Friday Photo 2024/51

 

San Francisco Bay, December 2024

Poem of the Week: 2024/51

The Faery Chasm

No fiction was it of the antique age:

\A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,

Is of the very foot-marks unbereft

Which tiny elves impressed; – on that smooth stage

Dancing with all their brilliant equipage

In secret revels – haply after theft

Of some sweet babe, flower stolen, and coarse weed left,

For the distracted mother to assuage

Her grief with, as she might! – But, where, oh where

Is traceable a vestige of the notes

That ruled those dances, wild in character?

– Deep underground? – Or in the upper air,

On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats

O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer?

– William Wordsworth

I was looking up a much better-known sonnet by Wordsworth, The world is too much with us, when I came across this one, which seemed connected in spirit, at least to the lines:

                                    I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

But here, the manifestations of the "creed outworn" are not classical deities but the native elves & fairies of Britain. The faery (to use the alternate spelling) chasm of the title refers not only to the fissure in the earth that, we are told, shows imprinted evidence of this secret world; it also refers to the deep division between our world, a "modern", industrializing world, & the ancient realms of Faery.

The first line asserts the reality of the old stories, & the proffered evidence, in the second line, is an eerie distortion of our normal perceived reality: there is the sky-blue color, but it doesn't belong to the sky, but to a stone hidden in a dark cleft in the rock, away from the sun's exposing glare. The oddity continues with the word unbereft, which is a strange way of saying that the footprints are actually there. But the strangeness is the point (& Wordsworth does need the word for the rhyme, but he makes the curious choice work as part of the unsettling opening description), & within unbereft is bereft, meaning a sad, lonely feeling due to the loss of a person, place, or thing – a reference to our alienation from the rich ancient world of folklore that helped bind us, in its attempts to explain otherwise inexplicable manifestations, to the natural world.

The description continues with another subtle distancing device, the use of a theatrical metaphor to convey the vanished scene: the stone is a smooth stage, & the now-unseen elves are brilliantly caparisoned, like some fantastical & vivid ballet. We tend to take theatrical spectacles, so easily available to us on our many screens, for granted, but in the early nineteenth century this sort of dramatic splendor would be a much rarer, & more treasurable, event, possibly available only in the larger cities. Again, the faery world is presented as similar to ours, but distorted, weird, at a slant.

And this slant & secret world is not necessarily benevolent, or guided by the principles that supposedly guide human society: the poet now references one of the familiar fairy tricks, swapping a changeling child for an infant – taking a flower & leaving a weed, as he puts it. The substitution is clear enough to the bereaved mother for her to be left struggling with a lifetime of grief at the loss, a struggle & an unending grief that don't matter to the trickster elves.

And, in a sort of unsettling way, it doesn't matter to the poet, either. He doesn't dwell on the maternal pain once he has pictured it so vividly, but immediately, & here is the turn of the sonnet to its final sestet, wishes he could, if not actually join the elves, at least hear the wild music (something obviously appealing to a poet) of their revels. There is perhaps a suggestion here that the poet (not just this poet, but any poet, as a poet) contains something inhuman, is somehow set apart from normal human society, suspended between that & the possibly more intriguing unseen antique world that is dismissed by rational modern society.

He seeks some trace, however fleeting, of the maddening missing music. But he is not even sure where to look for it; conspicuous by its absence is any attempt to find it among modern humans, or normal society; instead, he looks to nature, but not even the nature near at hand: deep underground – or perhaps in the upper atmosphere? In the cold howls of midnight winds? (In a time before electric lights, midnight was a much more significant & haunted time than it is in our artificially illuminated world.) Or somewhere in between, in a liminal world: at twilight, the period of transition from day to night's darkness, in autumn, the time when hot & fruitful summer moves towards the coldness & barrenness of winter, or in light & insubstantial gossamer, a substance associated with the natural world (spider webs, silk, little gatherings of dust) & with the faery world. Perhaps the longed-for & missing music is floating past us, unheard, in some in-between space just out of our reach. . . .

This poem is part of a sonnet sequence by Wordsworth titled The River Duddon, so I assume the sky-blue stone really exists, or existed. I took the poem from the Penguin Classics edition of William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume Two, edited by John O. Hayden, which seems to be, sadly, out of print.

Museum Monday 2024/51

 

detail of Amy Sherald's What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth, currently on view at SFMOMA as part of the special exhibit Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Friday Photo 2024/50

 

San Francisco, Financial District

Poem of the Week 2024/50

 Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well that passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias, the person, was real; it is an antique Greek name for Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in the late eighteenth century, sending along artists, archeologists, & plunderers, it ignited a fascination among Europeans with Egypt, a civilization that had been old when Greece & Rome were young. But to say these things, to talk about the "reality" of Ozymandias himself, & the cultural & political context in which Egypt fascinated European writers, is to miss the point of the poem, with its layered dissection of what is really real, & what survives of that reality.

Ozymandias himself does not appear in the poem, & the poet does not even see the statue of him. He's not even looking for it. He meets a traveler, who, in the time-honored way of travelers, tells him what he has seen on his trips to far-away & fantastical destinations. And what the traveler has seen is not, of course, the long-dead pharaoh, or anything he caused to be built; he's seen a statue of the ruler. The great political power of the ruler has survived only because of artists: the traveler, who functions as a story-teller, & the sculptor, who created the monumental stone portrait. But even their work has not come down intact: the traveler tells us very little about the ruler, & the statue is both broken & half-hidden by the shifting desert sands.

What survives is not actually flattering to the pharaoh; as the poem describes the sculptor' work, we see a not particularly appealing character: not a benevolent or merciful ruler, but the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command. Presumably the ruler not only accepted but wanted this brutal portrayal; it must have come across to him as conveying power & superiority, while the satirical possibilities would be hidden from his egotistic view. It makes me think of Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family, in which, to our eyes, they look coarse & stupid – but they must have approved the portrayals &, coarse & stupid though they look, the portraits might actually be flattering. Centuries of entitlement & in-breeding will do that to a family.

So the sculptor is sort of an ambiguous figure: he saw these unappealing qualities in his ruler, yet he took the commission (possibly under duress; the traveler is not telling his tale, only that of his ruined work). Is he glorifying, or satirizing, or, in some way, both at once? (This is an eternal dilemma; think of composers like Shostakovich under Stalin's rule.) The sculptor's is presumably the hand that mocked these qualities, but what does his mockery come to? The statue was still erected, to the glory of the great ruler. The statue, even with its vivid portrayal of human passions, is a lifeless thing. Yet even in fragmentary form, this artwork is all that remains of the ruler's reign: there are no remaining laws, or customs, or even stories about him; only massive broken pieces of his celebratory statue, & a boasting epitaph: yet the only "works" that survive to be looked upon by "the Mighty", or even by a common traveler, are the works of the sculptor: the works of the artist, & even those are broken & uncertain in meaning.

We don't even know why or how the statue was broken: did time just move on & as people stopped caring about the pharaohs nature took its toll? Was it vandalized, and if so, was it part of the grave-robbing of ancient Egyptian monuments, or was it some sort of political or military act? We aren't told. The sculptor is as long dead as his ruler (the ruler who was his subject), & the traveler doesn't give us that part of the story.

Only art survives. But what is it telling us? And is its message the one that was originally intended? Beyond the intentional portrayal of great political power, & the subversively accurate portrayal of the ruler's cold arrogance, the very fragmentary nature of the statue tells us something unintended by either ruler or sculptor: something about the transitory nature of even the greatest, most frightening political power, &, what is more disquieting, the transitory nature of even the greatest art.

Only art survives, but only fragments of that art, fragments whose meaning has been changed by time. The blankness of the desert sands drifts over them, burying them, or revealing them if the wind changes direction. It was Shelley who claimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but there doesn't seem much reason to think their legislation is necessarily wiser & more far-seeing than the more political kind: it just has more of a chance of lasting. Shelley elegantly conveys the futility of power & permanence in his last lines, in which the colossal wreck is surrounded by the balanced alliteration of boundless and bare & lone and level: the words convey a vast yet unvarying expanse, something like a physical equivalent of endless time, stretching out flat & alone, an expanse of sand stretching endlessly on around the mighty but smashed fragments.

Like most people who know this poem, I came across it early on, in school, and it has floated for years in the back of my mind. Dread over the American disaster looming over us brought it back to mind. I took the poem from the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Museum Monday 2024/50

 

detail of When One Sees a Rainbow, an installation by Leah Rosenberg at the CJM (Contemporary Jewish Museum); the museum is unfortunately closing on 12/16/2024 for at least a year, to regroup, but until then admission is free.

Friday Photo 2024/49

 

the Christmas tree in Union Square, San Francisco, from the 5th floor of Macy's

Poem of the Week 2024/49

Worship Service

In a snowfall

    that obscures the winter grasses

a white heron –

using his own form

    to hide himself away.

– Kigen Dogen, translated by Steven Carter

A few swift strokes, & an entire world is summoned. It is winter, obviously, as snow is falling. We are in a snowfall, but who is we? Is "we" even the right word there? The reader is not told who or what is in the snowfall: is it the writer, the reader, both of them, or just a place & moment we are suddenly being made aware of? "We" – poet & reader – are not actively present; this poem is about a level of perception that goes beyond (over or under) our conscious viewing.

The snow is heavy enough to obscure the winter grasses. It doesn't quite cover or obliterate them, but there is enough snow to make them difficult to see. Perhaps we simply know they are there, because we've seen them there before, though now the snow blankets them. Then in the middle of the poem, a striking appearance: a white heron. We are not told "then I saw" or "suddenly there was " or "and then I noticed" or anything like that: the heron simply appears. Again, neither poet nor reader is shown actively perceiving this relatively large bird: it simply manifests its presence. As something living amid the snowy scene, it catches our attention. Herons are graceful, striking birds. It must take a moment for "us" to realize it's there: the white bird against the white ground & the falling whiteness of the snow. There are fine gradations of white, little spots of color in the eyes, beak, & legs, even with snow falling around them.

After the perception that there is a heron there, we have a dash – that is to say, a grammatical break, which signals a change, a movement in our perception. The poem guides us to move from the scene itself to a realization about the bird: he is using his own form to hide himself away. What does this mean? On one level, it's just the camouflage effect of a white bird in a snowy landscape. On another, it's a comment on how we – poet, poem, reader – did not at first see, & then saw, & now perhaps are back to having trouble seeing, the bird in his stillness against the snow. But it's not just about our perception of the bird's existence, its aliveness in a chilly scene: the bird himself is trying to hide himself away. Why? How is he doing it by using his own form? Perhaps just by staying still, white against white, melding with the world around him. Why is the bird trying to recede from view? He doesn't seem to feel danger (if he did, he could fly away). The bird is simply being itself. There is a mystery in a living thing impenetrable by other living things. And this mystery becomes part of the landscape, & of our realization of our existence in the landscape.

Winter, snow piling up, whiteness: all frequent images of some sort of void, something beyond human life & even comprehension (think of Melville's chapter on the whiteness of Moby Dick). We have a living thing trying to hide his own individual existence in this mysterious void. By noticing & perhaps trying to understand what this alien form is doing, we also contemplate this void, this spiritual meaning that floats just above (or beyond or under or over) the surface of our world. This awareness of a spiritual significance to a pleasing but not unusual view is no doubt why the poem is titled Worship Service. Here we do not have a Mass or other ceremony; there are no official prayers being chanted, either by or to or for us; we are not in a church, or sanctuary, or even on some sort of sacred ground. There is only the ordinary (or "ordinary") world, & a moment of perception, that brings us beyond the visible world into a deeper consciousness.

I took this from Zen Poems, edited by Peter Harris, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It's interesting to contemplate the subtle ways a reading of a poem can be changed by the context in which we find it: read as part of an anthology highlighting Zen poems, spiritually inclined perceptions are going to be topmost for the reader. But there are other possibilities, other shades of emphasis: in an anthology highlighting poems celebrating the natural world, or even specifically birds, the emphasis might be first on the scene presented, on the life rather than emblematic significance of the heron in the snow. Or it could be presented & read as one of the "Eastern" poems that influenced in English translation the Imagist School of the early twentieth century, or the beats in mid-century. A poem can be held to the light at many different angles.

Museum Monday 2024/49

 

detail of Still Life with Lemons & Plate by Tamara de Lempicka, currently on view at the de Young Museum as part of the special exhibit Tamara de Lempicka

Friday Photo 2024/48

 

street & sky, San Leandro, California