjoy the land, verdant
with white rhododendron groves. I found a few native sassafras
trees asserting themselves amid the pines and other tall trees. Photos
inside the house were prohibited, so I cannot share the details of the
house and its construction. You just have to go there. The best life of
all is in a great city, with access to art and music and culture, but if
one is to have second place amid the mountains, nothing on earth could
be more joyous than this place. To awaken in a house like this is to
arrive in a day in which great things are expected of you. Maybe some
people could not deal with that, and for them, the trailer park, the
cookie-cutter suburban ranch, the termite-nest apartment building.
I was up till 2:30 last night watching "Japan's Longest Day," a
158-minute drama released in 1967 by Toho Films. I associate Toho with
Godzilla movies and Samurai films, so this was a startling surprise -- a
film that was not made with American viewers in mind. It covers the
last 24 hours before Japan surrendered at the end of World War II. The
isolated Emperor, absolute ruler -- the custom-bound bureaucrats and
cabinet ministers -- and a group of crazed military officers who
attempt a palace takeover to stop the Emperor from making a radio
speech announcing the surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mentioned
with some bleak wide-angle photos of the devastation and some horrific
close-ups of charred corpses. But the government officials seem numb to
the scale of the carnage, and the honor-crazed military men want to hold
out for a land battle in Japan. To watch this in the present moment is
signficant. We who lost a couple of buildings in 2001 and thousands of
troops we send off like rent-a-cops to overseas war that have no
purpose, do not know defeat, have not suffered the deaths of millions.
There is a lot to think about in this film as some leaders talk about
what the future can be for the future innocent, and what it would be
like to live in a country that vowed not to make war again -- against
the madness of ideology and blind patriotism. Intriguingly, the power of
the media is also at the center of the film, as all realize that the
Emperor's radio address would make the surrender irrevocable. The most
telling moment in the film is a crazed soldier holding a revolver to the
head of a radio broadcaster, who sits defiantly with the threat of a
bullet inches from his head. This will be a hard film to forget. See Wikipedia Page on Japan's Longest Day
Hikers in the Adirondacks know Pieter Vanderbeck as the mountain-man
artist, who spends about five months of each year doing conte crayon
drawings and line drawings all around the region. Pieter is also a poet
and novelist, and was my neighbor in Providence for many years. He and I
co-authored a book together, Twilight of the Dictators, and Pieter
illustrated my book, Poems from Providence. A while back I bought
tripods and lamps and umbrellas so that I could photograph more than 100
of Pieter's drawings for a DVD he was making. I'm delighted to see
these photos are now on Pieter's own website. Enjoy!
