A Change in the Wind

A huge smokestack of war: Vaclav Havel

As a boy, I lived for a time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of the people. 

If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon -- say, while out hunting -- he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his kin be saved. 

Văclav Havel, Politics and Conscience, 1984 speech

Dreamed in the sunbeams: John Muir

From his unpublished journals written in his sheep-herding days, before Muir came to stay in Yosemite Valley:

Dreamed in the sunbeams, when the sheep were calm, the plan of a hermitage: walls of pure white quartz, doors and windows edged with quartz crystals, windows of thin smooth sheets of water with ruffling apparatus to answer for curtains. The door a slate falke with brown and purple and yellow lichens. And oh, could not I find furniture! My table would be a grooved and shining slab of granite from the bed of the old mountain glaciers, my stool a mossy stump or tree bracket of the big dry, stout kind, and a bed of the spicy boughs of the spruce, etc., ad infinitum. 

John Muir, January 21, 1869 [from John of the Mountains]

The beautiful secret: Robinson Jeffers

From an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:

[Robinson] Jeffers celebrated the "transhuman magnificence" of nature, the beautiful things both vast and near that can provide even a 21st century reader with solace, even if we are often a muddled, ugly species and even if all things, as they do, fade away. 

Don't often hear poets extolled on the editorial pages of a major newspaper. At the heart of the essay is a quote from a poem written late in Jeffers' life, after he had suffered many grevious losses:

Cokinos writes:

Jeffers goes on, considering what is gone (his beloved wife) and what remains (trees that herons nest in, the material universe as a kind of divinity). He still "can feel the beautiful secret/In places and stars and stones.../I wish that all human creatures might feel it./That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler — as a handful of wildflowers."

 

 

 

The beautiful secret...  

 

What really happened to the developer: Chekhov

The New Yorker's great theater critic, John Lahr, hasn't been writing enough. Then on Dec. 12 the magazine doesn't put the compressed grace of his review of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" on line, and further goes on in the truncated "abstract" it does post to mangle Lahr's dramatic wisdom.

It's criminal! But no matter -- here's the gist.

Lahr begins with the obliviousness of the central character [played by Dianne Wiest, in the image]

When a character tells Madame Ranevskaya (the vulnerable and resolate Dianne Wiest), who is as sensationally blind to her predicament as she is to herself, that he saw "a very funny show at the theater last night,": she snaps..."People shouldn't be going to plays. They should be looking at themselves. Lives are so gray...gray, and you talk about things that don't matter."

This, of course, is a perfect description of the play we're watching. 

Which raises the question -- what are we watching? 

...as the actors enter Santo Losquano's elegant circular arena, where canvas is spread on the floor as in a circus ring, spotlights isolate a toy train, a hobbyhorse, and a minaiature table and chairs. Madame Ranevskaya and her entourage recall their former bliss on their soon-to-be-lost estate ("Happiness and I would wake up together," she says) while sitting on the miniature furniture, like giants in a child's universe. 

Chekhov began the play in a nursery for a reason: the adults before us are unwilling to take responsibility for the lives they are lamenting; they are infantile and unformed. "I feel young. As a child," Charlotta (Roberta Maxwell), the governess, says, adding, "Where I'm from, who I am -- not a clue." Cluelessness is the essence of Chekhov's comedy. 

What are these alleged grown-ups missing? Something does matter...the issue of the enormous natural estate that no longer can support these feckless nobles and their serfs must be faced. 

The cherry orchard must be saved -- or not. 

"The Cherry Orchard"...was Chekhov's last and most Expressionistic play. (Less than six months after its debut, in January 1904, he died, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four.) Chekhov insisted to the play's first director and star, Konstantin Stanislavsky, that "The Cherry Orchard" was "not a drama, but a comedy, in places even a farce." 

In other words, this will be in part about the question of the fate of the orchard -- which could easily turn melodramatic -- but it will also be about the larger question, which is us, our foolishness.

The playwright will examine us, like the doctor he was, "interrogate" us, as the academic phrase goes, and mock us at times. It's not just an environmental question, but an existential one.

What will be our relationship with our land, our property, and, ultimately, our planet?

The pushy but compassionate Lopakhin (John Turturro), who grew up on the estate as a peasant and is now himself a landowner, has a sound suggestion: in order to liquidate their debts and keep their property, which otherwise will be auctioned off, Madame Ranevskaya and Gayev must cut down their enormous cherry orchard, divide up the land, and tease it out in small parcels, on which summer cottages can be built. "It's all just so vulgar," Madame Ranevskaya says.

After days of coaxing the family to take action, Lopakhin implores Gayev, "Tell me what you want me to do!" "About what?" Gayev says. He and his sister cannot see what's right under their noses. 

Lopakhin, who represents the new economic order, on the other hand, recognizes an opportunity and, finally, buys the estate himself. (Turturro does a fine, high-stepping boot-tapping cakewalk around the stage in celebration of this social and financial coup.) 

What could go wrong for this winner? 

Lopakhin, however, is blinkered in matters of the heart. In a superb, devastating scene with Madame Ranveskaya's daughter Varya (the excellent Juliet Rylance), who wants to marry him, Lopakhin lets love pass him by. 

It's a moment out of John Cage. The most devastating line in the play is the one not spoken.

The nobility cannot see one "thing that matters;" the developer cannot see another. 

Two roads diverged in a wood: Robert Frost

Louis B. Jones pens a great essay on Robert Frost, which thankfully The Threepenny Review puts on-line. 

Here are two gems from it, set together: 

It seldom occurs to me, frankly, to contemplate any of the thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird; nor could I recite from memory more than a few lines of “Four Quartets,” poems which on the Truth-Beauty Meter (or the Ambition Meter) must score up there near the Tao Te Ching and the Sermon on the Mount. I wonder if, in the dark times of my life, or the merely dim times, I’ve gotten more of real consolation and upbringing from Frost. Frost’s having been acquainted with the night; his temptation to pause a little too long in the dark, cold, futile woods; his letting a boughful of snow dump over his head and not worsen but improve his dreadful day; or just his thinking it’s important that a newborn calf “totters” when its mother licks it—all these homely considerations have come to rescue me often, in the real life I lead while my hand is on the hoe-handle or the steering wheel, my eye on the oncoming road, my ear attentive to NPR or just the valley winds. Moreover, in almost every Frost poem, there’s somewhere the encounter with darkness, darkness deepened and worsened, perversely, by putting on light versification’s frock.

Then into Frost's most famous poem: 

Frost used to speak with mockery of himself as “that poet of stone walls, birches, and belilaced cellar holes,” with a sarcasm licensed by the open secret of his career: that most of his work is about the terrors, death and meaninglessness and solitary inarticulacy. The temptation to linger which is offered by cold dark woods is not a lightsome one, it’s rather a desolate one. And anybody who will simply read the twenty lines about choosing the road less traveled will see that it’s not a boast of the poet’s own nonconformity, nor any kind of endorsement of nonconformity—not at all. It’s an admission that no existential decision of ours really ever makes any “difference.”

But even if said ironically, how can "I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference" be dismissed? The music transcends the philosophy. 

Why we shouldn't like writer's houses

From a marvelous piece by April Bernard in the NYRB (only partially available on-line, I should add):

Here’s what I hate about writers’ houses: the basic mistakes. The idea that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

Once long ago someone took me to visit Shakespeare’s house in Stratford. I couldn’t go inside; it felt like snooping, it felt like preening, as if we could own a piece of him for ourselves. As far as I know, the only way to claim our real inheritance from Shakespeare is by reading and studying and memorizing—and, if we are lucky, by acting—his words.

All true. but it's still hard to resist the word made flesh. 

Wordworth's house in Cambria, England. 

"This most unusual career": Vaclav Havel

This has been a tumultuous year, and it continues with the loss of one of world's greatest civilians, Vaclav Havel. I miss him already.

For me this is perhaps his most essential quote: 

...you do not become a "dissident" just because one day you decide to take up this most unusual career. Your are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins with an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. 

And right on cue, from a truly spectacular piece on the rebellion in Russia by David Remnick, here comes a perfect example of what Havel was talking about, a civilian who discovers she is a dissident.

Or something:

...there are perfectly ordinary people in Putin’s Russia who find themselves wandering into a life of activism, as if by accident. In the summer of 2007, a diminutive businesswoman named Yevgenia Chirikova was walking with her husband in an oak wood near Sheremetyevo Airport called Khimki Forest. She saw that many of the trees were marked with red paint. When she returned home, she scanned various Web sites, and learned that the government had contracted to cut a huge swath through the forest’s swamps and floodplains, felling thousands of old oaks, to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Until then, Chirikova had been serenely upwardly mobile, concentrating on her small engineering company and her growing family. She enjoyed her walks in Khimki Forest, part of a greenbelt around the capital. “I didn’t know about the situation with Putin,” she said. “I wasn’t political. I was lazy.” Now she realized that if she didn’t raise her voice the trees in the forest would fall with barely a sound.

Chirikova, who looks like a homier Jean Seberg, turned out to be a charismatic civic leader, making effective speeches, keeping up active Web sites and Twitter feeds, and relentlessly drawing attention to the issue. As she organized demonstrations and acts of disobedience in Khimki Forest—members of her group set up a camp there and regularly thrust themselves in front of bulldozers, getting themselves arrested, and even beaten—she learned that the oligarch most closely connected to the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend and judo coach. She also discovered that local officials and Vinci, the French construction firm that was doing much of the work, were supremely uninterested in her movement’s argument that the highway could easily be built without doing damage to the forest. “The letters I got back boiled down to this: If it’s a federal project, then it’s legal,” she said.

Below a portrait of Yevgenia Chirikova, in the hoodie, with her enviro activist friends: 

You know how proud Havel is of her, and all such protesters. 

Disaster lurks behind every moment: Suddenly Last Summer

Nate Sinnott, who comes from the world of stage production, and has not directed before at this level, wrote his master's thesis on Suddenly Last Summer. Currently he has on a brilliant production of this play by Tennessee Williams at California Lutheran's Black Box Theater.

It’s shocking, symbolic — unlike most of Williams’ plays — and masterfully brought to life in Sinnott’s “experimental” staging. He points out that Williams wrote that the stage design “could be as unrealistic as a lyric ballet,” and chooses to put us inside the asylum with the cast. The grimy floor of black and white tiles angles down a muddy slope toward us. Broken pieces of asphalt lie about and it feels as if we’re inside a madness. Stark black and white images of strange natural phenomena on high screens add to the ominous mood. Behind the bars around the back of the stage, a phalanx of attendants dressed all in white stares coldly at Violet and Catherine as they battle desperately with their words. Disaster lurks behind every moment.

My full review here. 

 

Out walking with my father: Of course I remember

A new poem from Adam Zagajewski is always an occasion, and this one, blessedly, Threepenny Review put up for all to see: 

Out Walking with My Father
Grunwald Square, Gliwice

My father remembers next to nothing. With slight exceptions.
Do you remember fixing transmitters for the Home Army?
Of course I remember. Were you afraid?
I don’t remember. Was Mother afraid? I don’t know.
The garden on Piaskowa Street? Sure.
The scent of linden blossoms? No.
Do you remember Mr. Romer? Sometimes.
Skiing on Czantoria Mountain? I guess not.
Do you remember infinity? No, I don’t.
But I’ll see it soon. (He could say that.)


—Adam Zagajewski
(translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

 

What we have over-run and on which we rely

Here's a lovely profile of a poet new to me, Kim Stafford, from High Country News' Uncommon Westerners features series. 

The writer finds Stafford in a coffee shop in Portland. Nearby, writes Tara Rae Miner, is "a strip of untamed land, bounded by busy roads in a dense, urban landscape. It is not a park, simply a tract of woods that developers missed."

Stafford muses:

"a place like this is an island that's never been conquered, a metaphor for that wild part of the mind." That wildness, according to Stafford, is manifest in horsetail pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk and cottonwood seedlings growing in an abandoned storefront. Such things, he writes, "remind us of what we have over-run, but on which, in the end, we rely."

Horsetail pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk -- a picture of life itself.