Day 7

      musical introduction...

 

"...and on the seventh day God rested, and all this shit these events take place..." -an abstracted, generalized history of any similar species, based on our 20th century...

 

 

Part 1 of 6

 

Charmed with Beauty, Battered by Noise

   

Prelude

 

Charmed with beauty, battered by noise

unease rippled through a dying art;

a world of spirits, blood-soaked dissonance

overrun by levy-crumbled decadence

yet refined, a dangerous narcotic

murky, opulent surroundings

shaking the air, arousing curious sensations

ultimately paying the price-

claimed by overstylized, lobotomized dopamine addicts…

 

Hazy chords float over a welter of ugliness untamed

in splattering abstractions living in unassimilated undergrounds…

 

The art of the dead, alien sounds, atonal, minimal

selling on the market, reveled, reviled, ignored

between hot and cold wars, emigrations, social transformations

reshaping landscapes fenced off from society

until, crumbling, fall; articulated in obscure pandemoniums

on the outskirts of cultures cleaving the ether in novel flights…

 

 

 

 

 

Day 1

 

They sat at a plain wooden table, in earshot from the waterfall,

squinting in the sun in a kaleidoscope of moods

and indecipherable expressions;

a backwards place outside the sophisticated city,

owning its own rustic dialect, unintended slights,

and puzzling, sudden silences;

polar opposites tunneling from opposite sides of the mountain

in circuitous paths blazing spiritual transcendences,

passersby pressed against the window trying to catch a glimpse

or overhear… “You would not believe how vexatious

this matter has been for me…”

 

Hoteliers and pub philosophers buzzed of the tone-colored world to come

with a nervous electricity of the soft, slithering scales

and trumpeted fanfares heralding a succès de scandale;

critics fueled a polyrhythmic and polytonal anticipation

around the head of John the Baptist,

Salomé's scandalous features unsuppressed,

her stepfather aghast. “Kill that woman!”

How beautiful was the princess Salomé that night…

 

In the mountain sunrise the natural law of cosmic power

shines plucked with subdivisions from a harmonic scale

shimmering in overtones upon a vibrating string,

born of the diabolus in musica from the glitter and swirl of city life,

debonairly gliding through the contradictions of its world,

where unstable sexuality attempts to seduce ascetic rectitude,

a sensualist yearning for the moral life

reeling through the clouds like a drunken woman

stumbling over the body of a hero;

a hallucination of wings beating the air,

then all is quiet…

 

More visions, waltzes, clusters of impressionistic sounds

wavering through vulgar, thumping rhythms and exotic colors,

locked in a cistern prison with a toneless bass drum

and the strangulated cries of a double-bass in a smear of tones

awash in the mysteries of love and death…

 

“Hide the moon! Hide the stars!

Something terrible is going to happen!”

Obsessively elongated trills, glowering chords

mashed together at the moment of the kiss…

horns howl, woodwinds shriek on high

in eight bars of noise…

 

 

 

It is raining in the garden on the terrace,

applauding for ten minutes until the villa curtains were closed

upon the great masterwork.

The crowd murmured, “Vox populi, vox Dei.”

A flash of lightening illuminated the horizon,

where the past and the future were colliding,

living to a surreal old age, actually outliving itself,

springing eternal…

 

The center of the universe, cafés filled with people,

towered in mind-altering breadth and depth

as it is destroyed by forces that it itself has set in motion

from a portal to the beyond that crystallizes in weightless form,

time becomes space, transforming into a rock-like mass

then dissolving again into a cultural colossus…

 

Epilogue Day 1

A cool, composed façade behind which weird fires burned,

an outlaw spirit whose simple tune skated above strident dissonances,

who abandoned clearly demarcated structures

for poetically inflamed narratives

ending on hollow chords with scattered instruments;

it was gossiped that he would have made a fine match

for the Meister’s daughter, Eva

if not for his failings in morality, duty, and law,

which he illusioned were illusions themselves

like the stylistic squabbles of the day,

appreciated on a superficial level…

   

Day 2

 

In the lobby stood the embodiment of old Vienna

with a mixture of applause, boos, and shrugs

as pealing bells marched to the songs of rural soldiers

that suddenly crumble into tavern raucousness,

noise trampling on noise in a realm outside time and space,

at once a heroic struggle,, dreamily lyrical,

and triumphant in a wild, sprawling ending

that was not lost on the vox populi

of the steel town of Essen,

who strutted in front of a wall of eight horns screaming,

“Left! Left! Left, Right, Left!”

followed by a gaggle of unrestrained romantic effusion

of love songs from a different world,

all struggling to reconcile,

coming together in a strained marriage of ideas…

 

 

Wave after wave of fanfares, marching beats,

and in a shock tactic of sarcastic wonder

a giant drum that produced only a muffled thud

as all drifted away behind a metal door clanging shut.

 

Their friendship cooled, over-instrumented,

thinking too much and feeling too intensely,

sailing through life in ignorance of the world’s horror,

having suffered nothing and in need of no redemption,

waiting for their time to come,

when they are squeezed into an ever-shrinking bottle

with ever more men and ever more behemoth Teutonic creations…

 

Petty infighting, squabbles, and backstabbing

rode the forces of ignorance and inalienable reaction

into the new world…

 

The Telharmonium interfered with the local phone calls

for two seasons of electrification with crisp, vital sounds,

tinny and feeble, searching for a language of its own

in a Symphonia domestica,

then duly pilloried as a scandalous, moneygrubbing vulgarian

by the envious trapped in a fog bank off Sandy Hook,

dealing with the most horrible, disgusting, revolting,

and unmentionable features of degeneracy

corralled and branded in an opera from the Wild West

which remained a beacon in a darkening world…

 

The thirst for life continues as souls enter their higher realms,

nerve-wracked victims of the cosmos, contracting fatal infections

and leaving their tenth symphonies unfinished

as the funeral procession marches by to the thud of a dirge

derived from the overtones of a resonating plebian string…

 

They arrived at the summit, observed the sunrise,

then descended into the storm beneath the surface

of a song of longing shrouded in a mysterious, groaning chord…

   

Day 3

 

Pale, young, geniuses, criminals, infamy, anguish,

plotting from madness and death, hungry and proud,

from poverty and misery, plated in gold leaf everywhere

by a tolerant society, from the negative and critical,

caught in a cult of beauty and wasteful ornament

over industrial facades, the onset of insanity,

lust, violence, and rampant sexuality

in a feminized, aestheticized society

reactionary in its revolution,

withdrawing into a principled solitude,

pursuing nostalgia, romanticism, the past

with introspection and avante garde,

unraveling, warped by an unseen force

and the sacred wrapped in a mystery

sufficiently dull to impress the academically oriented

and sufficiently obscure to gain admittance

into the Temple of the Rose Graal Cross Kabbal Order

guarding the secret of the Grail

amid exotic sights and sounds

accumulating in dreamy towers tumbling over one another

in kaleidoscopic defiance of textbook rules

found in the Sumerian city of Ur,

luminous and unreal, bright and hazy,

a rainbow of narration shimmering into the upper air,

unresolved, self-sufficient in an unbounded nature,

new textures forming around it and shapes dissolve in the mist.

  

 

 

A faun, treasuring a memory on the echoing shore

a nymph veiled in the shade of sanctity

in a languid richness of classical harmony

evolving on the horizon into a love song,

the undulating dance exulting in a gasping climax

then lingering in ungrasped mysteries word for word

in riddled prose wherever it took him…

 

Wandering offstage, submerged in a liquid medium

of antique modes of the beautiful countryside

and the dawn of creation giving birth to a child

in elegance, clarity, and grace in dancing movements

of unearthly, hypnotic repetitions

begging to be whistled in the street

and played at the opera, cabarets, and cafés

of bohemian Paris and occult esotericism

in arcane philosophies floating up from the piano below…

 

A daring clandestine revolutionary dabbling in Rosicrucianism,

foundering in a Parsifal daze of dissonance

and knot-browed complexity that translated

into a language simple and new,

prolonging an instant, going nowhere,

developing into nothing, with no transition

from the lamp to the sun,

from the terrible depths within, illuminated by holy torches

to the brightly lit world of daily life…

 

He dropped the umlaut from his name when he fled

with the cantorial singers, living in modest circumstances,

subscribing to an encyclopedia and waiting for the ‘S’ volume to arrive

before composing a sonata, finely grained and lyrically potent,

setting off the central emotional crisis of his life

and spurring him to streetwise sophistication…

 

All is not well in romantic paradise, mesmerized and maddened

the critics and cliques were destructive,

with a few exceptions who endeavored to brighten up minds

darkened by decades of malice and ignorance

in servile devotion to rough sonorities

of a singer, two woodwinds, two string, and a piano

in a literary encounter with symbolism

and sensual secrets residing within the labyrinth of imagery

from an intense scene of farewell hanging on by the thinnest of thread

in the ghostly flow of an ice cold crystalline stream

sleeping deep in abandonment, then liberated,

free to pursue a new love, awkward, stammering

in servile devotion, and throwing off excess baggage

in anticipation of lean years to come

with unstable characters who had brutal expressionist tendencies,

who had a knack for gaunt-faced stares and bloodshot eyes,

who created minor masterpieces of their time…

 

 

 

The procession of ghosts moved in the chilly winds of another planet,

darkness upon their faces, then turning as if friends,

crying, rejected, plunged into insanity and despair,

victims of suicide, plunging ahead into an eternity of misery,

hesitating at a crossroads, considering their late romances

in fragments of hallucinations and four-note folk songs

dissolving into matrices of pain manipulated into expressive ends,

circling, weaving, dying embers of the holy fire,

fading whispers of the holy voice…

 

They dwelled on a cool, stately rhythm, not quite ready to go over the brink,

the light bizarre and surreal, their works dedicated to their wives

whom they had forgotten and then loved again,

staying in their otherworldly trance until serenity snapped

and they let out their pent-up rage before sinking into long goodbyes

and floating away into eighteenth century dreamworlds,

their pianos turning into percussion instruments

with battlefields of triple and quadruple forte

then disappearing into textures, gestures, and colors

hypnotically circling agitated rapid figures

screeching in their uppermost registers,

dripping blood onto marble, spitting, snarling flutter-tongued stumblings

through a moonlit forest in search of their missing lovers

while a distended monster saturates the senses and shuts down the intellect

with hair-raising voices plunging in cries of, “Help!”

that laughed at the suffering of Christ…

 

Not all was sound and fury; glimmers of worlds with quiet hidden valleys

lay between the loud thrust-up mountains, lay in a fog, hovering,

not harsh, but elusive, the rapt mood descending over warm sounds

chiming softly in place around two eyes staring unwaveringly and blankly ahead,

never blinking, heat rising in even the slightest of souls,

denying the necessity of the next development

with a chorus of laughter, catcalls, whistling, seat-rattling,

and ostentatious walk-outs amid cries of, “Stop it. Enough!”

and, “Quite! Continue to play!” until there was nothing left to react against,

leaving an uninterrupted succession of colors and rhythms

with signs of triumph and foul moods sitting in the most distant, darkest corner

with quizzical smiles on their faces…

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musical interlude...

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The brawlers were weeping, their cheers sounding like an apology,

yet the hero of the hour failed to appear; he was rather indifferent,

if not a little angry, standing alone against a world of enemies,

turning his back on the hysterical, worshipping crowd,

not realizing what he had set up, and thus, never able to achieve it again,

even beyond the limits of the universe, for the string of decisions had not been mapped,

leaving one laughing in perplexity at what was genuinely comical,

the sounds of the scuffle being the most harmonious sounds of the evening…

 

The crowd aligned itself as one mind, collectively, at the same rate

and from approximately the same distance, trapped,

having trouble understanding what was in front of them;

a half-lovely chord threw them into a concealed waltz rhythm

that raised a few hackles but generally had a calming effect

on the disturbed nerve endings of the art-loving middle classes

frayed by acidulous literary heroes who had a knack for turning out

sharp-edged barbs amid streams of commentaries, polemics, theoretical musings,

and aphorisms argued with charm and wit, and the will to annihilate…

   

Day 4

 

 

 

There is a moment of persuasion in justifying illogical, irrational dimensions

with convulsive emotions wrought with abandonment, betrayal, and humiliation,

the turbulence sensed by friends, directly, unconsciously,

forsaking taste, knowledge, upbringing, skill,

liberating oneself from all forms and symbols

and streaming through colors, sounds, movements,

seeking glances, gestures, a natural outcome

of historical processes, a result of necessity,

a creation causing confusion when it first appears

as it frees the enslaved dissonance

after centuries of repression…

 

They journeyed on, transatlantic flights,

expeditions to the poles, their arguments made sense

for a fleeting moment, then evaporated in indulged discords

of Theosophist spiritualism and devised harmonic languages

that vibrated around mystic chords at the foot of the Himalayas,

sung by astral souls in an attempt to prevent the annihilation of the universe

and the destruction of sexual differences in a future of art and speed,

of struggle, aggression, and self-fulfilled prophesies

predicted in a whistling, whispering pamphlet

written in several keys under the influence of Transcendentalism…

 

The vanguard hesitated, the collective bent on sweeping aside the established order

to realize a unique destination of gender ambiguity and reinforced tensions

in foggy atonal terrain with echoes of quaint melodies

gasping their last breaths with broken necks of comfort

in the midst of problems unsolved, hard truths and easy charms spinning

around an existential merry-go-round,

laughing, choking, crying, spilling forth all manner of chaos

in the ultimate pursuit of beauty…

 

They had become diseased, incoherent, unsystematic,

breeding with untamed souls, degenerating once again

from the mountaintop to the marshes, seeking places

free of pollution, though always mired in a muck of sexual allure

and dubious chords vagrant in inbreeding and imitation,

spies for sentimentality, agitators of the cosmopolitan;

catastrophe was inevitable, until times change when the mountaintop

once again becomes fresh and new unborn breezes…

 

They ran across a stereotyped ghetto Jew,

bent under the weird current of racial pseudoscience

and exiled into a dusty desert climate,

his rights and freedoms being picked off one by one,

expelled, boycotted, beatings within the cathedral of resentment

built up in misperceiving minds at the edges of society,

yet at the center of museum-like concert cultures

and illusions of historical prestige and guru status,

giving rise to intensities raised to the tenth power,

complicating themselves exponentially…

 

Reserved, cerebral, monkish in habits,

a scion of an old Austrian family,

fragrant in whole tone chords and lustrous orchestrations,

he enthusiastically changed course and reached for the farthest limits of tonality,

for new chords and timbers that a new generation could identify with

in successive stages of grief- presentiment of disaster,

the shock of the news, the screaming and wailing

that echo away over a restful Carinthian countryside

and the final memories of a smile…

 

 

 

 

 

The funeral procession began in ominous quiet,

rumbling, imploded characters, throaty, muted;

lyrical fragments groaning over subterranean chords,

rising to a shout, the wind falling behind,

crushed in a sequence of liquidating roars

as the age of noise begins…

 

He foreswore grand gestures and found his calling as a miniaturist;

amazing all with his ability to accomplish so much with so little,

compressed into an economy most extreme,

tiny plucks and plinks becoming massive statements

of the decision-making process,

though remaining delicate strokes on white paper,

most lasting for less than a minute,

less intense, cooling into clear, assimilatable linear patterns

gathered from the crumblings of dense, vertical masses of sonority

that could not be absorbed before the next arrived…

 

they communicated in silence, beyond the limits of language,

the boundary between the world of rational discourse and the soul,

at the brink of nothingness, passing unnoticed,

not played, but thought, between the noise of life and the stillness of death,

melting into one another until the ears are smacked like thunder

by the ensuing silence…

 

“Such a dear person.” Not a common eulogy at the funerals of geniuses

for whom life did not come easy;

a debonair, handsome man, ironic and self-effacing,

a fine-tuned sense of the absurd, sometimes dwelling a full century in the past,

modest, but not lacking in self-esteem, for he knew very well who he was;

aloof from utopian fantasies, having trouble keeping a straight face

when they demanded sex appeal; a dilapidated baron

who know how far down in the world he had come,

but scored a sales coup by purchasing three thousand teddy bears

at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair…

 

He had an unpromising adolescence, suffering academic failures,

fathering illegitimate children, pondering suicide,

his talents hardly prodigious;

but he was molded into a substantial force by an overbearing teacher

who had a habit of making barrages of demands-

bookkeeping, packing, legal problems, proof-reading, indexing;

the student’s adoration never ceased, but a proud determination grew in him

together with hidden resentments beyond his incubation

that culminated in his turning away from his teacher and toward the audience

with sweet sounds mixed with a love for mathematical complexity for its own sake,

swirled in a phantasmagoric angry mob spilling into the streets

and whips of clouds curling upward around an explosion of hammerblows

carrying out reprisals upon those who resisted,

doing irreparable damage to its reputation as the cradle of modern civilization…

 

 

 

“War!” We felt purified, liberated, an enormous hope,

our gaudiest fantasies of violence and destruction come to life,

giving rise to war psychosis where the ‘new’ sweeps away the ‘old’

in impatient shakings of the broom waxing militant,

shaking with its own spirit and its own God,

seeking slavery for the mediocre, killing several hundred in one town,

burning down a medieval library in another…

 

The atrocities did not cease with shame, the Great Event was the Cause,

massacres not simple mishaps, it was the total war

of the apocalyptic mind-set not yet weaned from murder,

lice, bed bugs, infections not yet cured by the village schoolmaster,

plump and balding, volunteering out of solemn duty

to treat the student-soldiers dwarfed by their helmets

and the ardent conflict of falling in love with an enemy maiden…

none posing any particular threat to the enemy,

confined to desk jobs and playing in the military orchestras

under beastly superiors who made life miserable in their own ways,

filling notebooks not with gifted genius,

but with instructions for the proper conduct of trench warfare

and proper military bureaucratic parlance,

though in the margins he penned his next opera,

the whole history thrown into a poetic abstraction

of what to keep and what to discard

from the mental instability of a murder’s mind,

in a backwards world where military discipline

speeds mental deterioration, and fussy Captains,

sadistic doctors, callous comrades and diseased atmospheres

are the preference of the town, jumping from fantasy

into the real…

 

He had to flatter his way through hell,

familiar forms buried under layers of impasto paint,

scraping like a razor over hallucinations of a common-law wife

while the world is ablaze with mistresses

instinctually lusting for muscular drum majors,

a world balancing sexual desires with religions feelings

while doting on the children who are victims of a large injustice-

the ruthless urge and rationale to reduce humans to data,

singing an aria to theory and fame

until the brutish drum majors force themselves upon the mistresses…

 

So the war continued in dissonance, the cruelty of authority,

the relentlessness of fate, the power of economic oppression,

lusts, jealous rages, tender love forged into the most intense expressions,

beauty and terror skirmishing, fighting for hollow souls

in prideful, historic forms and uncomplicated tenderness

full of drunken revelers while the stage band plays a Mahlerian waltz…

 

The barracks was full of atonally snoring soldiers, he could not find rest;

the mistress’s mind swayed back and forth between the calm glow of Christian verities

and the virus-like action of fear and guilt;

they walked by a pond, commenting on the red rising moon,

hints of outlaw sexuality on the brink of destruction…

 

 

 

 

From the threshold of audibility to the threshold of pain

the scene spans human limits,

the tavern’s out of tune upright piano plays a rickety polka

as blood drips from his hands and the locals accuse him of murder;

he rushes out to the pond to wash his hands and sinks beneath the waves…

“How still the pond is this evening…”

 

A last appeal to humanity through the audience,

a wordless oration of confessions of we, the poor people,

sheets of sound pounding out a lament for two human beings

amid the worldwide festival of death…

 

Are we to assume a despairing conclusion,

the children growing into their father, perpetuating the cycle of misery,

breeding violence from violence,

or will they escape to a distant city

where unhappy families can start anew…

   

A crowd had gathered, an out of the ordinary emotional event

for expert eyes, a spring gala of décolletage, pearls, egret headdresses,

plumes of ostrich, tails and feathers side by side with the showy rags

of the race of lower aesthetes, a thousand nuances of snobbery,

super snobbery, counter snobbery in a rite of spring,

the zeppelin moored in the middle of the street reflecting disquieting rumors

in an unapologetic prism of twists and distortions,

like vegetation bursting out of the earth, clashing at every node;

“Will it last a very long time this way?”

“Till the end, my dear…”

 

Classical gestures were discarded for near anarchy,

shakes, tremblings, shiverings, stampings, jumps crude and ferocious

among hills and trees of weirdly bright colors and shapes from a dream…

 

Overtones of class warfare erupted, canes brandished,

thumping upon opera hats, all incredibly fierce

until the language was understood, plain-spoken folk song melodies,

syncopations of irresistible potency,

boos turned to bravos, confusion to pleasure,

adoration in the street in a riot of delight…

 

Smartly savage, low and sophisticated, style and muscle

intertwined in physical spheres beyond the theater of the mind,

rhythms matching the energy of dance, sonorities depicting the hardness of life

in a pre-urban life, before refinements, when undomesticated boys turned into stags

and drank from the cool mountain springs that offered designs of supremacy

beyond the hulking fortresses, into the noise-making spirit of Dada

that fell through the cracks of notation and deep cultural differences…

 

They came from outside the city, yet remained city dwellers for most of their lives;

they never shook the feeling, however, that they came from somewhere else-

hamlets, peasants who could not afford to feed all of their children,

a welcomed scholarship for one to study in the city,

bringing humble origins and a fierce work ethic,

returning home to their villages with fresh eyes and ears-

flashing movement, sweat, screams, the fury of the fiddler

in abrupt, acerbic phrases leaping over large intervals,

jabbing away at a single note, then

following with smooth, ingratiating contours

that suggest rural life in all of its complexities,

time stopping for a luxurious instant, pulsing in heavy-beating chords,

gliding down, beating its wings, then soaring again

as two who have found each other and sing each other’s melodies

in a shock of hope…

 

Scorned or prettified in literature, they became flesh and blood people,

taken out of their adorned display cases,

away from the contaminating influence of cosmopolitan culture,

set loose on the social margins in personal upheaval,

received by the chaos of the outer world,

receiving romantic advances at first with bemusement and then with alarm,

all recorded on an Edison cylinder,

accelerating in ornamental passages which slowed at the end,

asymmetrical phrases, bent notes, wrong notes added for flavor and bite

in an archaic avant-garde defying banality and convention,

wandering free…

 

Their quest led them onward and inward, but the trip lasted only two weeks,

as they fell ill with fever; they planned a return trip the following summer,

and researched diets that would keep them healthy,

but the war put a hold on their plans,

and they passed time studying minute details of empathy,

and reconstruct them in the privacy of their garret

as they held sway over their subtly authentic imaginations

between their mother’s memories of a folkish past

and their father’s dreams of a mechanized future,

renewing the old language without disturbing the peace,

their ghostly figures dematerializing into splashing, skittering movements

amid bell tones resonating in spaces of explosive color

then freezing on static sonorities and rhythmic layering

in a rush of sound in a glorious rude noise from the beyond,

in the dangerous, drunken energies of the invading foreign hordes…

 

He had an egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and a luxurious mouth

that gave him an insectoid appearance,

yet he was greeted not by hostile fire but by ceremonious salutes,

kept hidden, bewitched with the vessel of primitive energies traveling east,

dealing in abstractions and folkish enthusiasms,

big with the seed of barbarism that will impregnate the thinking world…

 

Manners elegant, clothes impeccable, jokes lethal,

a peculiar elastic walk with a syncopated nod of his head

kept in trim, gymnastic condition, shrugging shoulders

and sudden freezes in mid-speech to punctuate his arguments

with broad, sarcastic grins common among the old, ruling class

in their spacious country estates,

yet with a luminosity of surface and intensity of feeling

that contrasted with the shadow cast over his home

by the lack of emotional warmth beyond the bland and imitative,

and that an urbane impresario was on the lookout for

in order to stun his audiences with the sorcery and spells of the firebird,

full of natural, flowing movement of exhilarating immediacy

jumping in from nowhere, snapping in midair,

tapering off in languid shrugs then turning to mimic the energies

of the urban crowds tired of the murkily mystical prophets

descending from the mountaintops…

   

 

   

Part 2 of 6

 

Machinations in Action

   

Day 5

 

A young girl danced herself to death, in pagan devotion,

the holy element being missed, in a historically accurate pagan ritual

on the theme of spring, pulverized into thematic bits piled high in layers

and reassembled into curious collages and montages

resulting in an apotheosis of rural peasantry,

rough-grained and brittle, pungent as they began their stomp,

back and forth in off-beat silent accents, up and down,

that the body’s movement is forced to replace

in ghastly syncopations that have the field to themselves,

asymmetrical timeline pulses jostling to a hidden master pulse,

causing the onlookers to spill their scotch in ecstasy

in a sweat-inducing crescendo, viscerally exciting,

even celebratory, gritty, swaying between languor and violence,

crawling, ghoulish, bouncing figures snaking in original ideas,

quick and spooky black-clad hosts in a forward propulsion of kicks,

expanding, contracting, until exhaustion, replacing intensity,

wins in a fatal climax, the earth tiring itself out,

and at the end a morbid spasm…

 

Such a female sacrifice was unusual,

some suspected the mechanisms of a jilted lover,

not of ancient instincts, but of a twisted bloodthirstiness

mocking the shortcomings of its peoples,

and quite possibly the contemporary West in an atavistic urban regression,

at first chilled, thrilled, and rapturous, then later, despondent moods

of regret, suffering, before a moral quality can be gleaned…

 

The guns continued to fire with the same patriotic fervor as previous wars,

long-standing resentments boiling to the surface,

foreign arts banned as ‘fatal infiltrators’ to match the fatal follies of the adjoining enterprise,

spurious grounds and accusations as insidious as U-boats

in a not-so-absurd paranoia considering the deep shock of total war,

marauding soldiers, people burned alive, drowned, torpedoed

as they clapped, slapped with opposite hands, and said, “Hey!”

 

He was killed during an early-morning assault on an enemy trench,

first enraged and enlisting as a truck driver, deployed just behind the front lines,

witnessing the ghastly aftermaths of battle, weaving back and forth on the road

to avoid shell holes and incoming rounds, all on a sunny day;

in an abandoned town he ran across a bombed-out château of muted terror,

found a fine Erard piano, and sat down to play some Chopin.

In an unreal experience typical of the war years,

averting its gaze from the stalemated carnage,

paying homage to the harpsichord suites of Couperin and Rameau,

emotions smoldering under the exquisite surfaces,

those who recently died in battle shuffling by in a procession of ghosts,

hints of muscle, glints of steel, then, passing overhead in a metallic stream,

a solitary biplaned hero of the sky, giving an unconvincing reassuring wave…

 

 

 

 

 

It was a period of experimentation, uncertainty, glancing around

to see what the rivals were doing in their motorcars

speeding alongside the locomotives in wild, precise clarity,

refusing to behave in proper atmosphere like a conventional work of art,

unsentimental and abstract in a trendy noise created for their hosts and exploiters

endowed with lavish resources which became too extravagant,

born of parental design rather than free romance,

with lamenting cries and meandering solemn chants

as they buried the body alongside his own;

the estate was handed over to farmers

in false grandeur and organized ugliness,

an icy fury possessed his untravirtuosic soul,

but during the daytime air raids, with trumpets blaring,

whistles blowing, church bells ringing, and people singing and chanting defiantly,

his death was hardly noticed…

 

Traumatized masses erecting an emotional coldness to violent sensations,

the horrified mind behind a barrier in the distance,

hyper-alertness turning away from the luxurious, the mystical

in a post-war reality…

 

Then the parade came, low culture sideshows designed to entice customers in

becoming the main attraction- Chinese magicians, acrobats,

the Little American Girl, short circuits, the sheriff’s daughter,

stampedes, cowboys, elevators, steamships, dynamos,

attempting to draw and audience in an age of pop culture,

radio, cinema, music hall numbers, sports, funny uncles

who sang badly as nightingales…

 

Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Simultaneism, Surrealism

salons surviving the decline of aristocracy by marrying into new industrial money,

eager to present new looks each season,

illuminating connections between the arts-

painters, poets, playwrights, composers, jacks of all trades

though all distant from the real life they were depicting,

African mumbo jumbo (“Banana lou ito kous kous”),

Brazilian percussions, machine music

all serving their anti-Teutonic purposes;

Saturday evening treks into the wilderness of the modern city-

steam-driven merry-go-rounds, mysterious booths, the Daughter of Mars,

shooting galleries, games of chance, menageries, the din of mechanical organs

blaring out music hall numbers on their perforated rolls;

when the crowd became too large, the soiree would move to a wine store

with jazz-like music; when that crowd became too large,

the club settled on rue Boissy d’Anglas with English upper-class bohemians,

wealthy Americans, French aristocrats, lesbian novelists from Romania,

Spanish princes, fashionable pederasts, distinguished diplomats…

 

 

 

 

 

They had rhythm in Harlem, meticulously studied by monocled Euros

breathless against the beat of the drum and twisting rhythms

breaking patterns of melodic lines from the depths of centuries

singing from table to table; they jotted down the despairing pathos,

dramatic feeling, and moments of unbridled joy flashing a smile out of the darkness

and back to the creation of the world in a Jelly Roll Blues

selling its soul to the devil for untold riches and a Creole band

assembling a fantasy world from scraps of evidence…

 

So the jazz lasted all of three years, disappearing with the skyscraper

and with the reappearance of the rose,

like a beneficial storm that leaves behind a clear sky and stable weather;

period and lifestyle modernism, orderly and stylish in ornates,

escaping recent history in tattered scores of Baroque

arranged for modern performance,

adding elongated, truncated, discontinuous, irregular, angular anomalies

in an ultra-modern confectionery of melancholy

paired with Bach and played in salons…

 

 

 

 

Far below, recent triumphant vulgarity was being admitted

to whichever purgatory punishes such triumphant vulgarity…

 

With the personality of an artist, aloof, intellectual, secretly lesbian,

she sat in front, in a high-backed chair, so she would not be distracted;

much displeased her, nothing surprised her; the host of period modernism;

“Madame la Princesse! Four pianos have arrived!”

“Let them come in…”

 

The racier salons played host to lifestyle modernism-

high fashion, low culture, sexual play,

the rules laid down by the Ballet Russes

which moved to the playboy capital of Monte Carlo;

Le Train Bleu conveyed the beautiful people to the action-

gigolos, flappers, golfers, tennis champions

all attired in sportswear by Coco Chanel,

monuments to frivolity, catering to a gay subculture

in tight bathing suits and Grecian shorts of a giddy ambience;

twenty charming and flirtatious women frolicking about

three strapping young fellows dressed as oarsmen

who looked more at each other than the girls

in a dance of modern narcissism, jagged grace catching in the voice

cart-wheeling in a nasty champagne kick lasting for years…

 

He reached the apex of his hipness, giving interviews,

taking homes on the Côte Basque and the Côte d’Azur,

a fling with Coco, a long affair with a bohemian émigré,

his premiers A-list events, his life a name-dropping affair,

after-parties on the Seine

with Picasso creating a sculpture out of children’s toys…

spending as much time explaining as creating,

amusing himself with the flat-toned inexpressions of a researcher

defending his work to fellow experts…

“My piece is an object, and object composed of the matter

from which it is composed, the matter a sufficient object in its own form,

the form creating weight and occupying a place in space as an object

and the matter that it is composed of, powerless to express anything

other than itself, certainly not feelings, attitudes, psychological states,

or natural phenomenon…”

 

The love letter was written to antiquated arts of old imperial styles,

themes and variations, modulations through major and minor keys

unfurling with long cantabile lines and stately processional rhythms,

neoclassicism to its core, on player pianos and gramophones,

fitting neatly on each side of a disc neo-Baroque ostinatos and arpeggios

that ironically suggested an infusion of machines in action…

 

Broken spiritual bridges repaired in a harmonious new world order,

in a great international festival featuring the last and best contributions to the art

from each nation, creating odd alliances, hailing each other before the old war resumed

in an illusory economic boom of rampant stock speculation,

names made with one or two attention-getting gestures guaranteeing publicity,

jazz-dancing kitchen utensils, gramophones rebelling against their masters,

the new becoming a battleground of styles between snob aesthetes with no pressing responsibilities

and other motley gatherings of elites, while the paying workingman preferred Brahms…

 

 

 

 

It was no country for old men; the youngest had the metabolisms

to digest fresh paradigms overnight rather than facing agonizing adjustments,

a youth-mad environment in a tangled chaos vomiting thick and fast

with watchwords baiting the next envy in a pitiless spirit that a postwar era required…

the verdicts were bizarre, engendering dazzling satires and incarnations

beginning with a nostalgic three-quarter time waltzing through the twilight,

then through the fury of war, the wedding of pride with the machinery of destruction,

then in snarls and rattling, the sassy, brassy fierce aftermath of a flapper gin parties

funded by the same old money as the prewar balls, spinning out of control,

personal histories being obliterated in the cartographic fiats of peace treaties

and old allegiances making one a quaint anachronism, like Gypsy fiddling

as styles migrated and cultures intermingled in stylized noise

revolving around a ‘right’ note, a base chord of a peacock melody,

strings whipping up dust clouds around manic dancing feet,

drums bang the drunken lust of young men, brass plays secular chorales

in neoprimitive scenes, a purely mental space danced across from end to end…

 

Grabbed by the shoulders in a fireworks of personalities- seductresses,

tragic heroines, vixen falling to the guns of poachers, tri-centenarian madams

as cold as ice, the military now rustic in the lashing rain, lightening,

then a clearing sky, a spell of moonlight, a pale sun running amok

and slaughtering the chickens, being banished to the woods

with the clammy little monsters of the pond before the walk into paradise…

   

Day 6

 

In a moment of high anxiety, asking for divine aid,

then looking under the bandage, and seeing the abscess gone.

It was a miracle.

Experiencing a religions reawakening, writing several sacred works,

following a fashionable reaction to an ethical and spiritual decline.

Then a hallucinatory epiphany in Picasso’s elevator,

kicking a opium addiction, and becoming an old Slavonic Catholic.

 

Art became well-made, complete, proper, durable, honest,

strung together in earnest without self-conscious gestures,

gnashing against a damaged, decaying grandeur creaky and clichéd,

bouncing and thrusting into the archaic Latin

of a marbleized statue dripping with the acid streaks of millennia,

in contemplation of itself; then the pendulum swings too far

and lands in shoddy quick-buck exploitations that give the whole endeavor

a sour taste…

  

A smooth, unbroken surface survives the attack of frauds and cheap imitators

and became a ballet of precious choreography in a union of body and spirit,

a symphony of psalms, a mosaic-gilded interior beneath a vaulted, heavenly dome,

set for eternity in a frozen architecture in ethereal tension,

the maker letting down his guard and melting the heart…

 

Terror and longings given an ear in an answered prayer,

the panic of speed and noise, the plunge of reality

shattering, and invigorated, one escapes the temple

and returns with the dance of the earth…

  

A social gadfly in a time of cultural unease,

chronicling the city’s concert life,

a primitive birthright, home to rebellious intellectuals on the social margins,

drinking from a grail of social progress and innovation,

yet lacking the polish of a conservatory education;

speaking through a ghost writer

of all that is pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious,

bold, merry, and evil…

 

 

 

 

 

 

They dragged him through the town, tortured him, then burned him at the stake

the story went, painting an innocent victim of a spectacle, a sick social sport,

of thousand people coming from all around to witness,

people cruel, vicious, heartless.  I had to research this...

Vengeance was wreaked by the victim’s family on her murderer,

spontaneously and unplanned as he disembarked the train that brought him back…

the newspaper had given the story of his capture, confession, and imminent return...

impropriety? Certainly, but one wonders how these stories evolve

into such prisms of distortion- no innocent man, no sport, no stake,

just a fabrication and magnification of an imaginary, generalized insanity,

to rub the universal crime of prejudice into those that one is prejudiced against;

making a phenomenal sound in a realm beyond that of the written note…

 

The say he thought that he was cooler than thou;

I say he knew he looked good and put it to great use…

 

The human edifice, consisting of science and art,

fashioned of components great and small, grand and miniscule,

bold and touching, sits ready on the launch pad,

ready to be shot into the far unknown reaches of the galaxy,

pride its fuel, crowing on a cosmic fence

in the neighborhood of a sleeping universe, until someone throws an old shoe…

 

New lines of transmission were appropriated and used to get the message out,

broadcasting on the lower frequencies, and the message is found wanting-

concern for the audience is absent…

 

The ground is fertile and new; there is no recognizable center,

no centuries-old traditions, the race consisting of invisible men

writing Wagnerian operas that are never staged, performances few,

giving violin lessons in oblivion;

give me that oblivion, it is mystique in disguise…

 

“How shall we raise our status?” The gifted young discipline problem wondered;

“Shall it be through art and great achievement?”

He lived out his grandiose dreams, tried, and failed.

Concern for the audience was absent…

 

All the children were listening, contemplating, evaluating,

they were not easily fooled, and when fooled, not for very long…

Fine skills went only so far- getting one affixed to the grand human edifice

of showy pride, then sent out into deep space, crowing on the cosmic fence post

until someone throws an old shoe…

 

“You are a stranger in a strange land. We are going to become friends.

Come to my house for lunch.

The gathering will included many leading personalities.

You are too exotic to arouse racial fears, and you will be well received,

for you have concern for your audience…

 

Dreaming of a better world with mixed feelings,

he sees how a national and racial spirit can be inflamed,

but he was not taking notes, and so he was ushered out

and the performance cancelled…

 

He fell into a pattern of confrontational jabs and hidden stings,

his mother was distressed to see his education going to this end,

she pressed for safe, puerile imitation; he did not stand tall enough

to see over either wall- for concern for the audience was absent…

    

He was a jazz ensemble in a Gilded Age of courtly values,

roaring to a disruptive audience seeking to fill the still-mostly-empty universe

with variety that took the form of the foxtrot and speakeasies,

growing from a well-behaved child into a rambunctious adolescent

emerging baffled from the subway, peering in all direction to get his bearing,

trying avant-garde assaults, or adornments of the traditional with the modern,

or using age-old devices to new effect;

his blind forging ahead dominated the scene for decades to come…

 

 

 

 

 

It was an art of noise, exuberant in tone, visceral in impact,

distinctive in everyday objects, eroticizing the machine,

creating an avatar of skyscraper mysticism of fierce lights,

synthetic textures, immense tensions of precision,

with cruel harmonies and battering rhythms,

and, once tired of that, back to comfort again

with compensating spells of delicate and exquisite lyricism…

 

After a time with the ultra-modern, he affixed a handkerchief to the end of his cane

and raised it in a gesture of surrender,

longing to return to folk motifs and popular tunes…

 

The ultra-modernist movement hurtled forward,

filling concert halls without actively catering to the public,

difficult music without commercial restrictions,

and, as so often happens with the new,

becoming intolerant and resentful of consumerism and vulgarity…

 

She delivered vocal lines in a classic blues style,

standing in the middle of a seething, discordant harmonic field

of polytonal chords and polyrhythmic chaos moving through diverse spheres

without becoming beholden to any of them,

passing by at a dreamy distance with refugees from the heartland

calculating obscure images with simplistic sounds,

mixing in a sensuous strangeness and an elegiac warmth…

 

Getting so late, should be sleeping…

speaking in riddles that become everyday,

sung by schoolchildren for time forgotten out of basic textbooks

of cubist sculpture and surrealist collage,

not in opera houses or salons, but on Broadway

with exotic racial allures, a surprise hit running for sixty performances,

sophisticated city dwellers humming the improbably tunes

about “Pigeons, alas…” then, when the fad was over,

he faded into writing criticism, living on the surface of his consciousness…

  

Thunder from an exiled, persecuted race

shook loose from primitive energies masked by adorned sophistication,

plundering the past, feeding off the present,

working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas,

identifying, coordinating talents

to bring about a grand slap in the face;

the backdrop an ambience of suffering and heartbreak

in show-stopping moments of melancholy

transformed into individual vessels of spiritual might,

transporting the angst of every downtrodden race

before they rise,

often to become the very monsters they seek to escape

as they sing the blues…

 

and so he achieves sweet harmonies from discordant tendencies

in flashing revelations before dropping out of sight

in endless hours of practice for the performance that will never come;

playing in the end only for lost spirits whom he will soon join,

to inhabit the void into which the creations of artists go,

his a simple figure against a cool and complex background,

learning as he goes, shuffling among conventions,

then ending oddly with pomp and circumstance after a rhapsody in blue;

a dizzying sequence of modulations played at ninety-five percent speed

that allows the audience to pause and explore between each note,

filling the empty spaces with their lives, longings, joys, heartbreaks,

gaining no notice or acclaim or high-level admirers,

content with the fascination engendered,

with giving a glimpse of new possibilities

and deeper synthesis that puzzle the flapper crowd;

and finally posing with a boxer and his punching bag…

 

Up, then down, sketching a tour of impressionistic bubbles in balletic sonorities,

alternating between plush tones and busy transitions,

then into a larger structure of kaleidoscopic developments

stacked with wickedly dissonant polytonal combinations

that two dancer/actor/comic/singers act out next to the piano,

every emotional nuance, every thought expertly transmitted to the listener,

a complete unbridled story told in total clarity without one word being uttered,

rhythms, chords, and scales in multiple modes intertwined with every breath,

each heartbeat and glance, each hope, each fear with every uncertainty

that inevitably take their courses, testing and trying love to its utter limits…

 

 

Did he navigate between diatonics, blues, klezmerish, whole-tone, chromatics?

Yes. Did he do it for its own sake? No.

They were tools, in the hands of a sculpture, and they played,

as if this were the only performance…

 

It was a summery, humid kind of stillness, a mother’s sweet lullaby;

summertime, and the living’ is easy…

 

Gifts and ornaments, a fusion of simplicity with complexity,

the simple winning out in the end

through freedoms of expression that move around at will,

irritating the trained singers in the cast

with power and vigor that lacked the correct credentials,

yet rated the highest compliments;

he created the most exquisite fantasy land

with a heart that fell between two stools,

one of the highbrow artist and the other of the lowbrow entertainer,

between rigid, notated score and the passionate, improvised spontaneity

of an accomplished storyteller,

coming as close as any during his time to the high-low art of Mozart and Verdi…

 

Then a brain tumor and a sudden death, the surface only scratched by his pen,

leaving unfinished business, frozen ideas,

and dangling directions with goals marooned,

sending smoke signals and writing an S.O.S. in the sand…

 

Then the illusion burst, and out poured the misery and rage

of all that was wrong with life in a wild, untamed universe given no order,

its mysteries unraveled only to lay in tangles of still-incomprehensible ends.

“If Bach were alive today, he would be as confused as I am" he said…

 

So they developed at a blinding speed, offering a high density of events

in limited space and time, in variation and development,

while he in contrast lilted from leaf to leaf like a butterfly,

tasting each in turn, unhurried,

finding a logical way, then transcending it with his own voice

which shuffled in from the cornfield, holding the attention of the cool crowd of onlookers

with freewheeling cadenzas and coloratura ornamentations

borrowed from past centuries, intricately rehearsed spontaneity issuing forth

and coming out sounding like no one else…

  

The incognito celebrity lingered backstage, dressed like a stagehand,

listening intently to the upward scales where churches outnumber cabarets,

where a lone tinkerer could step out and find equal pleasure in collaborating;

themes of conflict, crisis, collapse,

where, from deep backgrounds solos appear, sing out, then disappear again

into a life of dissonance…

 

Come Sunday the tom-toms beat out an invasion warning,

the mixes of races and genders under threat of rushed lulls

that still outshine anything of their time,

exposing anxieties from opposing camps,

becoming a messenger between until the dangers pass

and a new day dawns in the midsummer night;

and finally, listening to the discords of his own sweet thunder fall away

with those of other invisible men composing in a collective art of strangers…

 

   

Day 7

 

“Desperately difficult” said the Devil, in his traversal of our imaginary landscape,

giving us his full meaning only in front of an audience,

a lonely being of terror that lives off a crowd’s panic and doubt,

interjecting at crisis points of manic-depressive extremes

of alcoholic oscillations between grandiosity and self-loathing

while avoiding those in direct communication with the Almighty…

 

Encumbered by prestige, feeling worthless, unable to work,

isolation and loneliness driving him to despair, until he realized

it was all in his head…

 

A rustic house outside Helsinki, Finland; inside a desk;

upon the desk an Eighth Symphony, unfinished, the fireplace aglow, beckoning…

“It is almost ready” he stated several times over the course of several years;

it never saw the light of day, the composer giving in to the seductions of despair:

“I am fated to die forgotten…”

 

The house was named after his wife, the atmosphere heavy and musty,

the composer’s spirit still pent up inside, throwing manuscripts into the fire;

outside the forest stretches out in a curving canopy, sunlight penetrating down

upon many paths that all lead into a profound stillness,

away from human habitat, darkness descending, mists rolling in, with no way back…

 

So was the forest of his mind, an inner landscape at once sublime

and an embodiment of an inchoate fear of the void…

 

It became a land without music just as the glory of the empire was fading,

old, worn-out antiquated forms left with no new breath,

haunted by obsolescence, lamenting for lost worlds, elegies for the golden age

and forebodings of disaster, ghosts wandering in a world grown alien

who cannot cast out their old gods and bend their knees to new ones,

apparitions from the woods, resigning to their small, modest places,

boasting no vanguard credentials, yet building pillars

that support the domes of the future…

 

They lagged behind the intellectuals in appreciating the more adventurous,

but were quicker to perceive value than the politicians of style

who issue ill-aimed criticisms at eventual canonical masterpieces

by those whom the style-mongers love to hate…

 

He was his country’s only celebrity,

his monumental head gracing every hundred-markka banknote,

his name an impetus for enormous sums of money spent on the arts,

the Swedes forming the upper crust of their society;

he belonged to this elite, yet blending traces of ancient tribal rituals

of local invented mythologies that spurred a nationalist movement

by those who could not grasp things or obtain the minds of men,

yet who in the end slay guilt upon the end of a sword,

echoed in a men’s chorus, with soloists and orchestra…

 

He heard runic songs chanted by folksingers in patterns of three trochaic beats,

vowels stretched for dramatic effect, the language bent in sympathetic response,

the harmony drifting away from overlapping melodies twining around chords lying beneath,

rumbling clusters massed together in tone-poem suites,

mirages of dramas of the heroic soul in murmuring textures of defiance

crawling slowly, rising and falling in damning records of villainy by the Tsar…

 

Censored, clandestine, politically charged secret programs

fortified with alcohol, disappearing afterwards for days,

eyes rolled back in heads, running up large debts, beset by illnesses,

until cracks appeared in the façade…

 

A move to the country was to remedy all that,

but the world was all-embracing, its fast-moving environs

causing intrigue, alarm, sensuous radicalism,

bringing illusions of new possibilities of liberated intellects

composing in a claustrophobic grimness for cellos, basses, and bassoons

in ambiguous whole-tone collections slowed by the heavy gravitation force

exerted by foreign bodies running circular in unresolved conflicts

and around immovable obstacles and ending in shrugs of defeat…

 

He attempted to build a funerary character, stumbling through many attempts,

faltering, then proceeding with vigor, never escaping the uncertainty that steals back in,

a being facing extinction, a psychological makeup drawn to melancholia,

its loneliness an unbroken form upon the door, closing softly in blissful, tragic moods…

 

People avoided his eyes in a riot of silence, smiles furtive, ironic, taken aback,

not many came backstage to pay their respects to one who found joy in darkness

after he had given so much joy in creations rotating around epiphanic goals,

searching for meaning in microcosms of life that never quite touch the ground,

weightless fragments dissolving from one movement to the next

until they are hurtling forward, accelerating in syncopated sidesteps

with spells of calm flying in formation, circling overhead,

disappearing in the solar haze like silver, gleaming ribbons,

reappearing three days later, giving a strange splendor to his life…

 

A spiritual force in animal form, horns in a flurry of action in a layered time;

the winds launch a wistful bear of maternal logic,

gestating dissonances rocking loose, in convulsive transformations

reborn as a new being split wide open then shattering apart with a pulse of energy,

becoming the sun…

 

Pursuing a final symphonic synthesis, he broke at the height of his powers,

reduced to a smattering of minor pieces and phantoms of symphonic evolutions

transcribed from the noise of nature, a continuous blur without formal divisions

from the rustling of the forests and the lapping of lakes upon mossy shores,

overtones from meadows looked upon with a merciless eye

slashing away as if they were the scribblings of inept students,

yet keeping the harbingers of silence at bay…

 

Dissolution, decay, liquidation echoing in the sober spirit underpinned with harmony

fleeing into a mythic past with brutal brass and gossamer strings

whose textures speed, dancing on the wind to adagio hymns and scherzo dances

that united the darker and lighter sides of his imperceptible emotions…

 

The stars dwelled in dim, nocturnal moods, melting in the heat of elation

that teeters on the edge of chaos, growling funeral marches play

as catastrophe looms; metallic spheres radiant then resigned,

hands outstretched from a figure disappearing into the night behind deep acoustical throbbings…

 

He came from a dissonance of a deeper order,

altering the consciousness without assaulting the ears with mental storms,

a wanderer lost in the woods, struggling to find a path through the thickets,

the home found, having a hollow ring, pushed deep into the forest

with no exit in sight from the burden of grand thoughts twisting and deformed…

 

He left, then returned, sweetly nostalgic in dance and song, playfully archaic,

restless and adventurous, setting aside his magical powers

for some semblance of a normal life,

bedimming the mutinous winds, the azured vault, and the rattling thunder

shaking around the stout oak until the noontime sun waked the sleepers

among the pine and cedar groves,

loosing his airy charms breaking on the fathoms of the earth and plummeting down

from a sky at war, the walking dead in rage and pain then settling into quiet hymns…

 

 

Hw struck a note with the times, his reputation grew, his celebrity wide,

the last of a line of heroes, a new prophet free from artificiality and snobbery;

he then crushed himself in his own good time with boring Nordic dreariness

and stillborn affectations that far outstripped the attacks from the other camps;

checking his mailbox daily for terse telegrams, he receives one, then nothing,

with the world in flames, he was destined for ruin…

 

At ninety-one he made his last walk in the woods,

scanning the sky for cranes flying south for the winter in a ritual autumn,

crying their music, circling about, then soaring away,

having his score right all along, nesting on the outskirts of perpetual progress

in thematic deliquescence, evolving forms, and unearthly timbers

formerly rejected by punkish youth with scrap-metal percussions

rolling in avant-garde processions from microscopic materials

as radicals are exposed as conservatives and conservatives as radicals …

    

Day 8

 

Exploratory Footfalls

 

Blood on the wall, the city in its last months, the stains a last message,

a warning, in a mysterious pattern from the corpse, his former lover;

a state inviting melodrama, violent acts a prelude to the next chapter

of even more horrendous scenes; a city glowing with promise and threats,

a city of a myriad outcomes, embodying its culture in spirits of opposites,

the rush of victory and the humiliation of defeat, reinventing itself daily,

the first all-night city, a city without shame…

    

He joined in the frenzy, picking up the rhythms of jazz,

the noise of industry, the fashionable clutter of popular culture,

threepenny operas and showboat reviews

vying to break the divide between classical music and modern culture…

 

The tyrant’s rise to power was a preordained freak event

in a fevered dream that one does not live to finish…

 

He worked in the ministry of enlightenment,  taking political disorder

and proclaiming a Republic from the windows of the Reishstag,

hailing revolution from the steps of the Royal Palace.

A young man was in the streets that day,

listening to speeches and watching the skirmishes…

 

There were several periods: chaos, stabilization, devolution

toward political murder, coups, revolutions, counterrevolutions,

and a hyperinflation dependent on sinister, mysterious forces;

life was a wild adventure,

nothing mad or atrocious caused awe in the people any more;

they cleaned out the cobwebs of their elite culture

and aimed their art at a working-class audience,

resulting in subversive productions of classic repertory…

 

The Leftists deplored tradition, the Right deplored all avant-garde,

in the middle of the extremes were those who lacked political skill;

cosmopolitan, international bohemians had their time in the sun,

but the nation’s xenophobia was never far below the surface, ready to pounce…

 

 

He banged a bass drum a mile behind the lines,

the band giving aid to soldiers recovering from the trenches;

the quartet was playing to the officers when news of the composer’s death

came over the static airwaves of the radio;

they finished the piece in uncomplicated grace,

journeying through the stately graces of the Renaissance and the Baroque

and on through the deep feelings of the Romantics, modernizing relentlessly-

impressionistic vagaries, expressionistic abstractions,

constructions in introversion and displays of overt sensuality,

then into a furious march, the intensities rough and rowdy,

working fast and to order, organizing festivals,

eventually gaining control of the entire education system…

 

Day 9

.

A double-exposure photo montage of pop-culture artifacts

milling about in the new democratic street

with the miserable throngs pushed to their deaths

in the cogs of a monstrous machine,

dismissed for inefficiency, abandoning their middling careers

in pursuit of mysterious distant sounds

buoyantly lyrical, golden blurs of orchestration

and cosmopolitan serenades that sing from a glacier…

 

He found her at the railway station

as she rode off into the unknown,

the train leading her out of an abyss

and giving her an infusion of chic;

the 78rpm record has his name on it,

playing in the vacuum of a bell glass,

not a sound being heard on the outside among the noises of the street…

 

There was a Tuscan of Corsican descent seeking a return to Mozartean grace,

beset by flurries of dissonance and fits of spiritually empty banality,

who threw himself into a lake and heard the last blast of a car horn

and the jangling of a honky-tonk piano, effortlessly slinky,

selling the Tango in stores where it became a hit,

and after becoming professionally and romantically involved

he was never the same afterwards,

and tried to become a singer, a dancer, an actress, a stage extra,

an acrobat, and briefly even a prostitute during the years of chaos

and hyper-inflation, his voice an unpolished, cutting, wearily expressive instrument,

stamping his voice on anyone’s style,

“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar, oh don’t ask why, don’t ask why,

is here no telephone?”

 

He had loved outlaws, thugs, men of no principles with scabrous, criminal appearances,

ugly, brutish, dangerous, strumming on guitars during poetry recitals

by antisocial hooligans living in poverty and nastiness, with no hope of redemption

from the countermorality of beggars and rogues,

high-living highwaymen and psychopathic killers hanging out with Mac the Knife

as people disappear, are found dead, or raped by pitiless bloodthirsty archcriminals,

insoluble and unspeakable, insidious, desperate and bedraggled, gangsters of a higher order,

all given comprehensive coverage for an unhealthy audience…

 

 

Equivocations of masterminds, simple tunes circling around modernistic textures

and socially critical themes played where soulless professional expertise

meets the scrappy energy of knowingness, sarcasm, ennui, and despair,

children of the street in mesmerized fantasies of protests and pirates…

   

Day 10

 

He struggled to bring the word of God to his recalcitrant people

in morally uncertain times, rediscovering his roots, thundering,

the extreme emotionality exhausting him, giving direction

to the hapless denizens of modernity in a turbulent, devilish atmosphere,

as if to mock the workings of the scientific mind,

the ceaseless striving after knowledge amid a relationship of intervals

numbering four hundred seventy nine million one thousand six hundred,

or the factorial of twelve…

 

He rediscovered the benefit of having formal rules,

ideas clearly spelled out and rigorously developed,

abandoning the mystical mindset that dissolved form

and leaped into the unknown with evanescent gestures

barely noticed, yet on occasion demanding sex appeal

and an abstract beauty of ice crystals and other symmetrical patterns

in a blinding snowstorm of sound, a return to order

amid a chaotic marketplace, impeccably cosmopolitan

with the occasional scandal…

 

His unfaithful wife died, and he married the daughter

of a Viennese doctor, the sister of a violinist

that advanced his cause as he derided his peers

for pandering to the public like window dressers,

restaurateurs, paper necktie purveyors

who forego complicated ways of thinking

in favor of primitive ideas that betray their God;

in the end, not one had a runaway hit

with their outwardly fashionable directions

and their gritty new voices that wished for only whores as listeners…

 

He was treasonous, insisting he was loyal to their cause

yet wishing to go his own way, coming to despise their cause

filled with elitist pursuits who address their idiocies only to one another;

he found himself involved in communally oriented arts

and perceived that it was at the opposite end of the spectrum,

whoring to the public, fearing the unrepresentable and the inexpressible,

avoiding meditations on faith and doubt and other difficult subjects,

waving pornography as they condemn it

in order to sustain the attention of the ordinary onlooker;

in the end, Act III was never finished,

destined to roam the desert in the company of soldier-acolytes

where they would be invincible…

      

Day 11

 

It was their last hour of cultural glory before the fall;

they were alarmed to see him was in such poor health,

for he was single-handedly holding the state together

between mad, violent, murderous extremes…

when he died, intellectuals had a sinking feeling,

“It is the beginning of the end.”

 

Then a stock market crash and worldwide economic depression

put an end to the decade of the merrymaking spirit

and ushered in an era of battle music, aggressively political,

in anticipation of the coming conflict-

leftists using avant-garde methods to overthrow bourgeois values,

others used songs of struggle that attempted to focus the emotions

of the potential revolutionary elements of the proletariat crowds,

blunt instruments of righteous anger compelling some decisive,

brutish act on the part of the listener amid a secret mobilization

of beer halls, receiving shouts of approval

when banging the piano keys with balled-up fists…

 

It was a thrall of totalitarian ideologies in desperate times,

which tolerated no divergence or diversity of opinion,

no dissent; pitilessness was in the air, sentimental values sacrificed

at the altar of action, each opposing group sharing a will to violence

in a last spell of intellectual freedom before the era of “thinking as one”…

 

The mission had to go on; the sickly and injured were tossed over the cliff

in the spirit of Buddhist parables converted into secularized agitprop

creating a myth of community and a hard-hearted mechanized disregard for life;

those with remnants of Romantic grandeur send the dead off with funeral marches

played in schools thousands of times across the country, teaching acquiescence,

preparing them to do the unthinkable for whichever tyrant gained power,

the insufficiently ruthless cast aside in favor of those who could carry out foreign espionage

and ennoble the bloodlust in the interest of progress of political fanaticism

which devalued the individual; the “I” was disappearing…

 

It was a many-layered piece, critical of social norms, unburdened by dogma,

following a city of paradise through its founding, heyday, and decline

as sharks moved in, vice prospered, herky-jerky self-gratification ruled

in a culture where all could do as they pleased,

to the eventual ruin of the people, who were put on trial for not paying their bills

and sentenced to death by the hammerblows of fate and the fake utopia…

 

The message was greeted with a riot, the Social Democratic government dissolved,

the authorities ruled by emergency decree;

a leftist acquiesced to death by a beer stein to his skull

as the great retaliation began…

 

She had descended from the heights of society to the depths of prostitution,

a bearer of disease and degradation,

a conflict of romantic and avant-garde, stately and brutal,

empathetic and inhumane, meeting her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper

on the eve of the culture’s social catastrophe;

how it could please a first-night audience was vexing…

perhaps it was that, while imposing discipline on unruly spirits,

it allowed for the smuggling in of forbidden pleasures in flickering mirages…

    

Day 12

 

Living fragments of the past soaring toward the stratosphere,

his heart strumming sympathetically in a complex emotional life

of hopeless affairs and romantic skullduggery

that sabotages innocent, isolated natures,

following the letter of the law but sinning secretly and in spirit,

using it as an excuse to keep his poetic passion alive;

his wife lamented, but had no ready answer…

 

“Hereinspaziert! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen,

into the menagerie of Lulu…”

 

Of the entire circus, she was the most captivating creature;

her portraiture pledged his undying devotion,

and when her husband walked in on the two of them

he dies of a heart attack; and the portraiture commits suicide.

Lulu marries an editor who walks in on her

as she is consorting with an acrobat, a schoolboy, and his son;

he gives her a gun to shoot herself, and she shoots him instead…

 

Escaping from prison she lives the high life with the emotionally scattered son,

but the glamour soon collapses and her social trajectory spirals downward;

she flees the country and has no choice but to become a prostitute,

and in a final stroke of dramaturgy, she is killed by Jack the Ripper…

 

The camera dissects the complexities of human relationships in gliding movements,

passing in and out of souls, peering into the hearts of people

as it coolly observes rapid streams of social satire at a deliberate pace,

life’s dreaming grandeur gone beneath the disquiet of sentimental phrases

faintly living amid such total degradation, as love becomes murder

behind the social cruelty and the collective malevolence of the male species

played out in a prolonged death chord that assaults the senses,

stabbing at the ears in a terrible swiftness, the pain registered by onlookers

who inflict wounds upon themselves by their powerful empathy…

 

He picked fragments of debris from the dissonant detonations of twelve-tone machinery

that left chords of nowhere in ambiguous entities, speaking in Medieval dialects,

confessing their pacts with the devil, then, opening their mouths as if to sing,

lettikng out a wails of death shrieks that still ring in the ears;

of those descending into madness, one after the other fell into silence…

One remained, not allowed to die, wailing forever, though no longer heard;

and without a sliver of hope, slowly vanishing in a pianissimo fermata, then nothing more;

hanging in the silence and night, vibrating as the soul listens to dying notes of sorrow

in a poem without heroes…

 

                          

Day 13

 

The leader made a show of being inconspicuous,

positioning himself behind a small curtain in the back row of box A;

the others in tandem enjoying their proximity to the man behind the curtain,

laughing and talking amongst themselves; a string of bodies strewn their wakes-

those who did not meet the ambiguous specifications o the state,

those whose work was not deemed “for the masses”,

though the masses were at that moment vigorously applauding it…

 

Misunderstood, deemed artistically obscure and morally obscene,

their creators came to very bad ends when the reign of chilling terror began-

pillories and publicly or secretly executed or sent away to die in prisoner work camps

in the most inhospitable corners of the empire, some simply disappeared…

only the naïve returned from abroad, to endure long strings of humiliation

at the hands of the power thugs administering censorship

in twists that would seem too heavy-handed even in a novel…

 

Entering this warped and twisted phase,

one witnessed the politicizing of art by totalitarian means,

dictators rising to power by manipulating popular resentment and media spectacle,

and maintained it by a cult of personality, control of the media,

and armies of secret police, forging unholy alliances between art and politics…

 

The new aristocracy had been comprised of movie stars, pop musicians,

and celebrities without portfolio;

the largesse of the old dried up, the new knights in shining armor became the dictators,

with insidious prices to be paid by the creative mind, weak with fear and seduced by power,

resulting in murky, non-heroic behavior and acquiescence to narrow authoritarian aesthetics

featuring flawed actors on a tilted stage run by rigorous materialists

with little patience for the avant-garde while living in a vile hell;

dictators tolerating the new if it lent an aura of sophistication to their thuggery…

 

The smart and broadminded bureaucrat had a poor understanding of his dictatorial leaders,

and encouraged a period of “anything goes” in art, and much pioneering ensued;

but as it lacked propaganda value, it was crushed, and the running of it

went to the ideology and propaganda bureaus…

 

Intelligent, charming, cunning and brutal, with tastes narrow but not vulgar,

indulgent moods of extraordinary favors and the source of omens of disaster,

beginning with a knock on the door and a new species of fear

playing on the primitive aversion to violence and destruction, which became the state’s calling card…

             

Day 14

 

His first impression was nerve-wracking- ashen face, darting eyes, furtive glances

behind thick glasses, body twitching as if something was struggling to escape from it,

phrases repeating as anxious mantras; underneath was a great conflict-

frail, strong; tender, hard; withdrawn, passionate; socially caustic but cerebrally good natured;

one quality obliterating the other, it was a catastrophe…

 

His alcoholically dilapidated mentor had been mesmerized by the child’s abilities

who was able to grasp complex theory almost without instruction-

he made sure the child stayed well fed during the lean years of the government’s New Economic Policy

in exchange for beverages illegally obtained by the child’s father

from the Bureau of Weights and Measures…

 

The child’s parents welcomed the Revolution in its initial stages,

but took fright when the terror began as the extreme faction swept aside the liberal government

and instituted their absurd ideology across the socioeconomic spectrum;

when the child grew into a young man he remained ambiguous but not politically naïve,

and he walked a tightrope as party officials indulged him,

such as a former army officer notorious for employing poison gas against rebelling peasants;

educated, talented, and intelligent himself, he offered the young man a room in the city;

considering the officer’s fate in the Terror it was fortunate that the young man elected to stay home…

 

The crowds applauded his youthful assurance, and he quickly found an international audience,

which won him a well-paying position in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda;

he was set to work on a grand choral piece commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution

which became his second symphony, the beginning reflecting the pre-Revolutionary economic chaos

then, with a factory whistle and simple hymns that whip up a militant frenzy,

the rescue of society by the revolutionaries, redeeming wild abstraction with direct bombast…

 

Under the liberal government culture was varied and vibrant;

the international avant-garde came and brought modern tastes to the new paradise

that cut through luxurious traditions with shrill, jangled, curt tones;

the young man took to them like a kindred spirit, joining in the experimentation in new realms,

much to his later undoing in the Terror…

 

Throngs of spiky young artists were expatriated from the new culture

that dutifully depicted the struggle between the revolutionaries and their class enemies-

decadent slackers, tipplers, saboteurs, capitalist bosses, land-owning peasants-

some works to become icons of the age, which, in merry-go-round fashion

soon gave way to a newer age when widespread famines and corruption exposed the old utopias as flawed

and new promises of comforts and freedoms and slogans of  “Life is getting better”

were issued by the perpetually ruling elite and mandated in works

drawing from established nineteenth century vehicles of expression

such as the novel, the epic drama, the opera, and the symphony,

heroically depicting realist subjects such as strong-willed woman of provincial towns

who were variously bored and oppressed by the men in their lives…

 

They were petty, vulgar, crude and greedy merchants

creating tyrannical and humiliating atmospheres, and were liquidated as a class

either by execution, imprisonment, or deportation, leaving behind tragedy-satires

of hard-hearted grotesqueries laced with an occasional confession and lamentation

heard by icily unsympathetic ears in spite of the madness of love

and the disorienting power of sexuality and romantic lives of tragicomic aspects

that knew no bounds, that would perpetrate crimes inspired by the devil himself,

exposing the insanity of the world by embodying it to excess,

and becoming a dark monument to the great social experiments

in which utopia was always just out of reach…

 

After he was censured by the state during the new terror

he descended into alcoholism and mediocrity under the annihilating pressure,

losing his inner self to the state’s campaign against waywardness in the arts;

foreign sympathizers looked apologetically at the state’s efforts,

fishing for reasons and obfuscating the real motives behind party leader activity;

he kept a newspaper clipping journal to record the malice of the state for posterity-

vilifications, reorientations, censorship, imprisonment, death

to those who were told that they could speak freely, and who actually did…

 

He survived the crisis by following certain suggestions

by the Committee for Artistic Affairs, yet he was miserable;

he requested an audience with the Dictator himself;

he waited by the phone for days, for the call that never came

in a political climate that was becoming chillier by the day

with show trials that signaled new purges and Terror

during which many disappeared, some managing to return after a few decades,

others whose days were simply numbered, the state ever closing in,

especially on the too independent, the too charismatic, and the prospective rivals

who soon found themselves in torture chambers

signing confessions of political conspiracy on parchment spotted with their own bloodstains;

pilloried as enemies of the people, few living to tell the tale as the terror closed in…

 

Day 15

 

The military thrust closed in a drawn-out anguish, in a struggle of conflicting tendencies

in spite of it’s phalanx of industrial might, pistons pumping,

wanderers becoming slow, pale, lurching, frittering away the momentum

in overextensions and unconvincing heroic attitudes,

jagged fragments falling in strange events searching for comic relief

then ending with rattling skeletons beating out a dreamlike succession of rhythms

in grandiose patterns, as if a utopia was imminent amid the internal failures,

then all died away in hushed, spiraling dismal tone of despair

closing out the tragic ending in a diabolical complexity of fear which permeated all around…

 

 

 

He withdrew for two years, producing nothing of note

other than simple pieces that the ordinary person could understand,

following established patterns, proceeding from tragic to exultant,

apologizing to the dictators for his previous outlandish avenues,

creating that which they would like rather than what he needed to in order to progress,

sacrificing the complex for the simple and clear, suffering and defiance for  compliance…

 

Buried in his emotional complexity is the protagonist facing obstacles that he will never overcome,

certainly not heroically, personal layers lying beneath the public surface,

a heart slowed, lonely cries in the night, calls for help, begging for mercy fill the air,

each coming forward to sing its plaintive song in a sorrowful chorus,

running down the spine and raising the hairs on the skin,

stepping in front of a softer background in a primal cry of despair in a funereal tone

in a pageant of suffering flowing in bitter tears, weeping, weeping,

winding down like a spent music box mourning over more pure, original days

since painted over by artist-barbarians…

 

As the yearning phrase floated upward a martial mood returns,

pounding relentlessly in an emblem of power a base and brutal turbulence

 woven completely in intimidation, in tune with only the mechanisms of the cerebellum,

unable to act beyond it, engulfing all in reach, blackening the world in illicit endeavors,

spreading a numb horror severe and threatening, requiring a great assertion of will to defy,

turning most into cowards who burn one another’s letters in their terrified states…

 

He was able to escape this primitive fear for a little while as he looked out over the ocean,

then returning, white as a sheet, biting his lower lip, he was close to tears…

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musical interlude...

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Day 16

 

The two giants never understood each other very well, trading criticisms in front of colleagues

and in their haphazard correspondence with psychological motifs in play,

never indulging one another with even a little love and attention,

which was quite beyond their meager social skills and emotional means;

they engaged in their practical crafts as the world spun around them,

enfant terribles both when they were younger- sensuous and brooding fantasies,

living at the outer edges, pioneering, even carnivalesque in irresponsible merrymaking,

farces, parodies, and mock grandeur, both riding roulette wheels to ruin

in an untroubled lyricism that first opens its window to spring

and then receives instead apocalyptic noise disconnected with sorrow, hate, and plague,

the activity of infinite worlds, yet offering fresh air to develop their art, now deliciously absurd,

observations and criticisms periodically intruded by Tragedians, Comedians, Romantics, Eccentrics, and even Empty-Heads

who debated amongst themselves how the fairytale plot should have play out

and how they could overcome sickness, sin, evil and death if they achieved the right spiritual understanding…

 

The adventurer settled in the city and had to contend with the politics of style,

then wisely decided to go his own way;

old-fashion drama in extravagant, alluring, floor-rattling affairs

banging on the door to the beyond, though it failed to arouse interest from the style mongers.

He turned away from the energetic, chaotic manners of his youth, so currently in vogue,

and instead yearned for sweet, long melodies that gracefully reached on high

the slowly flittered down in spiraling voluptuousness, at odds with the current city tones

of a world gone wrong; some suspected him of being subliminally seduced by the Tyrant’s secret police…

 

So an illustrious cultural exile was brought back into the fold under the sham ideology,

shady characters lurking around every corner, in every restaurant, in clicks on the phone,

in clandestine searches, in people suddenly “taken ill” and disappearing;

he instead focused on the positive results of the Tyrant-

shiny new high rises in the cities, paved roads, a literate countryside, electrification,

things that were spreading much faster in other societies, a point he also chose to ignore

at his optimistic peak in the final months before the onslaught of the Terror

and the rituals of humiliation now standard from the State…

 

In his most debased form he created a toast to the Tyrant that sang his great name,

he who the land knows and loves, from whom all joy and happiness are derived,

he who brings sunshine, nourishment, and cherry blossoms;

it was soon played from city loudspeakers throughout the land,

and he listened from his velvet prison…

 

He could not help but give them more-

laboring away on fatuous and vicious defenses of the Tyrant,

fighting off invasions of the enemies in lavish, malevolent splendor with a young hero

who defeats the various class enemies before he is arrested and his wife stabbed

by the Tyrant he is fighting for, and is then sentenced to death on a day with 346 others…

 

During foreign visits he kept up his Tyrant-supporting line,

but friends could see the strain behind the mask of optimism and official praise,

and feel the profound and terrible dread…

sympathizing friends offered him a way out, but he declined,

knowing that he had to face and fight the problem from within

with so many others who had become dear to him…

 

Upon his return he had several chances to stay away, to turn back,

at several station he debated with himself; at the last station he told himself,

“This is it, it is now or never.” It was never, and he reentered his eternal hell and cast his fate,

and he never again received a foreign-travel passport…

     

Day 17

 

Everything he wrote or said was being monitored, he had to communicate in code;

everything he said meant the opposite, especially repeated words;

the blizzard raged outside his window.

“Everything is so fine, there is nothing to write about, all is happiness and joy,

a year of joy, a time of peace and joy, of unalloyed joy;

I am experiencing feelings of joy…”

utterances of doublespeak that mocked official statements and propaganda

registering primal emotions undetected by officials monitoring the appearance of what is said,

and not seeing what is really said in multiple levels of meaning…

 

He joined a fire brigade and moved into the local barracks

just as shells landed in the city and the nine-hundred day siege began,

a profile in courage, sending out messages in microfilm;

he had a choice between the Tyrants at war with each other,

and chose the one he was familiar with; people starved,

mass graves dug; his work became a tactical strike against the enemy…

 

There was a renewed clatter of arms, the explosion of shells, the strained emotions,

terror, slavery, bondage of the spirit;

the marching is at first accompanied by a pied-piper playing,

then ends in a gargantuan vulgar rant sweeping all aside

amid countless barrels of beer, expensive cigars, self-glorification,

champagne, hostages, and demands for milliards by demons who take flight in the night

and search for their next feast…

 

The impoverished family seemed insignificant in the face of the forces of history,

wishing to waltz in spite of the pistons of modernity churning in the background,

a nimbus of dark glory surrounding the epoch, lightened by festive tones,

cruelty on display in large-scale utterances in praise of the war effort

setting massive forces in motion and following with funereal overtones in an icy end

basking in the aura of power, having a dizzy spell, falling to the ground

and suffering a concussion that was never fully recovered from…

 

After the war he found a very pleasant country retreat with a large garden

with a nearby river convenient for swimming,

and was given a five-room apartment in the capital city,

along with a large monetary reward, as the elite were arranging for one another,

to the mutterings of the envious rank-and-file;

meanwhile a new wave of repression began against gloomy, individualistic fare,

especially when works of the great victory were expected by officialdom

rather than the satiric and melancholy creations that followed

which featured up-tempo merrymaking the beginnings

and then towering and cruel tragic ends,

consuming excessive state resources in pursuit of self-indulgence…

 

 

The second nightmare began with heat being placed on those

who could be trusted to grovel in public and shift blame to the bigwigs

who were to be removed for improper representation of the state’s political orientation;

servile idiots were on call when the task was ready,

which would be when the truth was sifted out of the voluminous lore that had developed around the figures…

Old fears resurfaced, memories brought back when people were disappearing;

when some were even envied for that very reason, having escaped the nightmare in their own way…

 

 

 

Widespread banning followed when the central committee issued its historic decree;

some apologized for having strayed from the chosen path, and pledged to make amends;

others sneered and then disappeared after several family members had been used to serve as lessons;

spirits were shattered, histories rewritten, regime-placating statements made upon pain of death

that when read at other times would have been comical; no one was laughing at the time;

the most courageous defiance anyone could muster was a conspiracy of silence,

except for those unfortunate few who had to deliver speeches thrust into their hands at the last minute by party officials,

reading like paltry wretches, parasites, puppets, whores, cut-out paper dolls on strings,

like violins playing semiquavers before and after the moment in a dance of death

wearing an optimistic mask singing praise to Death as He cultivated trees in His garden…

 

Some became gnomish and cryptic, secretly impassioned, finding a twisted outlet in dances of the gallows

where death is faced with inexplicable glee, and the somber-minded attempt to find joy,

lifeless but persistent, strange and mechanical, with terror and revulsion,

at last feeling a kind of victory as the executioner dies,

carried off into an empty street, past the crowds and tanks,

the coffin moving by hand, pulsing with a lyrical power that fascinates those

seeking new paths that gently and wistfully withdraw from the world,

where life is much easier and more joyful to live without having to be inscrutable and blank…

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musical interlude      

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Part 4 of 6 

 

A New Land

 

Day 18

 

They joined the exodus, and were driven to Paradise, with crowds of cultural luminaries

who left their respective satellites that fell to tyranny, to a land they had perceived as a wilderness of vulgarity,

but which in irony now became the last hope of civilization, entire communities resettling intact,

having hiked across mountainous barriers and sailed across expansive oceans,

to the land that quickly assimilated their high culture somewhere between highbrow academic pedantry

and lowbrow pavement slang- symphonies played on the radio, literary classics sold in book-of-the-month clubs

and serving as plots for A movies, the influx of genius now applying for citizenship

in a land still trying to find its own identity, taking hold of arts long the properties of the elite

and exposing it to the masses, who then offered surprising critique…

 

Not realizing that the revolutionary political ideologies quickly fell victim to murderous tyrants,

certain artists embraced the ideologies, and their work quickly died in the new land

where the common man, being more educated, was more attuned to actual current events and their grim realities…

 

The new foreigners, in spite of their genius, could not speak for the inhabitants of the new land,

who had already grown attuned to home-grown works- some now firmly associated with great triumph,

while others being in tune with great tragedy, works found in richness and broad dynamic range,

spanning from coast to coast, freed from the halls of the elite, and from the cities,

traveling across the countryside to reach the millions that every artist dreams of,

behind the mechanisms of publicity machines creating nationwide sensationalisms

who yet fearing a government takeover of their media vehicles if vulgarity were embraced too widely

rather than aspiring to class and culture…

and so the middlebrow sought sophistication without pretension, worldliness without being effete,

and an absorption of the new immigrant genius while imbuing it with their local accents,

melding the popular with the serious in a new idyll, at times at odds with corporate brains with their eyes on profits,

at other times, with the failed support for the new, becoming just another passing fad in a ravenous consumer culture…

 

He made claim to the evanescent mythology of the great frontier, operating an emporium in town

with an address between the tin shop and the gun store,

sharing in legend by temporarily hiring the brother of a famous outlaw;

then moving to the nascent city and running a department store, living above it,

in a neighborhood that was drab with no stimulus,

popular and classical airs enlivening the greater city beyond,

offering envious advantages such as intellectual acclaim or fame and wealth

dancing all night with the rising generation, showing impeccable taste in concert going,

cultivating lucidity and grace while absorbing the aesthetics of the age…

 

It became an atmosphere of spacious mystery, sweet and ambiguous,

unfolding in action and gestures of dancing motions in a journey from nocturnal meditation

to communal celebrations, maintaining a clarity and economy that did credit to his training,

and to his flair in the lowlier arts of organization and publicity of the modernist minded

trying to bridge the gaps between various camps, becoming a commando unit

teasing the edges with rhythmic jolts of burlesque in raucous productions

gesticulating in relentless attacks that threatened the ultra-modern school

with primordial chaos, winning raves but not filling the checking account,

contemplating getting drunk, struggling in feelings of spiritual hollowness

and social irrelevance, searching for deeper experiences in life without falling prey to leftist politics…

 

 

Then the Great Depression began, economic collapse staggering the urban elite,

no great shock to the revivalists melded to the heartland in a religious demagoguery

with a spirit that had resisted unscrupulous money changers,

living in an agrarian society largely without indoor plumbing or electricity

that eventually made its way into the vocabulary of urban intellectuals and politicians,

and, misconstrued, gave foreign communists the idea that the land was ripe for the plucking,

with capitalism providing the bountiful harvest needed for such a farce to work in the first place

with sly promises of no blood, no prisons, no ruin, no darkness from shut-in fanatics

replicating the worst of any political mind-set, ideologues demanding conformity

and denying the grim facts with apologetics and rationalizations, followed by refreshments and dancing

for the prospective future working-class leaders of tomorrow

responsible for shuffling people into optimum jobs or in prison camps for class enemies

who were not hailed by the Daily Worker or beloved by the masses of every country,

who were accused of being luxury tools of the system, dealing narcotics in its many parasitic forms,

indulging in avant-garde experiments of hard complexities concealed beneath a softly shimmering exterior,

who soon lost their creative urges, devoted themselves to mundane transcriptions, then died of cancer…

 

Day 19

 

The trees leaned leftward in the ever-changing winds then fell to thinking

about how to combine social critique with mass appeal,

roommates back in the Paris days of almost-empty pockets

before the aesthetic intellectual flight from society

in a triumph of genius and tragedy of isolation,

locked in a death-grip of individualism on a collective farm

infiltrated with a distorted version of the legal system steeped in shallow amateurism

shouting out slogans from the ivory tower of demonstrations

within hailing distances from their own mirages of peasantry and the Third Estate

who would more than mind if they had everything appropriated by official thugs

who deal in airy abstractions and extravagant notions of make-believe

upon which their exhortations are based, nevertheless charging them with a purpose,

though hardly a paragon of democratic thought…

 

The Revolutionary Party held power, inflicted with cultural departments

advancing the socialist programs centered around the imaginary masses

and equally imaginary heroes depicted in forty-foot high murals on the sides of decaying buildings

in the middle of perpetual ghettos by artists who fell victim to alcoholism

just and they were obtaining mastery of bacchanal mayhem

as jaunty, upward-leaping figures of pre and post-industrial cultures reach for exoticism

to shake the midtown towers and crash the downtown air with their Olympiad

intended to seize the attention of the worker’s world, and failing-

as the workers were busy advancing through the ranks

and looking for opportunities to become former workers…

 

They came from a wagon train moving across a long, dusty valley of the West,

rough-hewn, cut from the open prairie, written in an apartment on the rue de Rennes,

creating the illusion of a wide expanse complete with cowboy melodies

commemorating legendary outlaws who stole from the rich, befriended the poor,

charmed the ladies, and killed twenty-one men in a proto-socialist utopia

before their innocence is threatened by the grand designs of city-building settlers

glimmering over an already bygone world,

remnants clashing with skyscrapers rising on the prairie and glinting in the sun…

 

There would be no acquiescing to the common good, the common good having been corrupted

by human shortcomings and scary dogmatism imprisoned on unsubstantiated charges of rape,

the implicit radicalism never coming all the way to the surface,

and hence appropriated by all manner of politicos

who were pragmatic rather than radical at their cores…

 

Obligatory aristocratic airs twitched in the political web,

mighty wads of money having mighty impacts,

replacing old patronage systems the had developed and protected artists,

only to fall back on the old-boy network and its attendant cultural connections

to fund artistic homage to new social revolutions within aesthetic precepts

that no one had the means, will, or desire to enforce;

drivers, chauffeurs, and footmen occupied the seats of the masters and madams

at 83 cents per chair as juvenile delinquents sang out at full strength

waving flags, banners, and placards as they marched to the music of three bands

in rapid rate, with great mass and great color in its vastness,

hewn by hand, and hand that drove a truck

and was no classical sissy or bourgeois darling, but big-shouldered,

meeting true-blue expectations…

 

It was a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed by the rich,

now lit by the reflections of tyrants, whose faces stared down from mirrors above

at the working class heroes and the moneyed interest villains,

all involved in blatant activism with public funds

and soliciting all kinds of prostitution, from the press, the church, the courts, the arts

amid the machinery of exploitation and oppression,

 leading to outbreaks of violence in steel towns across the country,

sell-out crowds sneering at the upper class and their cults

with press coverage and controversy creating a conduit for revolutionary energies

that were criticized as hysterical by the Resettlement Administration

locating displaced farmers to model communities around the country

surrounded by grasslands in their primal states, before the devastation wrought by soil erosion…

 

He had a crack squad of commando units, growing to battalion proportions,

punching through the fuzz of radio static, crying out plaintively in empty spaces,

becoming a luxury trade riding in streamlined trains,

traveling from hermitism to obscurantism and back again

in the complexities of the systematic discord of educated urban working people

in easefully beautiful settings along the beach serving high-protein meals

in a grotesque harlequinade of specious modernity,

authentic, dull, serious, and utterly anachronistic,

eliciting petty and doctrinaire responses to the spellbinding qualities

of virtue and absolute sincerity of time-suspending atmospheres…

 

University intellectuals resisted in moods of ambiguity and loss,

obeying only inwardly necessary impulses rather than any social or political obligations,

their vigorous marching rhythms echoing the tested waters of the playful, propulsive styles

of the local vernacular and fuzzy agitprop as farm boys danced with farm girls from the heartland

in Broadway musicals…

 

The death knell sounded for the propaganda machine,

the middle class would not accept the burden of encouraging a twisted idealism,

which faded in the air amid the adspeak of a corporate world in a last efflorescence

amid a futurama spectacular’s radiant vision of suburban communities interconnected by superhighways,

locomotives parading across their massive reinforced stage

while puppets explained the oil industry to children;

forgotten were the air and sun so needed for growing,

in their place the brassy dissonance of industrial congestion-

frenzied, oppressive, inhumane, and out of balance with nature,

choking on the smoke of prosperity at the ruination of the planet…

in its place a proposed model community where rural values were joined with modern convenience,

the commuter ideal being financially supported by large automotive manufacturers…

 

Halfway around the globe a more somber air-

blood, ruin, murder, prisons, darkness swept across the continents

as idealisms were corrupted by the baser of mankind’s tendencies,

pacts and plans were being hatched for a brutal military domination of the world…

 

Day 20

 

He was driven into Paradise, exiled from his homeland when the pacts began,

a chauvinist in the old world turned patriot in the new,

without irrational expectations above generating revenue,

certainly not in indulging his genius at the expense of profits,

falling in with curious characters entangled in subversive activities

with absent figures and forces in revealing hidden psychological subtexts

at the moment of death, cackling in eruptions and squealing like a rat…

 

Subtle commentaries staying silent for long stretches, clear and pure,

romantically obsessive, never fell out of  fashion,

the muscular, flamboyant style of a swashbuckler earning a degree of respectability,

though betraying the progressive ideals of youth to become a decrepit capitalistic relic

drawing out moods and emotions, amplifying action, enhancing  the rosebud

in variations and mutations, in synergies of sound and image

that invariably made disastrous debuts with epitomized delusions of upper-crust foolery

with fake voices and unfulfilling endeavors in shattering eloquence

forgotten after the century’s end…

  

He hawked maps of megastar’s homes on street corners,

vending surrealism with health fads and cults of outdoor sports,

peach colored shirts with green white polka dot ties in gray suits

and vivid purple knit belts with ostentatious gold buckles,

endeavoring to create hits that would allow him to carry on with more advanced endeavors

in transfigured nights, and from the kindness of strangers move from today into tomorrow

as a Moses or Aaron crossing the good earth with souls at sea,

but ending up walking the dog with a cat that hated people, radiating nostalgia,

bowing the strings at the bridge, then ending on a soft and wistful passage

playing on the radio on Highway 1…

 

He arrived on the East Coast the previous year, and became a refuge once again

as hiss firebirds struck at dawn and place the North Star under siege

with demands for too much time and too much control

as he manipulated his colored pencils and searched for the perfect commando sonorities

to sate a limitless demand for irregular fragments of symphonic utterances in cubistic collages…

 

It was the most spectacular event since the dawn of the radio era,

his success caused a mass attack of envy and resentment among his peers

who chortled and sneered in savage references to the seeming oversimplified writing for cheap effect,

which was in actuality a complicated and dangerous act of parody of his tyrant state…

 

It would have been the century of the common man were it not for the dominance of genius,

both needed and ridiculed, and the singular spur for man’s progression toward the stars…

nevertheless the soaring rhetoric elevating the common man thrilled leftist intellectuals

who were blinded by the propaganda of the tyrant states, and still believed in the feasibility of their ideals,

oblivious of the darkness, death, and ruin they had already engendered in their subject states;

a few were tyrant-wannabe’s in their own rights and cared not for such petty shortcomings…

and as this finger was pointed, they scurried out of the way like rats…

 

He lived a mythic picture of life on the frontier, open air and in love

with a sweet, nameless archetype who embodied the purity of soul of a true pioneer,

carrying her across a threshold strange, ordered, and possessed with the lyric ecstasy of the spiritual

found far beyond the bridge leading away from flashing images and frantic movement,

to the emptiness of the wilderness, though flawed in its poetic cycle, bending westward

beyond violet mountainous wedges in a celebratory and critical evocation of modern life,

roaring by with the luxury locomotive The Limited, leaving behind reeling heads and swirling shreds of paper

carrying the news from city to city in less than fifteen hours while people stood on the tracks,

trying to stop the train, because it was imperfect when viewed from an idealized bucolic setting,

the idyll of which had been cast in shadow, voices reaching for the sweet and sentimental,

sul tasto, misterios… like an Amen streaming from the doors of a white-steepled church

that exists only in stereotyped imaginings…

 

          

 

Day 21

 

Open yet another era of terror, few tears in the tyrant’s voice,

whistling favorite arias as victims were selected for the gas chambers,

when great art was melded with great evil, and all became a death fugue,

a sacred realm existing independently, wholly sufficient unto itself,

floating above the ordinary world, a telephone to the beyond,

yet never quite guiltless or unstained with blood,

or able to rise above the politics of their times,

the more inarticulate all too easily imprinted with ideologies

and bent to all manner of political ends, acquiring a sinister aura

and suffering a deeper loss of moral authority,

falling to ultra-violent fantasies of arch-criminals setting out to enslave mankind

while teaching them how to dig their own graves with a corrosive love

in an ever-changing landscape, infinitely variable,

acquiring a new identity in the mind of every new arrival…

 

A hypnotism of force lurked in a humongous cult of power,

demonic strains played, praising all the backward tendencies

that one would later grow to lament- scandalous anti-reason,

barbarism beautification, demanding destruction and annihilation with a malicious intensity

those who were perceived as an enemy to pure humanity and all that is noble,

perceived as the ruin of mankind, with the characteristic traits of greed and petty intelligence

undermining race purity and regeneration that suffers as if from an obscure wound,

blood tainted, condemned to wander the earth, corrupting all except the pure fool

who in the end of a tangled tale wields the power to both heal and banish to oblivion

those with anti-collectivist messages or international modernist decadence

creating misfortune-gestating works set against the chaos of politicking while people starve,

pimps as Cultural Ministers, criminals as War Ministers, murderers as Justice Ministers,

while the sole remaining romantic, the savior of his times engaged in uncouth behavior,

flirted with conservatory girls, and took donations from those he publicly loathed

to produce his three-penny opera in an era of disappointments…

 

He was defenseless before the seductions, before the product of egotism,

nihilism, cynicism, and amoral aestheticism of the munificent princes

standing in the towers to the left under pale lights of the canopy of stars,

inspiring them to enter politics and to occupy the podium in the pose of conductors,

right hands raised in a rotate fist, the other drawn back clawlike…

   

He bellowed out bilious speeches in beer halls and barracks,

and his knowledge of culture won him entrée into rarified circles and salons,

connections that proved crucial in his ascent from provincial fame to national recognition,

casting his spell like a savior in an hour of highest need…

 

He spent summers in the country, becoming a different being,

feeling no need to represent power, and absorbing the local lifestyles;

then came his march to nowhere, an attempt to overthrow the national government,

a march that was a call of the moment, even if aimless and futile and doomed to failure,

for it was a propaganda victory and set the stage for another day…

 

The day came, power was finally under his control, and the first step of his madness

was having all of certain races and creeds banned from the public sector,

and old traditions were once again aspired to, rather that creating pedestrian sycophantic propaganda…

 

Patrols were sent out to fetch high-ranking party members from the local beer halls and cafés

to lend support to the aspirations, undermined by foreign populism that had taken hold during the previous regime;

and only the most prominent and gifted philosophical romantics were forgiven their ideological errors

in an agonizingly ambiguous world filled with myth and oversimplification,

and self-haters ridding the world of themselves, seeing a need to create a good cry

and deepen the hearts of all, if just a shade, even those one would not want to associate with on a regular basis…

 

With adroit maneuvering some carried on in avant-garde style, presenting it as satire;

the anthem of the troll kingdom was “Do As You Like”

far removed from the extraordinary beauties of previous eras, but capturing the public mood

that initially thrilled to the pseudo-heroic poses aimed at the impressionable

to preempt their inevitable disenchantment with shadowy, secretive beauty

that masked the deepening gloom…

 

The banning and forbidding of reactionary works continued, with exceptions, if the Tyrant liked them;

behind acid comments and mischievous, bitter laughs the decrees continued haphazardly,

until there grew an undercurrent of poison and creativity bowed to the unobjectionable;

encountering internal resistance, the Tyrant dissolved the whole society, then created a new one,

accepting only member in perfect agreement with his own principles and excluding all others…

 

When the invasions began, the people at home were initially orgasmic,

“This is our country today! A new state that has never existed before, created by this unique man!

Each day becomes more exciting. Such a good future is before us. It will be so different…”

The eventually ruined their voices by bellowing patriotic songs from the mansions they had commandeered…

 

Some resisted, accepting assignments with reluctance, avoiding the signing of papers,

resisting bans, making argumentative announcements, and finally quitting their posts altogether

in the face of Ministry demands; files were created on their poor attitudes, denouncements followed

for failing to give the party salute at public events, and collaborating with undesirable riff-raff;

the resisters shot back that the whole regime was a disgrace, evidenced by the incompetence,

a lazy mediocrity employing the basest of weapons against a higher intelligence and greater talent…

 

Humiliating, obsequious letters to the Tyrant followed, hailing him as the great designer of their existence,

wearing their poker faces as they were forced to protect their families who were spat on in the village squares

and who were harassed by the secret police, being dragged from their houses in the middle of the nights

and interrogated for days about not expressing anger when challenged about the progress of the war,

though towns were starving under sieges, or about failing Party institutions…

 

The warring Tyrant cynically manipulated opposing pacifists and twisted the minds of democratic leaders

by arguing that his military territorial acquisitions would prevent global war, not start it,

exclaiming, “Whoever lights the torch of war can only wish for chaos,” along with other empty sentiments

that failed to recognize how dangerous and miserable life had become for the populations,

especially for the unpolitical, who were treated like children as the ministers screamed…

      

To celebrate the sixth anniversary of his regime the Tyrant delivered a major address,

beyond the normal ceremonial, giving notice that his dominion would soon encompass neighboring states;

official state bootlickers hailed it as one that posterity must cherish as a masterwork,

both gripping and devastating, the work of a true genius; in it he introduced his ‘solution’ to several problems,

encompassed by two themes- world conquest and annihilation of the financiers…

 

Looking out over a blossoming meadow the flower maidens tempted him, then withered

to the sounds of a slowly rolling train, in its loneliness, it’s sacred tones dying away

in a brotherly pedal point of true love, without theatrical humility or formal empty babbling,

without frock or scepter, without a timeless Grail temple built around it…

 

The mood turned semi-abstract, the old guard protested against what they dubbed an ‘orgy from hell’,

with great domes of light rising at the center of the cities…

 

The villa remains much as the family left it, in the countryside on the outskirts of the ghetto-turned-concentration camp,

caught in a surreal moment by a painter of shtetl scenes before the guards turned him away;

but not before he added the backdrop of genocidal insanity to the furnishings,

in a cold, empty space where time ticked icily down under the threat of being turned to stone,

a mythological setting of worldly illusions where people escape their damaged lives by turning into trees,

leaves waving gently around then dying in downward-falling spirals;

to land at the feet of the daughter of the river god who herself turns into a laurel tree,

standing over the grave of her murdered love in a gentle greatness,

bidding farewell as darkness falls, overshadowing human emotion,

disappearing into a realm of lovely irony at odds with the surrounding reality…

 

She was fit enough to hang on until the following year, living in another world

of love and disappointments, joy and sorrow, longings and faith, floating high above the atmosphere

tepid with death, her futile insistence on perfection the only thing saving her from insanity,

from the eerie echoes of pre-war years that hung in a picture frame next to her desk,

times of pomp and magnificence, glittering gold uniforms and ladies in scintillating diadems

stepping out of their carriages…

 

A bunker was built on her castle grounds to protect her from the bombs;

parts of the villa were used for evacuees and wounded soldiers,

so many strangers in her home as it accommodated refugees from the retreat;

there was no light in the night, only night, riding into the flames,

nothing like the work of art that was envisioned…

    

Day 22

 

The day the Tyrant committed suicide two hundred allied bombers were poised

to lay waste the small mountain resort and its environs where his villa was nestled;

he would soon come to celebrate the end of the reign of the Tyrant;

today awoke a cautious optimism for the village that the war had so far hardly touched…

today it was a military objective…

 

The strike was called off at the last moment at the behest of a surrendering officer.

Allied jeeps rolled up to his resort, intending to use it as a military government command post;

he was told he had fifteen minutes to leave; he showed the major the manuscript of his unfinished comic opera;

an off-limits sign was placed on the lawn…

 

Young veterans emerged from the rubble into adulthood, future leaders indelibly marked

by what they had experienced in the war as adolescents, and under the transitional military government that followed.

Some had fathers who went to the front and never returned,

others lost insane mothers to the Party’s euthanasia program;

during the war they all served in various capacities; one tasked to revive soldiers caught in incendiary bombings

by trying to pour liquid into the ones still moving with a straw through holes in the yellow ball-like masses

that were once their faces… on any given day he and his comrades would haul thirty to forty corpses

into churches converted into morgues…

another was trained as a radio operator and spent the last year in a tank, wandering aimlessly around the ruined landscape;

another joined the local resistance; as a shell landed on the building he was hiding in

he watched his comrade’s brains splatter against a wall, then awoke to find his left eye and part of his face missing…

and so the war was over, begetting stories and evidence of duty, desperation, and horrible tragedy

as the rolling thunder of “thou shalt die” passed away…

 

Immediately after the war the country was in a shattered state, a primitive society

living a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging for food, drinking from drainpipes,

cooking over wood fires, living in basements of bombed-out buildings or makeshift trailers and cabins;

people starved, robbed, begged for food; waged were paid in cigarettes; all was misery.

Millions still lived in camps, millions more roamed the roads, with refugees fleeing the Tyrant to the east…

 

The collective might of the allies, used to obliterate cities and towns, now became a great engine of reconstruction

as the country would be reinvented as a democratic bulwark against the eastern Tyrant.

Part of that plan was a policy of detyrantization and reeducation, luckily run by an evenhanded, incorruptible,

and staggeringly efficient man with a whiff of the idealism that had just recently lifted and reshaped his own country…

 

The reorientation had been a part of the psychological warfare division,

tasked to achieve military objectives by non-military means,

in this case to degrade the concept of Tyrant superiority and cultural supremacy

with exposure to worldly views by those with thorough training and progressive outlooks,

who knew the country and culture better than the locals did, exploding their master race claim

in four exclamation points of horror…

doughnuts were baked in festival restaurants, serious theater used for light entertainment,

jazz played on the grand piano, and great halls used to barrack ethnic troops…

 

and so the Psychological Warfare Department endeavored to influence change by positive means,

encouraging beneficial international directions in thinking and crowding out the dangerous ethno-centric ideas

that had just wreaked havoc on a global scale… the first order of business being restoring that

which was banned by the Tyrant and his regime on racial and ideological grounds,

one stiff gray folder of material being appropriated from a Tyrant filing cabinet…

summertime institutes were formed to give the youth of the country access,

a project warmly backed by the occupying authorities;

it received glowing reviews in most Review of Recent Activities reports,

with the exception of one that noted a snobbish radicalism developing among the students

that was openly disdainful of anything else, creating extremes of revolution and reaction…

 

Super-refined and intricate designs followed, foreshadowing avant-garde constructions to come,

prophets of a new cosmos torn from this world by fate; students adhering in a quasi-religious trance,

talking of little else; one leader described as being ingnorant [sic], complacent, greedy, vain, abysmally egotistic,

and completely lacking in the most fundamental human impulses of shame and decency;

he countered with “sure, we are all of that, but also so much more, including the positive…”

all eventually became one half of an elderly couple walking into the twilight,

plunging into the sea with a proud and measured tranquility…

 

Day 23

 

What begins in mystique ends in politics; grand ideas become the ordinary,

theories become opiates, ending in power struggles among ideologues and pedants,

making it dangerous to simply be oneself…

 

It began with the mystique of revolution, then counterrevolution, then theories,

polemics, alliances, splits, happenings, and finally general pandemonium,

all aimed at ending regressive romantic tendencies annexed by the totalitarian regimes;

it became a golden age of freethinking thought with the rhetoric of the recent war-

exploiting weaknesses, conquering territory, neutralizing the opposition,

advancing, retreating, defecting to the enemy camp,

charging en masse into the unknown to strike a death blow to darkness,

with dissonance, density, difficulty, and complexity as the weapons,

and against the physical and intellectual violent nature of human existence

employing politics of style to beat down any future Fascist tendencies,

taking upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world,

misery, the illusion of beauty, sometimes dying away unheard,

dropping through empty time in a condition of absolute oblivion,

the sunken message in a bottle…

     

Yet a merciful light shone on life’s terrible depths,

like a sacred torch for those who had so recently witnessed oblivion at close range

at the hand of the tyrants, a light that burned from within the individual…

and yet new militant mentalities sprang forth like rites of spring,

never having known the trancelike chantings at Stalag VIII A

and the playing of the quartet for the end of time to the abyss of the birds

and in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse,

bewildering the onlookers who nevertheless maintained a respectful silence

in the absence of the steady beat of one-two-three-four

which the mechanized insanity of the war had conditioned them to expect,

the simplest sounds becoming the understatement of the century…

 

He was the perfect avatar of the postwar avant-garde,

charming, intellectual, elegant, skilled on persuasion and attack,

and absolutely sure of what he was doing,

which was reassuring amid the confusion of post-war life;

with so many old truths discredited, the time was ripe for a new artist savior…

too young to have fought in the war, he suffered little,

and actually welcomed the invaders, who he said brought a high culture with them;

his pleasant façade soon withered as he became angry with the whole world,

like a lion that had been flayed alive, he became terrible,

booing, shouting, hissing, and banging with a hammer with his fanatic sect

exhibiting dry and inhuman tendencies lacking in all celestial tenderness,

stabbing repeatedly with a letter opener all names who did not follow him on the modern high road

that reverberated with the rejection of the tones and semitones of the past,

a new dry and brutal violence becoming the leitmotif, pulverizing the present without nuances,

born of an antagonistic reaction to classical forms, and resulting in pitiless obituaries

to all but the gods of innovation as new laws were graven in stone…

 

The delirium wore off, giving way to an objectified, mechanized savagery,

erasing in any given moment any impressions of the previous moment

in a surfeit of ever-changing data; the present sliced into varying segments of time,

tearing at the fabric of the familiar dialectical universe,

endeavoring toward violence rather than tenderness, hell over heaven,

ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure,

experiments seeking to broaden and transform the psyche

from crumbled-down apartments that became bohemian Zen utopias

with white walls and minimal furnishings, in a simple rejection of that which had been overdone,

everything became a statement, some subtle, some blatantly loud,

some eccentric, some worldly as esoteric regions were explored…

            

     

Squawking from behind a moustache, they expected to be battered by some unholy noise;

her presented them with that which was conceptually violent, by came out innately sweet,

with a supernatural poignancy, close to the rustling of silence;

but underneath the ethereal surface unsettling tendencies were at work,

arranged in a chessboard of possibilities, moving from one to another in a detached frame of mind,

stupefying the listeners by the sum of the activities inherent in his words,

which in the end was determined by the I Ching,

in which sound and movement went their separate ways,

only to meet up again on a deeper conceptual level;

it became known as a “happening”, but what exactly “happened”

no one could agree on, except that it was a head-spinning philosophical statement

and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation;

anyone could have done it, they said, but no one else did…

 

 The bourgeois having been silenced, the age of machines could begin,

the center of all postwar campaigns against the past,

albeit with technology developed during the war,

in an air of a world gone berserk, of modernity imploding in on itself

in a madhouse atmosphere spilling forth from the previous repression

in a satire of a media-saturated society with a faint longing for preindustrial life

embodied by bohemians, eccentrics, and outsiders

at odds with the society women swathed in capes

and in need of connoisseurship, higher appreciations, and hyperactive chic,

wildly throwing paint on a canvas…

 

Day 24

 

The city streets overflowed with jubilant throngs, victory had been won,

domestic prosperity and global influence were on the doorstep,

main premises of art, industry, and politics had gravitated to their country;

but as the confetti was being swept from the square a darker mood arose,

in a chilling new method of warfare consisting of mutually-assured destruction;

and through propaganda and spies many a mind was to be politically compromised

as old spirits of solidarity began to disappear…

 

Weird scenes surrounded him as he arrived in the free world-

placards implored him to jump through the window,

he read speeches that were placed in front of him,

he answered questions according to instructions whispered in his ear,

under a façade of nervous preoccupation;

moods of suspicion, ill-will, and dread permeated the atmosphere,

cultural generalissimos, cynical maestros and impresarios foisted him

on a naively stupid, apathetic, and profoundly uncultivated public,

signaling a decline in cultural values,

sliding toward absolute and immediate comprehensibility

to large masses of people…

 

There was a certain amount of sympathy toward the pathetic figure,

his hands twitching the tips of his cigarettes,

his face and posture that of extreme unease, disturbed and hurt,

as the political escorts on either side of him looked as calm and content

as mantelpiece Buddhas, trapping him in the center;

he seemed like a man whose only wish was to be left alone

to the tragic destiny that he, like most of his countrymen,

had been forced to resign himself; lacking freedom of speech,

he towed the party line as splits ran across his spirit

during the charades he was required to conduct,

his protests took on subtle, silent forms, and in incorporating ideas

he garnered from the free world…

 

The lionization of refugee intellectuals who sympathized with such systems was at an end.

They were labeled dupes and travelers in a strange rogue’s gallery;

they countered that the same totalitarian madness that had swept the tyrant states was evident

in the demonic politics at hand, and they once again became expatriates,

not wishing to descent to the lowest possible standards, giving up morals, character, sincerity,

and the presentation of new ideas; but it was too late- they were guilty by association…

 

Usually in an ingratiating mood, some sudden urge welled up in them,

to confront the gala audience with an old whiff of revolutionary mystique in a barbaric yawp, a

way from their plainspoken eloquence, which had stopped running through their heads,

as if someone had turned off the faucet;

they faded into mysterious character, and into a tender silence,

perhaps dreaming back to more hopeful times;

darkness slowly came down on what they did, their audience disappearing into the ether,

and one ending his life as the victim of a homophobic attack on an island by three sailors,

providing an epitaph for the era…

 

They served the violent for the boys, and the amiable for the girls,

the rest relegated to historical status, former idols denigrated, stylistic politics aflame,

the old guard now seemed worn out, impotent,  brimming with artifice,

when in fact they simply glowed with a new warmth at the height of their abilities;

the quality of their output mattered little, what mattered were perceptions

and the perception of those perceptions…

 

He was one of the few welcome both on North Rockingham Avenue and North Wetherly Drive,

and each confessed their inner souls to him, lamenting, breaking down, even ready to weep,

suffering shocks of recognition that history was passing them by,

that the present was richer in substance than the past,

or at least that other things mattered more in the present;

some resolved that “tomorrow would be their dancing days” and began work anew,

resulting in elaborate, expensive, incoherent festivals, first of sentimental moods,

then with the liberty to experiment, to be esoteric or familiar,

with funding covertly provided by the secret service combating enemy ideologies…

 

They fought a folklore of mediocrity on political grounds,

their creations, and even their methods, becoming symbols of one ideology or another;

there were fistfights in the aisles, and hoots and catcalls from the balconies

as each group sniped at the other, claiming that their method was the necessary method,

while all others were useless;

in the end, besides contributing another method for the creative types,

it served to create an identity for their times,

their archaic modern rituals pulsing with life in a streetwise look,

shoulders twitching, wrists snapping, arms lashing out

in an attempt to reconcile brain and body, cerebral and sexual…

 

 

 

 

Part 5 of 6: Light and Darkness 

 

 

Day 25

 

He returned to his homeland after five decades, bells ringing in the middle distance.

Long-suppressed traits reappeared in his personality, though moving slowly, as if in mourning,

as if, in the single romantic gesture of his life, he was writing a requiem for himself.

He had become the perfect cosmopolitan, everywhere and nowhere at home,

and, whether willing or not, the avatar of the free spirit…

 

Yesterday’s revolt was today’s status-quo- events were in a state of perpetual revolution,

experimentation enjoyed a generous apparatus of support,

old cultural idiosyncrasies were abandoned as the new cosmopolitan language evolved;

people dressed and worked together like scientists,

like atomic physicists working in a laboratory, thinking in pseudoscientific mentalities

and phrases with a cerebral tinge and a vogue for abstraction in the plural,

and a new freedom from subservience to established institutions,

even from the mass public, a freedom to truly go wherever their creativity took them,

freedom from the prevailing tastes of society and its media,

freedom to evolve without interference…

 

There was one freedom lacking, however- the freedom to enjoy old methods,

brought about by faddish tendencies for the new, the stylized, the abstract,

where everything had to be catastrophic, scandalous,

where one had to be a vehicle of the repelling, the shocking, of unmitigated cruelty,

trying to impress the denizens of esoteria;

some had the gift of being able to assemble the latest conventions into jaw-dropping spectacles

with a dash of the colonial adventurer proceeding through the jungle,

clearing new paths along the way…

 

One was bright, glib, fair-haired, and collegial, exuding a positive energy,

but with an authoritarian tendency that occasionally made him an insufferable colleague;

in later years he developed a mystical streak, claiming to have lived many past lives

and being extraterrestrial in origin, though he was born in a small village.

Growing up he relieved the tedium of wartime discipline by opening up to the new,

whatever floated semi-independently above the world with its own changing values,

ranging between insouciance and sensual appeal to the aesthetics of pulverization,

from rearrangements of familiar objects to that existing outside the known and the conventional

in disordered images and sensations likened to raindrops in the sun

and to fiery furnaces erupting in showers of impulses;

and ranging from haunting voice-likes phrases to machines grinding in a cauldron of artificial worlds

without grandeur or emotion, joining the frenzy that anything new engenders

as the world grew abstracter, as symphonies, scherzos, concertinos and sinfoniettas

transformed into perspectives, structures, quantities, and configurations;

as Fighter Pilot Marches and sonatas for flute and piano gave way to Syntaxes and Expression K’s…

 

Behind the hypermodern façade lurked old revolutionary impulses-

the urge to overthrow the bourgeois order, the ancient longing for sublimity and transcendence;

to present the radical in order to represent the radical,

sometimes withdrawn from the public eye where it had no place, in order for them to matter more…

 

The architecture consisted of undulating convex and concave shapes,

and of models of the irregular activities of atomic particles in a gas cloud,

yet giving great thought to how it all would be perceived by the novice

and how it would take one beyond immobilities with carefully-planned bedlam

where only the sum of the actions is apparent, like listening to a field of cicadas

or the detonated calm of despair, dust, and death after machine guns have been fired

on a crowd of protesters…

 

The hammer had no master, and set out a luminous language, both seductive and menacing,

yet without anything so vulgar as a melody or a steady beat;

most highly removed and of utmost refinement, with a bit of theater

that trace deliquescing, desperate-sounding patterns in the upper air,

doors dissolving into an apocalyptic void, its definition changing with the seasons

in a rhetoric of taste adroitly maintaining the illusion of being out in front…

        

Day 26

 

He declared his intention to show an openness to what is new,

but deferred all his decisions in that arena to his wife,

who promptly created the illusion of an endless artist salon,

with events ranging from extravaganzas to intimate dinners

where the guest of honor would drink too much and leave early, saying, “Nice kids.”

As one tyrant state, the old ally in the war, continued on, a new cultural war began,

the tyrant state feigning freedom and the free state feigning high culture,

endowments being fleshed out by wealthy contributors fearful that their side was falling behind,

the benefactors acquiring the unaccustomed feelings of financial and psychological security,

both sides defining differently that which was morally corrupt and that which was virtuous,

each creating reactions of opposites and cultural doors swung this way and that…

 

He drew from his secret intelligence work during the war to inveigh against middlebrow populism,

against the chimerical hopes of success in a world dominated by celebrity,

by mechanized popularity, and for discovering what they truly had to say,

and saying it in the manner of an adult to those who have the mind to hear it,

seizing the opportunity to engage in complex problematical activities,

in abstruse relationships among myriad elements

full of economy, delicacy, and clarity dissolving in a quest through empty space,

appearing and disappearing like half-familiar faces in a crowd,

without concern for populist success, without overly reaching out to the public,

but rather in drawing to public into new worlds…

 

He embraced the aesthetics of density and difficulty in a symbolic act of self-isolation,

living in the desert, creating works very interesting to himself

in overlapping streams of activities in independent, intersecting layers

each going at their own uncompromising rate, like the disorganized intensities of urban life,

until darkness buries all, until a single thought drives a wedge into the molten mass,

like an individual’s struggle against the collective with the desperate vitality of a walled-in fragment of a city,

all while the tireless mechanisms of the cultural war churned on…

 

He settled on pursuing a private life of professional achievement,

as opposed to a public life of compromise and exhibitionism,

made easier by his historically marginal ethnic background,

until he reached a high plateau in society, frittering away his time on glitzy dates,

media appearances, radical chic parties and game shows,

forgetting all historical necessities that drove him at the start,

and contributing to the façade of prosperity that sprung out of a middle-class neurosis,

played off on gang-ridden neighborhoods and thefts of culture with political slants,

emblematic of eternal striving and conflict, expressing romantic yearnings

and motifs of hate; from this he created an uncompromisingly modern work…

 

 

The tenements had been cleared to make room for the colossus high-culture center

where interpretations of other people’s works could be made in crystalline settings,

where cringe-inducing moments could coincide with heart-filling ones;

where those who would could be mocked for their presumptions

until they gave stupefyingly powerful performances, raining beauty on darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion…

     

Day 27

 

He took up abode in a windswept fishing village-

a bleak little place, not particularly beautiful,

houses huddled around a towered church;

the sea, when heavy, which is often, pounds at the shingles.

To the north is an estuary, melancholy and flat,

with expanses of mud where the marsh birds cry

with an emptiness echoing the emptiness without,

where one needs not a single thought in his head

when strolling across the flats,

the scene taken from a far future time,

from the remains of civilization after a great catastrophe;

portions of the ruins of an ancient town to the south having slipped into the sea;

then the rusting remnants of the recent wars

wearily ready to ward off the invasion that will never come;

the abandoned atomic weapons development facility on the distance hill

looking like a spire-topped skeleton of an alien base.

In stormy weather all this takes on a terrifying aura-

masses of low black clouds roll in uninvited, turning the sea into a dull green,

and causing the abandoned houses to groan in the wind.

 

The people here believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,

in being of use to others still living today as well as to posterity,

in the intimate rather than the grandiose, often with staggering dramatic force,

and amid all this there was a fisherman…

 

This fisherman had caused the deaths each of the young apprentices the town had provided him.

While under suspicion and being persecuted, he had slowly lost his mind, but not before more tragedy.

It was on the edge of this village he chose to anchor and hide where the dark warm floods ran silent and slow,

to hang his head with the ebbing tide, its hot slimy channel slow to glide,

dull and hopeless, in a trancelike state he’d trace the sideways sand trails of the small, spiny race

and often listened to the tuneless cries of the fishing gulls and the golden-eyes

following their reflections upon churning waves and the booming surf of windswept days

in a rich expanse of melodies and rainbows sharply tuned,

yet flecked with darkened dissonance arching beyond our familiar modes

and out into the psychologically wandering strange where shapes arise from feelings alone…

 

Perhaps his gift and personality were distorted by the necessary regimentations of society,

he was at odds with the social norms, a lonely, troubled man who became a town icon,

forming a lasting bond with no one as his elusive emotions skimmed across the surfaces,

obscuring a deep inner landscape too fleeting and dim to perceive,

yet because of that, seizing the spotlight with its unspoken passions and madness,

with turbulence and mysticism, with the uncertainty whether it had been overcome or succumbed to,

and whether the disordering power of desire had been indulged in or restrained…

             

 

 

Day 28

 

The two young men seized the spotlight in the postwar era, thought they skewed gay,

the nexus dating back to the end of the previous century when such new aesthetes gathered

with green carnations on nights out, the free-floating power of their emotions

rendered in archaic, stylized ways, giving voice to unspoken passions,

causing a general unease in the general population;

some seldom hinted at their deviance, trembling on the edge of disclosure,

while others openly inhabited a recognizable subculture, turbulent and mystical,

their allure for each other as metaphors for religious ecstasy, daring and strange,

yet not without the struggle to resist the Dionysian magnetism, orgiastic rituals blazing all around…

 

They grew up in ordinary middle-class homes, worrying of money,

making a living, sometimes nurtured to excess, sometimes playing outside the window

where the mother was dying, where intellectual precocity went hand in hand with emotional immaturity,

existing in a prolonged and exaggerated boyishness, adult realities scaring them, most of all sex,

some emotionally frozen at the age of thirteen…

 

The received scholarships to study at the university, and also gained informal educations

courtesy of the town’s more engaging denizens, giving generous attention to budding prospects;

there were the occasional pitfalls of the immoral, of those not of good influence…

 

There was a semi-socialistic spirit of the time, with the associated governmental propaganda units

giving employment to rising stars and those who had lost their jobs during the recent collapse of consumerism…

they went to work for the Postal unit, propagating information about stamps and the many uses of the mail system,

which sharpened their abilities to take on any subject for any occasion,

mixing with people from elsewhere, some making it their missions to bring the young men out of their shells,

socially, intellectually, and sexually, though they had no stomach for agitprop…

 

They assembled personal languages out of whatever pleased their uncommonly sharp ears,

taking from both conservative and adventurous models, wavering in bluesy shadows between the two,

between the liquid fire of intellectualism and the power of human desire…

 

He purchased the Old Mill outside the tiny fishing village, a pre-century roundhouse

on a hill overlooking the river, marshes, and the sea beyond;

he knew that, to develop to his full stature, he would have to suffer,

to shake off his cocoon of caretakers and admirers,

to abandon his enthrallment with the sexless and the innocent,

to cast off his romantically-tinged attachments with those beyond proper social grasp,

to do away with his false flights into memories of childhood,

to confront the world of waspishness, bitterness, and cold hard eyes…

 

He developed the unattractive habit of cutting off contact with associates who disappointed him,

who outlived their usefulness, or who were perceptive and intrusive;

the list became so long that he referred to them as his ‘corpses’

as he endeavored to preserved his boyish paradise, before the disease of feeling germed,

back when there was a primal state when all went well;

and he wondered whether such a time could ever come again;

this plaint became a sob, “How long, how long, how long, how long…”

              

He made his escape from the nightmare of the dark, emigrating to the new land,

though his sensitive ego suffered terrible scars in the business world;

there were those who kept up with is triumphs and problems,

and found that in the end he could not adapt to the eccentric, bohemian lifestyle

that his friends had cultivated- he could not create the cocoon of comfort he required

in the communal lifestyle that he found himself in- every room taken, even the attic;

strippers dropping in, novelists with alcoholic insanity, writing on the corruption of innocence,

and of a dark, secret love that destroys, as it spirals through a circuitous, spasmodic pattern,

creeping along, then leaping forth, using simple means to suggest fathomless depths…

 

It was the story of a vile man. Even in childhood he was a horror,

spurning, berating, beating, and, it would seem, killing his own father.

As a fisherman he took to drink and grew viler,

subjecting his young apprentices to physical abuse,

and a village poet put the evil to verse:

a power he ever loved to show, the feeling of being subject to his blow…

his first apprentice was left to die in bed, ‘cause of death unknown’;

his second apprentice, gentler and slender, is abused sexually also,

strange that a frame so weak could bear so long

the grossest insult and the foulest wrong…

then dies falling from the mast of the boat; his third apprentice dies in a storm

and the villagers, who had averted their eyes from the incidents,

forbid the fisherman from having any more apprentices…

He floats his boat through the estuaries, haunted by the ghosts of his victims,

all whispering the word ‘murder’ and raining the horrors of his sexuality and sadism back upon him…

your body is my cat o’ nine tails’ mincemeat, pretty dish,smooth-skinned and young as she could wish;Come, apprentice, up, whiplash! Jump, my son,jump (lash) jump (lash) jump, the dance is on… 

There were some in the village who saw him in a sympathetic light,

as a victim of a close-minded society, as the individual against the crowd,

an introvert, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem being self-expression,

as they twisted their illusions of him from villain to victim,

wounded by his status as a social outcast and reacting to the mechanics of oppression,

rather than a monstrous brute with the gift of being able to sway

between heartbreaking lyricism and heartless violence, everything about him ambiguous,

thoughts stopped short by emotions too complex to be resolved,

almost extending sympathy to an ugly man,

using his crimes to indict the society that sired him…

   .    

There were fractures beneath the town’s tidy surface-

rhythms of conversation swirling in questions and accusations,

forming into chatter, gossip, rumor,

then into a staccato'd crescendo of growing suspicions,

the upright citizens organizing themselves above the chorus of voices

picked up by the cold, gray morning winds spinning a churning sea…

 

The residents' peccadilloes became more memorable than their virtues-

hidden brothels and drunkenness appear in the townscape blur;

people scatter from an oncoming storm growing in volume and moving like a wedge

cracking the harmony of the town open, whipped it into a tempest,

and as if a psychic being, playing their ruses like an ancient tune;

then uneasy feelings are washed away on a golden Sunday morning

when radiant light glittering over the surface of the calmed waters streams into the church…

 

How near love is to torture, how tragic the misplaced faith in human goodness,

when, gravely sorrowful, fears rise like snaking figures into night

then uncover a murder most foul, beyond redemption;

followed closely by a vindictive justice knitted in childhood dreams,

ending in the chilling tale of a Renaissance lament;

 

the quarry flees to the empty beach with the ghosts of his victims in pursuit,

their chants shrieking in triple forte,

sealing a final madness and accompany him to his fisherman’s grave

where, in ceaseless motion, comes and goes the tide…

 

Day 29

 

The war requiem was not a bore, it took its national duties ambitiously

amid the raging paranoia that nothing could ever be secure,

with duplicitous and anti-patriotic sorts crouching in every corner and leering from every shadow;

across the ocean the list of prohibitive immigrants grew long,

attempting to preclude the endangerment of innocence

in a yearning for an unblemished world by those who would destroy what they could not possess…

 

He kept an austere façade, military justice would have demanded that he die

in a death sentence that could not be reversed, with motives wrapped in a holy oblivion

of double negatives and circumlocutions, the music of muted passion buried

under a “lovelessness that passeth understanding”,

and with an absence of any force to reverse the tragic momentum of the event;

bystanders were complicit in his fate,

though mere mental projections that had their will with him morning and night, even as they tried to rescue him from the master matrix,

thinking good and doing evil, children damaged by an excess of adult emotion in a world of victims and predators,

with the harm that desire can cause by those who have not exorcised the darkest strains of their nature

when there is no fairy to resolve the issues by dropping magic juice on sleeping eyes…

 

A language of sweet noises were cast in harmonic pratfalls that vanished before they could be caught,

like a lullaby from another world and a fragrance that comes to rest in a warmth of utter peace,

save for one fleeting shadow crossing the mind through the shell of a ruined cathedral,

whispering words that have been set to music thousands of times;

the complex, vaulted architecture transforming the personal into the political, the secular into the sacred,

the cold into the expressive shiverings of a midnight appointment between lovers…

 

Undulating contours of fear and guilt along his fault lines, in his crevasses, offered little light,

gave rise to spasms of existential dread, scared to death of the terror,

a whore and a wretched alcoholic, and a candidate member of the Party;

“They have been after me for years.”

Upon acceptance the dissident movement labeled him a traitor to their new-won freedoms,

his gesture of conformity giving rise to disappointment that knew no bounds,

just when political control had relaxed somewhat, to fall victim to official flattery,

yet another victim of totalitarianism and war, leaving him in private anguish,

the self-glorification quickly wearing off, leaving a self-critical hangover,

tormented by a grievous bondage trailing off in a chorale of lamentation and self-alienation

in a desolate psychological terrain filled with villains, famine, greed, and bloodlust,

with a murderer’s hand banging at the door and the terrified reactions of those cowering behind it…

 

He eventually became optimistic, by pure luck, rather than tragic in tone,

though never fully escaping the tensions of modern existence,

his metamorphoses taking place within the confines of a closed circle of fate,

in the spiritual places between everyday life and the eternal, until the theme at last is death,

in its peculiar glow and supreme calm without sentiment, a strange event

somehow outside of the gloomy, introverted psychological outlooks that preface it,

the seat banging shut as he hurriedly ran from the auditorium, apparently in displeasure,

but in fact having his final heart attack; whether he transcended the stupidity of his time

with an artistic solidarity between artists remains to be judged;

nevertheless, his last reemergence came with a cryptic smile…

 

The beach hotel provided the stage for his Apollonian and Dionysian struggle,

between the needs of his mind and body,

and offered a fictional backdrop with a high-culture veneer,

of exploding sexual energies that had for a lifetime been carefully suppressed,

pent-up and strangulated within a purely intellectual sphere, ending in folly

and a rebellion against his conservative military family in an erotic anti-establishment stance,

though still the virgin in this scene, available and aware;

he was the great man in the box, the focus of awe and the audience’s ovation…

 

Must it be, the good and the noble, in cosmic affirmation, embraced by millions,

then turning violent, moving toward hell, death-obsessed, innocence drowned,

fateful currents of black masterpieces attracted to the dreadful and dire,

in close proximity to terror, melodramas of difficulty reliving adolescent angst,

gazing on the agony of man from the grand hotel above the abyss,

or answering horror with a halo-like aura, rejecting and transcending it,

rediscovering luminosity and wit, or explosive jubilation from a surreal future

speaking a language of the spirit, walking as a saint rather than a sinner,

though eating an entire pear tart at one sitting…

       

The bush trembled as they gathered magnificence, as they opened up in space and time

with near-divine force, an atmosphere of ritual, incense, rustling robes, flickering candles,

the simple, almost brutal intermingling with the lavish and grand, post-war pillars,

fireworks and fountains, women in white dresses the symbols of grace and eternity,

the death and rebirth of souls in the grips of exceptional emotion,

scandalously mixing angels with lipstick, yet rising each morning at 5am to make breakfast

and send the children off to school…

 

They wondered if he had lost his mind, he was anxious to disappear behind birdsong,

the warbler, the blue tit, the spotted woodpecker in a polyphonic chaos,

the owl tragic and desolate in the closing bars of the dead of night,

a man stamping his foot on the surface of nature and glimpsing an outer mystery

blasted from the ground, crashing through the frame, rising from the dead

over the boldly colored terrain, immense solitude, whiffs of terror and death

ascending from the canyons to the stars, and Heaven beyond,

theological dimensions from the primordial desert striking the music of the bedrock,

of pulsing geological violence and of silent splendor of precarious rock formations over sandstone cliffs

crying out for their missing chords…

 

Day 30

 

The transfiguration of the period took on a carnivalesque, through-the-looking glass appearance,

pushing out into interstellar spaces with rebellion, liberation, and experimentation,

everyone contributing to the performance by way of coughing and moving chairs;

during the brief episodes of coherence they lit cigarettes at specified intervals

and asked an endless string of questions, without any answers given,

breaking free and buzzing around one another in decelerated patterns,

fragments spread across the page, surrealist cartoons attacked with boxing gloves,

a frothing sea of cognizance, essences, resonance, obscurity, conclusions and circumstance.

thoughts by nature dim, at the end of the sound spectrum, and in the end, simply bypassed

with primitive growls and angelic purity of tones in a contrapuntal swirl of images

leading to a crisis atmosphere of false dichotomies between style and expression,

virtuosity and structure, the noise of daily life and the harmony of spheres,

where taste had been forgotten, devolving into randomized activities,

unanalyzable densities of insipid excess in a difficult language

and aired in an overwhelming simultaneous variety on a myriad of channels,

resulting in a hemorrhaging metacollage transcribed for a ragtag band

whose hyperventilating players have incomplete mastery of their instruments

while sopranos shriek poetry into a megaphone, sentimentality chewed to pieces…

 

He limped through a dimly lit, groaning landscape of stony icons in search of drinks,

finding insolent tones contrasting with the tortured and tragic reluctance

of those who served in the cavalry on both fronts,

gibbering delirium set against hardened ex-soldiers,

and in the distance storm clouds of fear, anxiety, insecurity and terror

rumble in undercurrents of biblical tones…

 

The lure of progress proved irresistible,

though overintellectualized and technically overdetermined,

the more amenable replaced by rapid-moving figurations

pounding a single note against screams flowing out from the serious, dark, and difficult

and a cultural white noise bleeding together with imminent technological disaster,

and going over the brink into absurdity…

 

He wanted to escape, in a prison between the avant-garde and the past,

surrounded by taboos against what is in and what is out,

old habits became stale, he had to absorb what was new,

yet never burying the horrific things he saw in his youth during the war years

in the forced labor gangs on the front lines, carrying heavy munitions,

always a step away from deportation to the death camps,

or being killed in action, or shot by his overlords…

his father, brother, aunt and uncle were all killed in camps;

his mother somehow survived one thug regime after another…

 

He managed to avoid having to create the odious party propaganda;

every bit he did create was a stab in the tyrant’s heart…

soon there was an uprising, but it was quickly put down;

he escaped under mailbags in a postal train

and dashed over the border by the light of military flairs,

and quickly made alliances with those who embodied creative freedom…

 

Warring camps soon arose, and though there were no people being liquidated,

character was being assassinated; “be sure to wear protective goggles”

the advisements went; many of the jokes had a serious undertow,

the hilarity of the scene gave way to an unexpected complexity,

as the last survivors waved their little arms in the air, they looked forlorn…

 

He entered a seductive threshold into an alien world,

spacious large structures assembled from multiple layers of microcosmic activity,

the effect mysterious in a sonic haze, shapes emerging from shadows,

dark cedes to light in religiously inflected works of revelatory impact,

of souls melting into a hellish mob of primordial humming

then, in a transformation, attaining celestial harmonies

that scale the highest ranges only to stop at the edge of an abyss in a ghostly chorale,

staring at the apparition of an inscrutable black monolith

signaling the invasion of the superior alien intelligence,

spanning the entire arc of nature’s original majesty

before spiraling through the outer limits of an alternate universe…

 

He was starved for sacred images; religions were in decline,

losing their awe and community-forming functions

in the face of reason and knowledge; he yearned for ritual,

and found it in pseudo temples of secular culture,

creating a new sacred space in the industrialized world;

the godless times ironically brought forth a slew of devotional masterpieces,

as if acknowledging the good the old religions achieved

in spite of their administrators’ fatal waywardness,

and in response to the mass consumption, youth rebellion, sexual liberation,

and frivolity of the times, emerging enigmatically out of the fog ardently and gravely… 

Apocalyptic chanting and archaic liturgies aside, epiphanies were to be found

by flesh-and-blood figures gazing ravenously toward the heavens,

mouths hanging open, hands wrapped around their heads,

and from unbearable sweetness their souls would have left their bodies

in the elusiveness of poetic expression, catching glimpses of the divine,

crashing in from a more elemental sphere in a negation of death…

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musical interlude...

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He made it into a collage of cutout pictures of mavericks and counter-culture heroes

who paid heed to the classical avant-garde, some of whom he’d look up and call out of the blue;

he ricocheted his way through lame-brained attempts to capitalize on the new culture,

with adds like “fantastical magnificent experience that you should tune-in to, smashing…”

hypnotic repetition in a limitless open-endedness free of modern angst and inflected of pop optimism,

new ways of seeing and hearing over the sepia-toned prairie through the technology of speed

with the imperturbable cool of a post-war era, scribbling lightening in the air,

inventing new ways of getting from one place to the next, serious in thought, playful in execution…

 

A new race was birthing in the West, giving germic embryonic seed of future majesties of growth

amid the thumping of native thundersticks playing to the beat of a square root of two over two;

people rejecting the mainstream and playing the outcast,  abstractions giving way to body and soul,

crisscrossing the country, riding trains, doing manual labor, leaving messages on highway railings

running through the adapted landscape stripped of its idealism, its advantage laying in its wilderness…

  

Day 31

 

He slowed to a joy of gradual change, a gentle soul in a century of sacred monsters,

of chants and machine dissonance, his enveloping silence a stark, prophetic utterance,

creatively misinterpreting the diverse strains of precision and poise,

dwelling in a desert vista of long drones and lulling patterns of musical noise and stationary textures

alien to the goal-oriented structures and narratives of the time, to the vogue of profundity

rather than letting life unfold moment by moment, abstract to the core;

the local paper sent a gang of eight critics to cover the event, one of whom ended up performing,

being reimbursed five cents for every twenty minutes they spent there…

 

He inspired a hostile response, though inward and withdrawn, seldom raising his voice over a whisper;

his eyes, however, were verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic,

and preoccupied with the vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful world of unmapped space.

 

He came of age in the cosmopolitan city, born of two independent artists in an age of chance;

indeterminacy and improvisation reigned in strange, sacred spaces with the past scrubbed away,

releasing the expressive power of what remained, however daringly sparse;

breathing, allowing each detail to say what it had to say and animate the surrounding silence

with irregular and overlapping rhythms dwelling between paradise and oblivion,

more direct and immediate than anything that had existed before in an obsession with emptiness absolved of fear…

 

His unearthly sphere was not entirely free of fears and memories- yellow stars pinned to chests

in a ghost-ridden world of silent protests screaming out from under the cobblestones over the death of art,

its fragments floating in shrouded forms at the edge of perception, chiming in gentle clusters and fleeting echoes,

and threads of lament in the voice of God, the chant of millions in a single voice…

He thus endeavored to wipe everything out, clean everything away, to create a life-changing force,

but tested endurance and patience, taking the inhabitants to far-off places that few travelers chanced upon…

 

He was not without talent, created a piece occasionally, it was appreciated occasionally,

a few awards, the reviews aren’t bad, a teaching position… he led the official life,

though his talents were of the defunct; he led a life of living death, finding little happiness in academia,

yet he was named the mastermind of the avant-garde movement;

would that he had known, perhaps he could have used his celebrity to be at odds with prevailing fashions

and pursue his true romantic inner self, though he be branded a lingering virgin

taking refuge in richly endowed uptown institutions, while the free spirits habited lofts below 14^th street,

experimenting with the difficult to the freakish, making that from even the previous decade seem quaint…

 

He had a sense of space, that things could take a long time,

the buzzing of grasshoppers, distant trains, the drone of power lines,

the wind whistling through cracks in his log cabin; there was a sense of reverie, there was always time…

life was combat in slow motion, in tune with the continental drift at a glacial pace,

a waking dream state between kindred spirits under the whine of high tension line step down transformers,

rituals in metamorphosis by shamans of the outer limits playing lounge piano at Strategic Air Command bases,

proceeding at their own paces and to the desires of the moment, aesthetic tensions propelled in divergent trajectories

during all-night improvisations of unrealized urban discourse and endless highways…

 

He pressed the buzzer to hear the voice say, “Come on up.” It was the velocity of the mind,

whirring with the soft buzz of a cell phone, the siren in the street, the whistling tea kettle,

distant conversations, pile drivers, elevated trains on rails, a world away from death and war and genocide,

one nation’s idyll to another’s horrors, ice cream and records to machine guns and mortar shells,

the call of West Coast freedom to the creaking of a death train, free speech movements to Ministries of Disinformation;

yet even in an idyllic setting one has a need for a certain amount of panic and fear, as if a Biblical rain was coming,

causing passersby to wince and walk faster, though the warning will ring out forever…

 

The mimes messed with his mind with surreal provocations, yet he saw the commercial possibilities

of the fluid psychic footing, setting up situations and observing the outcomes,

sometimes tempted to interfere and bend them to more personal expressions; or create a gladdening impact

when the culture tilted toward chaos and madness and end-of-the-world messages,

where the destination was inside the point of departure, for intellectual convenience,

and in keeping with the neon glow of hallucinogens…

 

He crawled around the floor of kitchens as a plumber,

and eked out a wage moving furniture, driving taxies, and working at the post office, 

yet he vaulted to a level of popular recognition that no peer enjoyed,

though he did not find satisfaction that he was regarded as more commercial than serious,

crazily creeping through time chanting numbers, inching across the stage

in a prematurely air-conditioned world swirling around like lost pages of Mozart

leaving a canyon of emotion in a behind-the-scenes zone of unidentifiable loss,

large scale structures and modularisms ascending as if toward transcendence,

all coming together in a blazing chorus of mesmerizing patter in a sophisticated drama of harmonies and rhythms

that culminated in an expressionistic stabbing intensity upon inconsequential details, reaching an apex of cool

then settling into a ritual of sensual illusions, dancing and pulsing with a special life

carried off to a huge black window in a bleak industrial neighborhood

where a lone silhouetted figure played in an improvised silent accompaniment…

 

He found a secret stillness in anthems of imminent doom in achingly decadent times,

multimedia events of exploding plastic surviving at the whim of a cruel authority,

the eerie peacefulness of a journey into self oblivion, on the edge of consciousness,

the ambiance weightless and pristine, the outer world captivated under its spell,

the speaking voice extracted from a teenage wasteland, repeating itself over and over…

 

Day 32

 

His was a world of grand gestures and abrupt transitions, the ghosts of clipper ships,

rolling meadows ending in cliffs, tempting the aimless to follow to the end;

beguiling detours of dizzying distortions, angled perspectives rising like blue ocean hills in a rear-view mirror

winding its way through a fragmentary culture with bright curious eyes clouded with a faint sadness,

speaking in unhurried tones, halting to find the right word on a path to a rustic one-room studio

where one’s life works are scattered amid the sawdust of a live-in woodcutter who chips away at the silence,

trailing off into lullaby chords as the fate of the century slumbers

and vanishes from the radar screen into a mythical distance kept in museums for would-be elitists,

and appreciated by the damned as it trickles into newly awakened cultures awaiting their own heroes

to be forgotten after their deaths, outliving the age in which they mattered, dwelling in sunken cathedrals,

ceasing to be exclusively male…

 

After so much sunless, soulless labor by the child soldiers, a world of possibilities opened up

when a stray shred of beauty gleamed in for the briefest moment and was caught on an unrolled scroll,

only to be buried with meticulously-tuned bianzhong bells for twenty-four hundred years;

nevertheless new life had begun, zigzagging between liberalism and repression, riding out waves of terror,

making brave stands against totalitarianism, living to ripe old ages of ninety six,

singing folk tunes while planting rice in the fields, protected from the ravages of passing time…

 

The celebratory street mood was filigreed by tension and dread, slipping away like sand,

almost invisible events happening uptown and downtown stream down side streets

as the leaders of Avenue C blend opposites and send it around the world at the touch of a button,

carrying their life’s work in a backpack the decays before one’s eyes as it honors the expected

with a degree of wit toward modernist impulses that mutate toward the extreme that annuls the norm…

 

So he passes his days in a subterranean laboratory as a velvet-fisted director

consuming large percentages of the government’s budget for media and audience

and continuity with a storied past, sometimes servile to, sometimes opposed to society,

though set behind rippling facades of interior activity and a reverberating roar

among phantasmagoric boomings, ecstatic shouts, and the endless ringing of bells

tolling the dangers of free expression while pulsing emphatically with their own,

infecting the most fundamental laws of the state…

 

Loudness and lewdness ensued, computational machines analyzing spectral overtones,

constructed denials of familiar expectations float by in madness and death, mangled and scorched,

the cries and whispers carefully placed to express revolt against destruction by the destroyed,

emotions trapped behind plate-glass windows,

the grandeur and sorrow cordoned off like a criminal scene under investigation,

cities and towns frozen in time, with little evidence the previous centuries had ended,

fading paint speaking of an annihilated world, ghosts lurking in piles of decaying scenery and ravaged spirit

still on display as if preserved in amber, or as if a geneticist in a secret laboratory has cloned the past to life…

 

There lingered a disruptive, nonconformist energy, defiant of official direction,

with blood-curdling yells in a long twilight giving rise to a new harvest of religious feelings,

haunted visages gathering in a troubled stream of consciousness

with medieval chants, Renaissance masses, Baroque figurations, and pre-century waltzes

creating an ironic chaos from their combined order,

fighting like wounded animals behind rusting cage bars against phantoms from the apocalypse

moving along mistaken paths, scraping and whispering in episodes of extreme quiet,

serpents curling through small openings, giving way to roaring, wild narratives of radiant clarity,

then back again to a murmuring procession reemerging from doors suddenly opened in the mind,

like lonely exiles returning from oasis of repose to play again and again for those slowly dying…

 

Day 33- The Last

 

He stood, gleaming atop a tower of sound, now in his sixties, yet full of the dynamism of a raging, blissful youth,

blasting, testing pathways, attention-grabbing, arching in convulsive fits of energy, searching for resolution

among fractured counterpoints, a kaleidoscope of idiosyncrasies, and relics from the ravaged landscapes of the past,

dying cries, grim and faint, then a tremor of hope glowing in the night, dark but not dismal,

quiet but not calm, lyrical but not sweet, dense but not compressed, where ghosts walk again

from the top of the staircase down to the dungeon, and from that subterranean space unable to escape,

existing muted and eerily, quivering in a luminous sphere, until, with jubilation through parched lips

the hopelessness of white noise gives way to a sunny desolation, into which they stagger on…

 

He listened to the crash of the moody ocean, unchanged since childhood, old houses sloping against the sky,

without the agony one would expect, playing their part as beautifully as anything,

embodying the virtues of a culture that is at times the envy of the world, though nearly invisible and existing on the edge,

without the background noise of ideological disputation, content in their native following,

no stains of terror or tragic pasts, offering new light on old traditions, swearing off solitude and venturing off to the big city,

struggling to define themselves, seeking an asylum amid the disorder in noble expression,

microtonally tuned to the spacious melancholy between the whoops, whistles, chants, beats, and thrills and dangers of close contact

drunkenly shouted in vacant streets, making their way home in spinning hedonistic epiphanies that will be forgotten by morning…

 

He was divided into two contradictory parts, using symbols both had in common to make a point,

propelling his language forward, even militantly at times, trying to unify his daytime and nighttime worlds,

confined by liberation, sleeping but not dead, levitating like a rusty oil tanker above the bay in a dream,

propellers crisscrossing to nowhere, children of the planet invited for a ride,

cleaning out the cobwebs of finely-spun oratories and creating convoluted utterances in half-rhyming couplets,

their nervous grandeur defeated by the lower demons of their nature chugging across the open prairie in television blue,

mental eyes drifting to enemies and subversives, rats chewing in ingratitude,

while the finger of sinister resonance and paranoid malice is ever pointed in the wrong direction,

tyrant views once again romanticized in hypocritical poetic philosophies, charming and repulsive in totalitarian kitsch

where intellectuality is transformed once again into a bloody barbarism of icy coldness hammered into hard steel,

the miserable shouting ‘joy’…

 

Finally, forgetfulness descends, the historical characters of our sadly-remembering minds becoming the souls of their century,

standing on a mythical island with swans of death circling around…

 

He tried to barricade himself against the outer world, against opposite extremes, against variations and mutations

and scandal-making totems and the inevitable revolts against them,

but his indeterminate notions simply lead to another day in his life, the gradual process infiltrated by interconnectedness,

a globe that is borderless and a landscape that is continuous, from the life of the mind to the noise of the street,

no longer knowing who the offerings are from, or for whom they are intended, fragments against a soft cluster of voices

singing in a great fusion of languages and venerable traditions not yet devoid of airy power and relevant meaning,

the crude and libertine taking inward enigmas out to extroverted displays of rule-breaking, who assimilate everything

and communicate the imaginary world with their singular intensity.

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