Friday Photo 2024/22

 

the flowers that bloom in the spring

Poem of the Week 2024/22

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide,

Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide,

Doth God exact day-labor, light denied,

I fondly ask; But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts, who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."

– John Milton

Milton of course is renowned for the epic sweep & sonorous majesty of his verse, but his sonnets are almost oddly powerful, like a contained but impressive granite monument. Here, in his famous sonnet on his blindness, he is also  unexpectedly intimate, dealing with a physical crisis that shades into a spiritual one.

Blindness, which came upon Milton as he worked to justify the English rebellion against the anointed King, is not only a terrifying condition for a poet, but a resonant one, as the mighty figure of the blind Homer casts a giant shadow over subsequent poets. Milton was immersed in the classical past & worked with & against it, but he probably would have preferred to have that ongoing agon take place outside his physical body, in the mental/spiritual worlds of poetry & philosophy.

Milton approaches the subject obliquely, referring to his light, rather than his eyesight. & that light is spent, meaning not just gone, but used & therefore unavailable for further use, like a burnt-out candle. He was actively using his sight, not just for literary work, but for political work. The difficulties of such work are immensely increased, of course, when you have to compose in your head & rely on an amanuensis. Light is traditionally associated with knowledge, not just worldly but spiritual: enlightenment. ("This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all": First Epistle of John, 1:5, King James translation). So the poet is cut off not only from his work in the world but, by implication, from his spiritual sustenance. Yet in this moment of despair (there is an echo here, I think, of Job) he does not curse, or turn away from God; he questions His ways. He considers his situation, reviewing it carefully, examining it from different angles.

The calamity struck him before "half his days" were run: I assume Milton is talking here rather generally about half of the traditional Biblical lifespan of threescore & ten years (70): in other words, he still has much to do in "this dark world and wide". The world is dark: mysterious, lacking enlightenment, cut off from the divine glow. The poet whose light is spent is stuck in a world lacking light, but instead of feeling at home, he feels cut off, isolated; wide suggests an uncertainty about which direction to take or where to turn in this world. (Much like Dante at the beginning of his Commedia, lost in a dark wood halfway through the journey of his life.)

The next lines are an extended play on the parable of the talents, found in Matthew 25: 14 - 30. With his usual verbal dexterity, Milton puns on talent, a unit of money used in the Bible, & talent, a skill or knack of doing a particular thing. Milton's talent, of course, is scholarship & writing, & he is unable to use them as he did, despite his zeal. There is genuine anguish here; it is death to hide this talent: he refers not only to the money given the servant in the parable, but to what he felt was his purpose for being in existence on earth. At the end of the parable, the "unprofitable servant" is cast "into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth". Again, darkness is used as an indication of ignorance, suffering, & even damnation. Continuing the play on the parable, he wants to present his "true account", & this refers not only to the account book in the gospel story but to God's judgment on each soul when it dies (in Christian theology, the "four last things" are death, judgment, Heaven, & Hell).

This sonnet divides its fourteen lines in what is sometimes called the Italian or Spenserian mode: an octave & a sestet (as opposed to the English or Shakespearean sonnet, three quatrains & a concluding couplet). Line 7 concludes the extended play on the parable as well as the summary of the poet's tormenting situation: will God judge him for his failures to do his work, since God is also taking away his necessary tools? This question – Doth God exact day-labor, light denied – is usually, in modern editions, set apart with quotation marks, making it clear that the poet, the I of the next line, is the speaker. But when I pulled down my college copy of Milton's Complete Poems & Major Prose, I saw that I had crossed out the quotation marks, which surprised me, as I do not write in books, until I suddenly flashed on my professor instructing the class to do so. They are apparently not in the more lightly punctuated original printing, & they're not meant to be. With his customary flexibility of syntax, Milton initially suggests that this line is the "chiding" the returning Master gives his servant. It isn't until the end of the octave that we realize the speaker is, more likely, I the poet. There is a tendency in annotated editions to make the crooked straight &  the rough places plain in ways they weren't meant to be. Writers often want the ambiguity, the struggle to see what exactly is going on.

So the answer to the poet's question – why have I been struck in this terrible way, & what do I do now? – is already developing even before the sestet, in the amphibiously placed line that suggests God is the one chiding the poet by asking if he really thinks God will punish him for the troubles God has laid on him. And the poet asks the question fondly. Fond at this time primarily means foolish, though there is a suggestion of the current meaning, which centers on affection for someone or something. The poet himself feels that his question is foolish (who is he to question the mysterious ways of the Almighty?) but he has not turned away from God: there is that residual affection. & despite what we would now call the "power imbalance" between poet & Creator, the poet feels he can & should question the ways of the powerful, as in the stated epic purpose of Paradise Lost, which is to justify the ways of God to men, meaning not only to justify to men (humanity) God's ways, but to justify the ways God has treated men (humanity): that is, he feels free to call God to account for the state of humanity, & he feels God not only expects but requires this analysis from his rational creation.

The sestet provides whatever answer the poet is going to receive. The poet has murmured his question; murmur now implies something low, soft, & indistinct, but here it has a more Biblical resonance as grumbling or complaining. Patience – a quality of endurance, of withholding judgment on one's situation, of waiting to see what is in store – heads off the murmur by suggesting that God is not quite like the Master in Jesus's parable; God does not need anything from those he created or from the gifts he gave them. The poet's suffering & troubled confusion is, in the vast & empyreal vision of God, a mild yoke (another echo of Biblical language: "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light", Matthew 11:30, King James translation).

In a phrase suggestive of the celestial armies of Paradise Lost, we are told of thousands who, at his bidding, rush without rest over the entire world, finding no obstacles in land or sea; they post, which suggests they are messengers or servants. There is a great sense of infinite movement & quickness here, part of the abundance of the Creator. Of course we feel we should also be rushing about. But, with a traditional Christian humility in the face of the unknowable ways of God, we are told that they are also serving him who simply wait to see what he gives them to do. There is a suggestion that they will be called on, at some point, to end their standing & their waiting. & though this attitude is rooted, as I mentioned, in a traditional Christian fear of the Lord, it is impossible to hear Milton's firm & magnificent final line without feeling a sense of power, strength, & determination, & even defiant pride, despite their official acceptance of Christian humility, in those who stand & wait.

I took this poem from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Hughes.

Museum Monday 2024/22

 

detail of Statue of Bacchus with a Panther, from the 2021 special exhibit Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the GraveLast Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/21

 

nasturtiums

Another Opening, Another Show: June 2024

As a reminder / warning, the last weekend in June is Pride Weekend & any non-pride events in San Francisco will take extra time & effort to get to, so check your dates before making plans (I speak from experience here). Summer comes in with several festivals, ranging from the medieval / Renaissance / Baroque world of the Berkeley Early Music Festival to the written-right-now modernism of the Kronos Festival,  but there's also a lot of stuff in between: something for everyone!

Theatrical

Ray of Light Theater presents Everybody's Talking About Jamie, the musical by Dan Gillespie Sells & Tom Macrae, about a British teenager in Sheffield who dreams of becoming a successful drag star; that runs at the Victoria Theater from 1 to 23 June.

Steve Budd’s Seeing Stars, a one-person show written & performed by Budd & directed by Mark Kenward, about an adult son trying to reconnect with his father, runs at The Marsh in Berkeley from 1 June to 13 July.

BroadwaySF presents the recent gender-flipped revival of Sondheim's Company (Bobby is now Bobbie), directed by Marianne Elliott, at the Orpheum from 5 to 29 June.

From 6 to 23 June, the Oakland Theater Project presents the world premiere of The Ghost of King, a one-person show created by & starring Michael Wayne Turner III exploring the philosophy & legacy of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

Berkeley Rep presents Mother Road by Octavio Solis, a contemporary riff on The Grapes of Wrath, directed by David Mendizábal, from 14 June to 21 July.

On 17 - 18 June, the Shotgun Players Champagne Staged Reading Series presents David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face, an "unreliable memoir" exploring color-blind & ethnic-sensitive casting, directed by Daniel Eslick.

Aurora Theater presents The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, based on the book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (I give the credits as they are listed on the website), directed by Jessica Holt, about a magazine fact-checker & the renowned essayist whose work is being checked, from 21 June to 21 July.

Z Space & Word for Word present Who's-Dead McCarthy: Stories by Kevin Barry, directed by Paul Finocchiaro, from 26 June to 21 July at Z Below.

San Francisco Playhouse is doing the Tim Rice / Andrew Lloyd Weber hit Evita, directed by Bill English, as its summer musical; performances start on 27 June & the show runs through 7 September.

Talking

City Arts & Lectures presents novelist Percival Everett, whose latest novel, James, reworks Huckleberry Finn, & filmmaker Cord Jefferson, who made the film American Fiction, based on Everett's novel Erasure, in conversation with Jelani Cobb on 3 June at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

City Arts & Lectures presents gender thinker Judith Butler in conversation with Poulomi Saha on 13 June at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

City Arts & Lectures & the SF Jewish Community Center co-present writer Daniel Handler, in conversation & making cocktails with Isabel Duffy, on 20 June at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.

Operatic

San Francisco Opera concludes its current season with three productions: Mozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by Eun Sun Kim in the celebrated production by Barrie Kosky (informally known as "the silent movie production", which of course makes me need to see it) on 30 May & 2, 4, 8, 14, 20, 22, 26, & 30 June; Saariaho's Innocence, conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs. on 1, 7, 12, 16, 18, & 21 June; & Handel's Partenope, conducted by Christopher Moulds, on15, 19, 23, 25, & 28 June.

Pocket Opera presents Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor, with music direction by Robby Stafford & stage direction by Phil Lowery, on 16 June at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, 23 June at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, & 30 June at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Opera Parallèle presents Fellow Travelers, with music by Gregory Spears & a libretto by Greg Pierce, based on Thomas Mallon's novel about the mid-century Lavender Scare in the federal government, on 21 - 23 June at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco.

On 8 June at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, the Wagner Society of Northern California presents Leo Eylar, Music Director of the California Youth Symphony, speaking on Wagner’s French Connections, which will explore the composer's complicated relationship with all things French & his influence on later French music.

Choral

Artistic Director Irina Shachneva will lead Slavyanka Chorus in Songs of Faith, Love and Delight, a program of Slavic folk songs & sacred hymns by Irina Denisova, Dragana Velickovic, Ljubica Marić, Iryna Aleksiychuk, & Dobrinka Tabakova; you can hear them on 7 June at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Berkeley, 8 June at First Congregational in Palo Alto, & 9 June at Star of the Sea in San Francisco.

Ming Luke leads the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra with soloists Sara Couden (mezzo-soprano) & Simon Barrad (baritone) in Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service (Avodat Hakodesh) & Maurice Duruflé's Requiem at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley on 7 - 9 June; as usual with the BCCO, admission is free & no reservations are required; the doors open about 45 minutes before the concert begins.

The International Orange Chorale presents a 20th anniversary concert, Bridge to the Future, at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco on 8 June, featuring a newly commissioned work from Rex Isenberg (with guests the Cable Car String Quartet) & Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands.

In addition to their 9 June performance as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival (see below under Early / Baroque Music for the festival), Chanticleer will be performing Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame on 2 June at Saint John's Lutheran in Sacramento, 7 June at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, & 8 June at Mission Santa Clara. 

The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir gives its second annual Juneteenth Concert at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage on 15 June.

On 18 June at Davies Hall, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus (Jacob Stensberg, Artistic Director) & the San Francisco Symphony will perform All We Need Is Love, a program which will include pieces by Vaughan Williams, Michael Tilson Thomas, Cyndi Lauper, David Conte, Dominick DiOrio, & others.

Vocalists

Jane Monheit vocalizes at Herbst Theater, presented by the SF Jazz Center, on 6 June.

On 10 June at the SF Jazz Center, René Marie performs Jump in the Line!, her tribute to Harry Belafonte, with trumpeter Etienne Charles & trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. 

On 27 June at the Taube Atrium Theater, the Merola Opera Program offers The Song as Drama, a recital with as-yet unspecified pieces chosen by Carrie-Ann Matheson & Nicholas Phan.

Orchestral

On 2 June in Zellerbach Hall, Music Director Joseph Young leads the Berkeley Symphony in Ellington's Solitude (arranged by Morton Gould), the west coast premiere of Jimmy López Bellido's Aurora Violin Concerto (featuring soloist Leticia Moreno), & the Ravel arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Catch him while you can: current but sadly not future Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Esa-Pekka Salonen leads some stimulating programs this month: on 7 - 9 June, he collaborates with director Peter Sellars & choreographer Alonzo King (with his LINES Ballet) in performances of Ravel's Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) & the SF Symphony premiere of Schoenberg's Erwartung (with soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams); on 13 - 15 June, he leads the Symphony in Shostakovich's Cello Concerto #1 (with soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason), the SF Symphony premiere of Gubaidulina's Fairytale Poem, & Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini; from 21 - 23 June, he leads the Symphony in Schumann's Piano Concerto (with soloist Yefim Bronfman) & the Bruckner 4, the Romantic; & on 28 - 30 June, joined by the Pacific Boy Choir Academy & mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor, he leads the Symphony Orchestra & Chorus in the Mahler 3.

Dawn Harms, Music Director of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, leads them in Ethel Smyth's Overture to The Boatswain’s Mate, Copland's Lincoln Portrait, & the Beethoven 9, the Choral, on 22 June at Herbst Theater.

On 23 June, Jung-Ho Pak leads the Bay Philharmonic in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 (with soloist Jon Nakamatsu) & his 4th Symphony at the Chabot College Performing Arts Center in Hayward.

Chamber Music

On 2 June at the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Symphony's Alexander Barantschik (violin), Peter Wyrick (cello), & Anton Nel (piano) will perform Mozart's Piano Trio in E major, K542; Richard Strauss's Cello Sonata in F major, Opus 6, & Smetana's Piano Trio in G minor, Opus 15.

On 16 June at Davies Hall, a chamber group of San Francisco Symphony musicians will perform Kodály's Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, Ernst von Dohnányi's Sextet, & Shostakovich's Piano Trio #2 in E minor.

The San Francisco Symphony presents violinist Stella Chen & pianist George Li at Davies Hall on 26 June, when they will perform Schubert's Rondo in B minor, Eleanor Alberga's No-Man’s-Land Lullaby, & Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata.

The Eos Ensemble (Craig Reiss, violin; Evan Kahn, cello; & Elizabeth Dorman, piano) will perform piano trios by Dvořák & Haydn at the Piedmont Piano Store in Oakland on 29 June (the store is near Oakland's City Center area, not in Piedmont).

Instrumental

On 14 June, Old First Concerts presents Arjun Verma on sitar & Eman Hashimi on tabla, with "ancient and modern aspects of Indian classical music in the style of the legendary Ustad Ali Akbar Khan".

On 30 June, Old First Concerts presents pianist Lee Alan Nolan in From Rags to Mystics 2, a program including Messiaen's Catalogue d’oiseaux, livre 1, Bruce Christian Bennett's Small Art, & ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin, May Aufderheide, & Irene Giblin.

Early / Baroque Music

The big event this month is the biannual Berkeley Early Music Festival & Exhibition on 9 - 16 June, presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society. You can check out the full "official" (meaning, non-Fringe Festival) acts here; some events that jump out at me from the offered riches are:  Chanticleer & Alkemie performing Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, along with songs from the minstrel tradition, on 9 June at First Church in Berkeley; La Fonte Musica tracking Dante through his Commedia on 11 June at First Church; Alkemie performing 3th-century trouvère songs, dances, and motets on 11 June at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Berkeley; La Fonte Musica performing Enigma Fortuna, a program exploring the music of Antonio Zacara da Teramo, on 12 June at Saint Mark's Episcopal; Cappella Pratensis singing Jacob Obrecht's Missa Maria zart on 13 June at Saint Mark's Episcopal; Cappella Pratensis performing mass movements, motets, & chansons by Josquin Desprez & Jean Mouton on 15 June at First Church; Severall Friends in Shadow of Night, a program exploring Elizabethan occult practices as expressed in music, on 15 June at Saint Mark's Episcopal – my selection here leans heavily on Early Modern vocal music, but you could review the schedule & come up with other interesting themes: baroque instrumentals, or non-European traditions; in addition, there is a plentiful field of Fringe Festival events, which you can see here.

Modern / Contemporary Music

On 2 June, Old First Concerts presents pianist Blaise Bryski in an all Mark Winges concert, featuring Red Sky Opening, Nocturnes, & More Hand Jive.

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Florence Price's Piano Quintet in A minor & David Sanford's Klatka Still, along with world premiere works from Chris Castro, Kevin Barba, William Jae, Sebastian Lopez Bossi, Christopher Martin, Maile Pacumio, & Evan Wright, & you can hear them all on 8 June at the Piedmont Center for the Arts & 9 June at the Ruth Williams Bayview Opera House in San Francisco.

Ensemble for These Times celebrates its latest release, Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood: The Album, on 15 June at the Berkeley Piano Club with a concert including music by Erich Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Alexandre Tansman, & others featured on the recording, as well as Schoenberg's Cabaret Songs (Brettl Lieder), with soprano Chelsea Hollow.

On 19 June at the Center for New Music, Ken Ueno & Karen Yu will perform their Noise Box Cantos & their Shadow Mudras, developed collaboratively as a reaction to their experience of feeling subsumed & erased during improvisations with a collective of modular synthesizer players; percussion duo Kevin Corcoran & Jacob Felix Heule will also perform.

The annual Kronos Festival, capping the quartet's celebration of 50 years of innovative music-making, takes place at the SF Jazz Center from 20 to 23 June: on 20 June, we have the world premiere of Beyond the Golden Gate, exploring the history of Chinese Americans. for which pipa virtuoso Wu Man joins the Quartet, followed by a moderated conversation with activist David Lei; the program also pays tribute to Sun Ra with a world premiere from Zachary James Watkins & a mash-up composition by Sun Ra, Terry Riley, & Sara Miyamoto, as well as new works by Sahba Aminikia & Aleksandra Vrebalov; on 21 June, we have the world premiere of Active Radio, which combines Kronos with a live conversation between journalist Brooke Gladstone & civil rights lawyer Dale Minami, along with a world premiere by Jonathan Berger, a recitation by Nathalie Khankan, & throat singer/composer Tanya Tagaq who performs a set of her own compositions, including the local premiere of Watchwolf, with the Quartet; on 22 June, we have violinist John Sherba & violist Hank Dutt, both retiring from the Quartet, in conversation with Brooke Gladstone; also on 22 June, composers Missy Mazzoli & Ellen Reid discuss the Luna Compositions Lab, which "provides mentorship, education, and resources for young female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13–18"; the two will discuss the Lab & the Composition Fellows & their work with Kronos; also on 22 June, the program features works by long-time Kronos collaborators, as well as performances by Mahsa Vahdat & the San Francisco Girls Chorus (led by Valérie Sainte-Agathe), selections from Trey Spruance's The Black Art Book of St. Cyprian the Mage, the world premiere of a piece by Mary Kouyoumdjian, & two more world premieres, this time from Luna Composition Lab Fellows; the festival closes on 23 June with the “live documentary” A Thousand Thoughts, with live narration by filmmaker Sam Green & live performances by Kronos, along with filmed moments & interviews.

Garden of Memory, the annual summer solstice celebration of new music at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, will take place on 21 June this year; buy tickets early if you're interested, as the number who can attend is capped & this is a popular event.

Jazz

On 12 June at Davies Hall, in honor of Oscar Peterson's upcoming centennial, the SF Jazz Center presents the American premiere of his previously unperformed Africa Suite, along with his Canadiana Suite & other of his compositions; the evening's host is Delroy Lindo & the music will be performed by a core quartet of pianist Benny Green, guitarist Russell Malone, drummer Jeff Hamilton, & bassist John Clayton, joined by pianists Kenny Barron, Gerald Clayton, & Tamir Hendelman (featured on the Canadiana Suite), as well as bassist Robert Hurst & the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, co-led by John Clayton & Jeff Hamilton.

Appealingly named piano trio GoGo Penguin performs at the SF Jazz Center on 14 - 15 June.

Joshua Redman & his ensemble, with vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa, are touring to support their latest album, Where Are We, which was conceived during the pandemic & explores "themes of isolation, wanderlust, and American identity", & that's at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage on 22 June.

Art Means Painting

The Contemporary Jewish Museum's first California Jewish Open includes work from 47 Jewish-identifying California artists; it opens on 6 June & runs through 20 October.

SFMOMA & City Arts & Lectures co-present a conversation on 6 June at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco between Kara Walker, who has a site-specific installation opening at SFMOMA in July, & writer Doreen St. Félix.

Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples opens at the Oakland Museum on 14 June. 

Sculptor Leilah Babirye will have her first one-person show in America at the de Young Museum, opening on 22 June.

Cinematic

The San Francisco Documentary Festival runs from 30 May to 9 June at the Roxie in San Francisco; a lot looks enticing, but one thing in particular that jumped out at me is Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, with the filmmakers in attendance, on 31 May.

BAM/PFA starts its summer film programming this month by launching three series: starting 7 June, Les Blank: A Life Well Spent explores the Bay Area-based independent filmmaker's works; starting 8 June, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Cinema explores the Japanese animation giant's beloved films; & on 14 June, Film Noir Classics: America’s Dark Dreams highlights many of the genre's classics.

The 20th Anniversary International Queer Women of Color Film Festival will take place at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco on 14 - 16 June; the screenings are free.

Poem of the Week 2024/21

The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House

One without looks in to-night

    Through the curtain-chink

From the sheet of glistening white;

One without looks in to-night

    As we sit and think

    By the fender-brink.

We do not discern those eyes

    Watching in the snow;

Lit by lamps of rosy dyes

We do not discern those eyes,

    Wondering, aglow,

    Fourfooted, tiptoe.

– Thomas Hardy

Sometimes poets make you read a ways into the poem before its subject is revealed (Emily Dickinson, for example, wrote a number of what you might call riddle poems, in which you have to deduce the subject from the description – see for example this poem, which does not include the word snake). Here, Hardy lays it out right in the title: a fallow deer, a lonely house. (A fallow deer is a species of deer now widespread in the United Kingdom.) The deer brings us to a wild, or at least semi-wild, part of nature; the house must mean that people are or have been there, but it is a lonely house (an adjective that casts a shade of melancholy over the possible inhabitants), a house isolated from others (again, the situation of the house, physical & emotional, reflects on its inhabitants), bordering on an area untamed enough to include wandering deer, deer who have not yet learned to flee all signs of human habitation.

One reason to spell out where we are & who is involved is that the striking first line would be pretty creepy otherwise: who is this person staring in! a thief, a stalker, some yet unimagined criminal sort? Instead we know that it must be the deer who is outside, drawn (by curiosity, by the light, by who knows what fallow-deer thoughts) to look through the small gap in the curtains. The poet does not begin with his discovery of the picturesque animal staring in, but outside, with the fact of the animal.

The animal is on a sheet of glistening white: an as-yet pristine snowfall. (The second stanza confirms that the white is snow, & not, say, moonlight.) Sheet is interesting, as it can refer to human-made domestic bedding as well as to "an extensive unbroken surface"; this gentle poem puts us into a sort of hazy space between the "civilized" & the "wild", in which human & non-human are distinct but adjacent, curious about each other, open to each other.

The first line is repeated as the fourth line, a pattern that will recur in the second stanza; the lines fall lightly, perhaps like the snow that whitened the grounds outside of the house. It's nighttime, & the repetition gives a bit of a drowsy feeling to the lines. The last two lines of the first stanza bring us indoors to the human half of this encounter: but who is we? Two friends, a couple, one lone person speaking grandly & inclusively in the royal pronoun? Whoever we are, their activity is thinking by the fire (fender-brink, I assume, is the low grate in front of a fireplace), which is a mode suggestive of rumination, contemplation, reverie, rather than active planning.

The first stanza opened with the fallow deer looking in on those inside the house; the second opens with those inside the house perceiving the deer nuzzling up to the window. But this moment of closeness between human & animal can only go so far; we cannot discern those eyes; just as the repetition of one without looks in tonight emphasizes the inside/outside separation, so the repetition of we cannot discern those eyes emphasizes the unknowability of the deer. On one level, discern means something like to make out clearly, but it also suggests discriminations, usually of a moral nature, some fine-grained reading like connoisseurship. The eyes, in the common phrase a window to the soul, are, in this animal, beyond our comprehension; we cannot grasp the thoughts or soul or whatever it is that's there behind them. Nonetheless the two isolated beings, the people inside & the fallow deer outside, can exist together in a state of mutual & benevolent curiosity, a moment of grace.

Lit by lamps of rosy dyes: presumably this is the fire, glowing reddish & orange. That seems to be the only light on in the house, adding to the air of reverie; if the house were brightly lit, could it be described as lonely? Would a lone deer wander up to it out of curiosity? The lit by lamps line falls in between lines about the deer watching in the snow & the line about the inhabitant's inability to see the eyes; grammatically, given the semicolon before the lit by lamps line, it seems to refer to We, perhaps explaining why we cannot discern the eyes: is the light too dim? Are "we" half-drowsy? (There is something dreamlike in a pleasing way about the mysterious apparition at the window.) But the grammar of the line is flexible enough to cast a rosy glow back on the creature in the snow. A rosy glow is usually an optimistic one, & it seems to be so here. But its likely cause, fire, is a destructive element, the controlled use of which sharply separates humans from other animals. Again, the poem gives us a lovely view of two disparate creatures brought together, but at the same time reminds us of the unbridgeable gap dividing them.

Just as the first stanza ended with two lines describing the house's inhabitant(s), the second ends with two lines about the deer outside, as imagined by the house's inhabitant(s). The first of these lines – the two words wondering, aglow – seem to be what the inhabitant is imagining about what might be seen in the deer's eyes. But we also know that the inhabitant is wondering, & even, given the lamps of rosy dyes, aglow, giving us another suggestive link between the two beings. But then the final line reminds us of the gulf between them: it's possible the inhabitant might occasionally rise to tiptoe, but fourfooted is an indelible marker of difference, despite the peace & fullness of this momentary encounter in the solitude of a snowy winter night.

I took this from the Complete Poems by Thomas Hardy.

Museum Monday 2024/21

 

detail of The Actor Ichikawa Danjūrō VI as Fuwa Bansaku in the Play "Kasei sanbon karakasa," by Toshusai Sharaku, currently on view at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as part of the special exhibit Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World

Friday Photo 2024/20

 

blossoms of an Asian Pear Tree

Poem of the Week 2024/20

Spy

She walked alone, as she did every morning.

Hers the narrow sidewalk, the corroded lamppost.

Larks thrilled the apricot air. Barbed crucifixes

Against the sky, the haloes of mist around streetlamps –

They reminded her of Jesus on a gilded altar

And Mama in a blue apron, praying.

Where were the oily midnights of depravity?

A woman of hard edges, blonde with dark armpits –

Where was she but always coming in from the cold?

– Rita Dove

Who is the titular spy here? On the one hand, it could be the woman who is the subject of this poem: one who walks alone, in the liminal moral space of the spy, & the final line (Where was she but always coming in from the cold?) seems to clinch the identification, as it refers to  John le Carré's celebrated 1963 novel of Cold War espionage, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (made into a film starring Richard Burton in 1965). The success of the novel popularized the idiom to come in from the cold, meaning "to become part of a group or of normal society again after one has been outside it" (definition from Merriam-Webster). In the novel & the idiom, the cold refers to the shadowed, morally ambiguous world of spying, as well as to the Cold War in which the story takes place. In this poem, there are suggestions that this woman is in a morally ambiguous space, but cold is also a literal reference to the cooler morning temperatures in which she walks daily; it also could refer to an emotional world, either the one she lives in (she is a woman of hard edges) or the one she inhabits (oily midnights of depravity), or, more likely, a bit of both. But once you've been in the morally ambiguous space, some of it always clings to you: this woman is always coming in from the cold. It is a daily act for her, which means she never truly comes in from the cold, at least metaphorically, as she's always going back out into it, with the cycle repeated day after day.

On the other hand, the spy could be the poet-narrator, who has been tracking this woman & knows her regular morning routine, & by implication & extension, the spy might also be each of us reading the poem, who are sharing in the speaker's somewhat voyeuristic morning surveillance. "Somewhat" voyeuristic, because, in a poem full of suggestive, hovering borders (between past & present, memory & reality, city & country, the sacred & profane), the speaker implies rather than states & judges things. The woman seems to be a sex worker, rather than a housewife or office worker, but that's evoked rather than stated: she is walking the streets (but does that make her a streetwalker?) & she is right away put in the context of a lamppost, leaning against which is associated with disreputable behavior such as drunkenness or sexual solicitation; corroded as a modifier to lamppost not only tells us something about the street this woman is walking – obviously it's not a wealthy, well-kept-up neighborhood – but also suggests an air of moral rot. (It should be noted, though, that the woman isn't actually leaning against the lamppost; it is described as hers, just like the narrow sidewalk – is it just that she's the only one out there? or do they belong to her because that is how & where she works? or is there some other sort of emotional connection & ownership going on?)

I keep picturing the narrator as a girl nearing adolescence; it seems to me an older person would dismiss this hard-edged woman, redolent of the illicit, & a very young child wouldn't recognize the signs of anything wrong. Why is the speaker watching this woman regularly? The fascination seems to be linked to something the woman is telling her (& through her, us) about the complexities & difficulties of adult life. Yet the narrator couldn't simply be someone observing street life; she also seems to be an omniscient, or at least empathetic, poet, who can tell us what the woman is remembering: gilded altars crowned by Jesus, her mother in a blue apron praying.

We are obviously in an urban or at least built-up area here (the sidewalk, the lamppost), but, in the characteristic manner of this poem, we are kept off-balance: suddenly, in the third line, Larks thrilled the apricot air, a lushly bucolic image that redirects our impressions of what is going on. The lark is the joyful bird of morning; the apricot skies bring with them the sweet soft smell & taste of golden summer fruit. But before we reach the end of that same line, we're redirected again: barbed crucifixes appear. are there literal crucifixes (or, more likely, crosses) on steeples? Or is this a metaphor for how the streetlamps look? A crucifix differs from a cross in having the figure of Jesus on it: an image of suffering humanity, as is our hard-edged woman, perpetually coming in from (& then going back out into) the cold. But these crucifixes are more complicated than the usual reassuring religious symbol; they are barbed. Are they being protected by the barbs, or are they attacking with the barbs? Are they fending off or separating from the world, & from those of us in it?

The crucifixes lead into the holy symbol of haloes around the streetlamps: an observable natural phenomenon (the way mist diffuses light into a surrounding radiance) & a reminder of a spiritual realm & of organized church-going. The woman, we are told, recollects a religious past, one as lush & colorful as the unexpected larks against the apricot sky: the shining splendor of gilded altars, enriched with sculpture, & her mother, called by the more intimate & affectionate Mama, in a blue apron. (Blue is the traditional color of the Virgin Mary, the loving mother who suffers along with her child).

Is it this memory that separates the woman from her oily midnights of depravity? Oily is such a rich word there, so sticky, slimy, somehow both rich & unpleasant. Where were they, is the question, but who is asking? Is it the woman herself, pulled from the life she's now living into a memory of the life she used to live? Or is it the observer/poet, who has thought one thing about the woman (hard-edged, depraved) but who, with a moment of empathetic insight into her past, suddenly sees her in a different way, one distanced from whatever nighttime corruption she's involved in?

It's in the last two lines that we get our first physical view of the woman: she is a woman of hard edges (did the oily midnights create those edges? do they help protect her from them?), blonde with dark armpits: again, more is suggested here than stated. I have the impression the blondeness is artificial; is this some recollection of tough blondes in the movies? The woman's race is not specified, though there is a tendency to assume she is Black, because the poet is; are the dark armpits just exposed flesh, or sweat stains, even at the morning hour, indicating an uncleanly late night? are the armpits noted because the woman is exposing them in a way that seems somehow worthy of note, perhaps suggestive of other dark crevices in her person? The final question, Where was she but always coming in from the cold?, does seem to be coming from the poet-narrator, though you could easily imagine the woman thinking the same thing as she travels between the blue & gold sanctified past & the corroded reality of the present. She seems to be caught in a perpetual loop, going between past & present, city & country, holiness & depravity, always coming in from the cold only to head right back out.

There's another possibility for spy, though I've run out of hands: it might be a verb, describing the way we see the world, & other people in it: like spies, we watch for patterns & for clues, which we then interpret, though we can never be certain we're correct (it's implied that the woman here is a sex worker, but we don't really know for sure; there are other possibilities that would encompass depravity & hard edges). If it's a verb, spy might even be an imperative: given the oblique & cryptic world surrounding us, looking attentively for clues & interpreting them fully & empathetically may be the only way to comprehend what is going on around us. What does it mean to be a spy? It means we are dealing with inference & partial knowledge in trying to parse a puzzling, morally ambiguous world. It's best to pay close attention, & also to tread lightly; lives are at stake.

I took this poem from Selected Poems by Rita Dove.

Museum Monday 2024/20

 

detail of the Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Her Children by Lavinia Fontana, now at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/19

 

on the campus of UC Berkeley

Poem of the Week 2024/19

An Everywhere of Silver

With Ropes of Sand

To keep it from effacing

The Track called Land.

– Emily Dickinson

The brevity of this poem – barely longer than a haiku, & just as concentrated in its implications – contributes to its force. An Everywhere of Silver: as often with Dickinson, her capitalizations provide emphasis to words that might otherwise not receive full weight. Its an ecstatic image: shining silver, spread all over, covering all. But what is this she's viewing & describing? It's only with the second line that we get a clue: there are ropes of sand. This silver expanse (which might have been moonlight, or a field of flowers) is apparently the ocean, hit by sunlight so that it looks like a molten expanse of silver. Anyone who's been to the seaside, & I honestly don't know if that includes Dickinson or if she's going on imagination & desire here, has seen the waters like that.

But why ropes of sand? As the shore stretches out, it could look like rope, but it could just as easily look like a wall or barrier or the solidity of our earth. Ropes suggest something more tenuous than any of these, some attempt to control something wild, or potentially unruly, like even a domesticated animal. Obviously humanity did not place the sand there, but the word gives the sense that it is somehow related to humanity, something made, held against the vast & gorgeous silver sea. & why are these "ropes" there?

The answer comes in the concluding two lines: To keep it from effacing / The Track called Land. Effacing suggests complete disappearance, & at some subliminal level, the face hidden in the word suggests an erasure of the human face. Land is where the viewer most likely is standing (how else could she see the ropes of sand?). With her characteristically slyly elliptical style, Dickinson, without presenting any obvious humans in this scene, suggests not so much that they don't happen to be present at the moment but that they are swept away into invisibility & even nonexistence by this boundless & regardless Beauty.

Track is an interesting word; as with ropes, it suggests something narrower & more fragile than our usual conception of the massive solid Earth that we live on. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon has an interesting entry for track: the first definition is "Footprints; set of footsteps; trace of passing; marks left behind when one walks on a path; evidence of passing over the ground in a certain direction." Again, the presence of humanity is suggested indirectly, with the suggestion of absence: people were here, but they've passed on (& of course, to pass on is a euphemism for death, & the ocean is often a metaphor for the vast & unknowable life of the universe, & the primal source of life).

Silver is usually found under the earth, or extracted & shaped by humans for their enjoyment or benefit or enrichment. Here Silver is Everywhere; though the poet doesn't mean the word literally – there are narrow barriers keeping it back, however tenuously, from the land – it is metaphorically an erasure of our usual land-based existence. Water is a necessity for life, but the poet never mentions water; it is suggested only by the gorgeous spread of silver, a combination of water & light. The splendor of this view is more than a sumptuous celebration of Nature for the delectation of the human viewer: as with the sensuous allegorical emblems in Spenser, there is a moral message lurking beneath the beauty: a reminder that Nature & what we see as its glories are indifferent to us, that we could disappear & they would go on, that our very admiration of such beauty can wipe us out: with ecstasy comes annihilation.

This is #884 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Museum Monday 2024/19

 

detail of a Six-Armed Demon with Flaming Hair, a Javanese shadow puppet now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/18

 

two sphinxes with broken noses, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/18

Bliss

                        I

                All bliss

            Consists in this,

    To do as Adam did:

And not to know those superficial toys

    Which in the garden once were hid,

    Those little new invented things.

    Cups, saddles, crowns are childish joys.

        So ribbons are and rings.

        Which all our happiness destroys.

                        II

                Nor God

            In His abode

        Nor saints nor little boys

Nor angels made them, only foolish men,

    Grown mad with custom, on those toys

    Which more increase their wants, do dote.

    And when they older are do then

        Those baubles chiefly note

    With greedier eyes, more boys tho men.

– Thomas Traherne

Though most of his work was hidden in manuscripts until the early twentieth century, the Church of England priest Thomas Traherne was part of the great seventeenth-century flowering of spiritual poetry in English.

Bliss is a heady subject: not contentment, or even happiness, which seem like possible earthly states, but bliss, a state associated with the ecstasy of personal communion with God, which on earth seems available only in the occasional saintly trance. Starting with the title, this poem tells us to turn away from worldly things & look to the heavenly. It's a radical subject to take. & the poet's treatment of it is radical: in tight & elegantly balanced lines, he advocates a rejection of most of what we consider civilization & a return to the prelapsarian ways of Adam, in a garden without the "superficial toys" that occupy most humans. In fact this seems to be a garden without Eve; this is a conspicuously male-centered view of life, mentioning men & boys only. It is possible that the "ribbons and rings" listed as childish joys are meant to refer to feminine ornaments, but it's equally plausible that they refer to male insignias: ribbons in the sense of a military/political decoration or something attached to a medal, rings as signs of office or authority (or ribbons & rings as worn by the more ornately dressed men of the time). The other "childish toys" – cups, saddles, crowns – seem masculine as well: the cups referring to drinking parties, saddles to hunting, & crowns neatly encompassing both the British coin & the ultimate political authority, the monarch. (Women of course drank, if not in parties, & some hunted, & there were queens as well as kings, but these things were seen as predominantly male-centered & male-dominated.) Romantic or sexual love does not even make an appearance in the list of worldly vanities.

So what did Adam do, besides not know "superficial toys"? The state described is before he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil, so he didn't know that. What did he know? It doesn't seem to be a matter of consciously knowing; the poet says bliss is to do as Adam did, not think or feel as he thought or felt. Adam experienced God the Creator, & Nature his creation, in a very direct & personal way. How is it possible for us, the fallen children of Adam, to regain this state? By taking the recommendation of the more austere saints (Buddhist as well as Christian), & renouncing the world: not the natural world of God's creation, but The World in the sense of striving & struggling human society. What we think of as long-lasting traditions are dismissed as little new invented things: not only novelties, but small ones as well. Contrast that with the eternity of God; Traherne notes that God in His abode (Heaven, of course, but isn't He also present in His creation?) did not invent these ways, nor did angels, nor saints, nor "little boys", but "foolish men". The contrast between boys & men is interesting; the poet specifies little boys, so he seems to be embracing, long before Rousseau or the Romantic movement, the idea that children are born pure & corrupted by society (so much for Original Sin!).

The edifice of human society, the weight of tradition & "how things are done", is here summarized as foolish men, gone mad with custom, for things that are, after all, recent & ephemeral. The poet advocates a radical rethinking of our relationship to society, to Nature, & therefore to God. He notes that ambition can never be satisfied: those toys the more increase their wants; superficial toys, childish joys, baubles: no value is given to earthly attainments; they are destroyers of happiness. The foolish men prove their folly & their madness by eyeing them greedily, never satisfied with what they have, never thinking they could approach existence in a different way. The close proximity of dote & older suggests that what used to be called the second childhood of senility is endemic among the ambitious. The pinnacle achievements of manhood are here equated with the rawness of boys; these accomplished adults are, psychically, more like boys, despite their official manhood. Here boy suggests not innocence but immaturity. Is it simply the exigency of rhyme that leads to the poem's ambiguous play between the innocence of little boys, who would never come up with the foolish things of the world, & the immaturity suggested in dismissively terming authoritative, accomplished men boys? Even as the poet suggests childhood is a time of innocence, the weight of Biblical teaching tells him that all human states, even childhood, are prone to corruption. This would not be the first time rhymes led a poet into a fruitful, suggestive tension.

I took this poem from Selected Poems & Prose by Thomas Traherne, edited by Alan Bradford for Penguin Classics.