Museum Monday 2024/Bonus Round

 

Rodin's The Age of Bronze, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

Another Opening, Another Show: January 2025

It's the start of the calendar year, though the half-way point in the traditional performance calendar; time to dust off December's glitter & pack away its tinsel & accept the onrushing realities of 2025: let's all make sure that reality includes as much art as we can manage.

Theatrical

Robert Townsend’s Living the Shuffle, a one-person show written & performed by the director of the film Hollywood Shuffle, comes to The Marsh Berkeley from 3 January to 2 February.

BroadwaySF brings the touring company of the recent Broadway musical based on Some Like It Hot to the Orpheum from 7 to 26 January.

The Marsh Rising series presents Crush, a dance-comedy show about, you know, having a crush on someone, created & performed by Molly Rose-Williams, at the Marsh San Francisco on 8 January, & Don’t Mind Me (I’ll Just Sit Here in the Dark), an examination of the Jewish Mother stereotype written & performed by Lauren Mayer & directed by  Michael Mohammad, at the Marsh San Francisco on 15 January.

San Francisco Playhouse presents Exotic Deadly: or, The MSG Play by Keiko Green, directed by Jesca Prudencio, from 30 January to 8 March.

Berkeley Rep presents the world premiere of The Thing About Jellyfish, adapted for the stage by Keith Bunin from the novel by Ali Benjamin, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, from 31 January to 9 March.

Talking

The Contemporary Jewish Museum & the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco present The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik speaking on Cities & Jewish Life on 21 January.

Operatic

Undergrad Opera at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents The Magic Flute on 23 & 24 January.

Choral

The San Francisco Early Music Society presents the Boston Camerata, directed by Anne Azéma, in We'll Be There! American Spirituals, Black and White,  1800 - 1900, & that's 30 January at First Congregational in Berkeley & 31 January at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco; on 29 January, Azéma & the Camerata will lead a sing-along workshop at The Chan Center for the Arts, 170 Valencia St., San Francisco.

Vocalists

You can find a listing for Schubert's Winterreise as part of the Left Coast Ensemble's Winter Wandering Festival, listed (somewhat arbitrarily) under Modern / Contemporary Music.

Orchestral

Here's what's happening at the San Francisco Symphony this month: on 9 - 11 January (there is an Open Rehearsal on the morning of the 9th, as well as an evening performance), James Gaffigan conducts Missy Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto (with soloist Ray Chen), & the Prokofiev 5; on 16, 18 - 19 January (with an Open Rehearsal the morning of the 16th, as well as an evening performance), David Robertson leads the world premiere of an SF Symphony commission, After the Fall, a new piano concerto by John Adams, with soloist Víkingur Ólafsson, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, & speaking of unanswered questions, who thought the perfect item to round out Adams & Ives would be that overly frequent visitor, Orff's Carmina Burana (with soloists Susanna Phillips, soprano; Arnold Livingston Geis, tenor, & Will Liverman, baritone, as well as the San Francisco Girls Chorus & the regular Symphony Chorus); on 24 - 25 January, Mark Elder conducts Berlioz's Overture to Les francs-juges as well as his Le roi Lear Overture, Debussy's Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune, Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, & John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine; & on 30 - 31 January & 1 February, Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt returns to lead the Schubert 5 & the Brahms 1.

Ming Luke leads the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Haydn's Paukenmesse (Missa in tempore belli), & the Faurè Requiem at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus on 3 - 5 January.

Voices of Music presents works by Haydn, Joseph Bologne Chevalier de Saint-Georges, & Boccherini, on 10 January at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, 11 January at First Congregational in Berkeley, & 12 January at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Caroline Hume Concert Hall.

Daniel Hope leads the New Century Chamber Orchestra in Musical Diversions, a program featuring pianist Inon Barnatan performing CPE Bach's Keyboard Concerto #3 in D minor, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto #1 in C minor, Opus 35, For piano, trumpet and strings (with Brandon Ridenour on trumpet), & Bartók's Divertimento for String Orchestra, & you can hear it on 17 January at First Congregational in Berkeley, 18 January at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, & 19 January at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco.

Chamber Music

The Saturday morning lecture series at Herbst Theater, presented by San Francisco Performances,  featuring musicologist Robert Greenberg & the Alexander String Quartet (Zakarias Grafilo & Yuna Lee, violins; David Samuel, viola; Sandy Wilson, cello), continues its exploration of The String Quartets of Papa Joe & Wolfgang with two sessions this month: on 11 January, you can hear Haydn's String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 33, #2, “the Joke” & Mozart's String Quartet #14 in G Major, K 387, the “Spring”; & on 25 January, you can hear Mozart's String Quartet #22 in B-Flat Major, K 589 & Haydn's String Quartet in D Major, Opus 64, #5, the “Lark”.

On 14 January, Noontime Concerts at Old Saint Mary's in San Francisco will present a Musical Tribute to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, featuring pianist (& program organizer) Carl Blake, soprano Hope Briggs, violinist Joseph Edelberg, pianist Daniel Glover, baritone Bradley Kynard, & flutist William Underwood III, who will perform works by Valerie Coleman, Serge Bortkiewicz, Leslie Adams. Garrett-Martin-Nicholson, Olivier Messiaen, William Grant Still, Roland M Carter, Undine Smith Moore, Blind Tom Wiggins, &  Bruce Starks (the rest of the month hasn't been listed on the website yet, but presumably they will resume their regular Tuesday lunchtime concerts).

Cal Performances presents the Takács Quartet, joined by pianist Jeremy Denk, at Hertz Hall on 25 - 26 January, when they will perform Beethoven's String Quartet in F major, Opus 18, #1, Janáček's String Quartet #1, The Kreutzer Sonata, & the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, Opus 34.

On 31 January at the Barbro Osher Recital Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Bowes Center, Philharmonia Baroque presents Bach in Bengal, featuring Arjun Verma on sitar, William Rossel on  tabla, & the Philharmonia Baroque Chamber Players performing original works for sitar, tabla, & strings, as well as variations on a Bach Bourée by Ali Akbar Khan.

Instrumental

Trumpeter Chris Botti plays the SF Jazz Center from 7 to 12 January.

On 17 January, Old First Concerts presents pianist Samantha Cho performing a world premiere piece by Monica Chew, as well as music by Mozart, Debussy, Takemitsu, & Jean Ahn.

Kodo, the Japanese drum troupe, returns to Cal Performances & Zellerbach Hall on 25 - 26 January, with their latest program, Warabe, the Japanese word for child; the program explores the “desire to play the drums with the simple heart of a child.”

Early / Baroque Music

On 19 January in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, joined by soprano Julia Bullock, in a program of arias & instrumental works by Handel, Vivaldi, Bach, Purcell, Pachelbel, Rameau, Strozzi, Telemann, & Lully.

On 19 January the Cantata Collective continues its survey of Bach's sacred cantatas, presented for free at Saint Mary Magdalen's in Berkeley, with Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, BWV 9 & Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, BWV 115, with soloists Nola Richardson (soprano), Sylvia Leith (alto), Kyle Stegall (tenor), & Edmund Milly (bass).

On 25 January at Herbst Theater, San Francisco Performances, in association with the OMNI Foundation for the Performing Arts, presents guitarist Miloš in The Arts & the Hours, a program featuring baroque & baroque-inspired music by Weiss, Bach, Rameau, Barrios, Abel, Scarlatti, Couperin, & Duplessy.

Modern / Contemporary Music

On 5 January, Old First Concerts presents pianist Sarah Cahill in a program dedicated to the music of James Cleghorn, the long-time music librarian for 25 years at the San Francisco Public Library.

On 17 January at Herbst Theater, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players & the ARTZenter Institute Emerging Composer Program present another free concert featuring all-new scores for orchestra, this time featuring works by Peter Chatterjee, Daniel Cui, Gabriel Duarte DaSilva, Angel Gomez Ramos, James Larkins, & Benjamin Webster.

Other Minds celebrates co-founder Charles Amirkhanian’s 80th Birthday on 19 January at the Goldman Theater in the David Brower Center in Berkeley, featuring compositions by the honoree & on-stage discussions by friends of Other Minds.

On 25 January at the Center for New Music, Ensemble for These Times presents Midnight Serenades: Music by Women and Non-binary Composers, featuring works by Olivia Bennett, Gabriella Carrido, Devon Lee, & others, as well as world premieres by Lucy Chen & Madeline Clara Cheng.

On 25 January at the SF Jazz Center, pianist Gloria Cheng performs Root Progressions, a program featuring solo commissions by Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, Linda May Han Oh, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, & Gernot Wolfgang.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble hosts a Winter Wandering Festival, which will include: the last works of Luigi Nono & Schubert (respectively “Hay que caminar” soñando & the String Quintet in C Major, D 956) on 24 January at the First Church of Christ Scientist (the Maybeck church) in Berkeley & on 2 February at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco; Echo Contest…Nearly on 25 January at the Maybeck Church in Berkeley, in which "Left Coast musicians join with community members to create two improvisatory works which explore the spatial dimension of music within Maybeck’s innovative architecture", featuring Raven Chacon's Echo Contest & Danny Clay's Nearly; On the Threshold of Dreamland, in which Volti joins with Left Coast to perform the world premiers of Todd Kitchen's Soprasymmetry IV, “as west and east in all flat maps are one” & LJ White's This Place, along with Huang Ruo's Without Words, Britten's Folk Songs, & Laurie San Martin's Witches, & that's 25 January at the Maybeck Church in Berkeley & 1 February at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco; A Dark Matter (Coffee Concert), a morning program featuring the world premiere of Addie Camsuzou's Unearth & Gilad Cohen's A Dark Matter (the 2023 LCCE Composition Contest Winner), as well as Tōru Takemitsu's Equinox, Jessie Cox's Afronaut, Thea Musgrave's Impromptu #1, Elliott Carter's Steep Steps, & selections from Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, & that's 26 January at the Berkeley Hillside Club & 1 February at the Noe Valley Ministry; & Schubert's Winterreise, with tenor Kyle Stegall & Eric Zivian on piano, on 26 January at the Berkeley Piano Club & 31 January at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco. You can buy festival passes to the whole series or tickets for individual concerts.

San Francisco Performances presents its annual three-day PIVOT festival at Herbst Theater, curated again this year by singer/pianist/composer Gabriel Kahane: on 29 January, he is joined by violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, the Del Sol Quartet, & members of Sandbox Percussion in Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths, inspired by Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies; on 30 January, he is joined by singer/songwriter/guitarist Haley Heynderickx & brass quartet The Westerlies in an exploration of Heynderickx's songs; & on 31 January he is joined by Sandbox Percussion in a performance of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars.

Jazz

Meshell Ndegeocello performs music from her latest album, No More Water/The Fire Next Time: The Gospel of James Baldwin, at the SF Jazz Center on 17 - 19 January.

Composer/trumpeter/SF Jazz Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard brings his E-collective & Turtle Island Quartet to the SF Jazz Center from 23 to 26 January; 23 January features music from his album Flow, 24 - 25 January feature music from A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina), & 26 January features special guest vocalist Dianne Reeves; there is also a Listening Party on 22 January.

Flutist Jamie Baum & her quartet play the SF Jazz Center on 24 January.

Bass player Jeong Lim Yang & her Trio play Mary Lou Williams' Zodiac Suite at the SF Jazz Center on 26 January.

Freight & Salvage presents a three-day Django Reinhardt Birthday Celebration, featuring the Hot Club of Cowtown, Christine Tassan et les Imposteurs, & the Hot Club of San Francisco (24 January); the Rhythm Future Quartet, the Hot Club of San Francisco featuring Cullen "Cujo" Luper on violin, & San Lyon (25 January); & Debi Botos, the Hot Club of San Francisco, & the Hot Club of Los Angeles (26 January).

Dance

San Francisco Ballet presents Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Manon, set to music by Massenet, from 24 January to 1 February.

The Japan Society of Northern California invites you to Theater of Yugen's NOHspace theater on 25 January to experience the Nihonbuyo style of traditional Japanese dance with professional dancer Ume Nakamura, who will perform & discuss the style.

Art Means Painting

You have until 12 January to see the Battle of Pavia tapestries at the de Young & until 26 January to see the Mary Cassatt show at the Legion of Honor.

MOAD (the Museum of the African Diaspora) offers free admission on Martin Luther King Jr Day (20 January).

On 26 January, the Berkeley Historical Society hosts The Life and Art of Chiura Obata, An Illustrated Talk by Kimi Hill (the artist's granddaughter), which will include discussions of the Japanese-born artist's long association with UC Berkeley & his time in the American internment camps during World War II.

Cinematic

On 11 January at Grace Cathedral, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents Hitchcock's The Manxman, with Ben Palmer conducting the Oakland Symphony in Stephen Horne's original score.

On 18 January in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances screens Alejandro Iñárritu’s film Birdman, with Antonio Sánchez performing his score for the film live.

BAM/PFA launches some film series this month: Landscapes of Myth: Westerns After The Searchers begins 10 January (I'm not a fan of Westerns in general, but sure, this series looks interesting); Masc II: Mascs plus Muchachas: Butch Dykes, Trans Men, and Gender Nonconforming Heroes in Cinema, a second iteration of the popular series from last year, runs 17 January through 23 February; & Sergei Loznitsa: Filmmaker in Residence, will run, with screenings & talks, from 30 January through 8 February.

Friday Photo 2024/52

 

trees on the campus of UC Berkeley

Poem of the Week 2024/52

 On Christmas

With footstep slow, in furry pall yclad,

    His brows enwreathed with holly never-sear,

    Old Christmas comes, to close the waned year;

    And ay the shepherd's heart to make right glad;

Who, when his teeming flocks are homeward had,

    To blazing hearth repairs, and nut-brown beer,

    And views, well-pleased, the ruddy prattlers dear

    Hug the gray mongrel; meanwhile maid and lad

Squabble for roasted crabs. – Thee, Sire, we hail,

    Whether thine aged limbs thou dost enshroud,

    In vest of snowy white, and hoary veil,

Or wrap'st thy visage in a sable cloud;

    Thee we proclaim with mirth and cheer, nor fail

    To greet thee well with many a carol loud.

– John Codrington Bamfylde

This sonnet from 1778 comes by its antiquated language honestly. as well as its rustic presentation of Christmas, so different from the glittery festival we are maybe overly familiar with today: the holiday was often under Protestant suspicion, as being too pagan or too Popish; this poem dates from before the iconography of Santa Claus/Father Christmas was set, before the German Prince Albert popularized the Christmas tree in England, before Charles Dickens helped make the holiday a signal time of festive cheer, before Christmas became the linchpin of the capitalist year.

It does mark the closing out of one year, in the rural dead-time of winter; here, as so often with months, seasons, or holidays, the day is personified, as Old Christmas, & he does seem old, with his slow footsteps, wearing against the cold a furry pall (meaning a cloak or cloth covering, but the word is often associated with hearses & tombs, as well as with a feeling of gloom, or something that is losing its appeal), but also with evergreen (never-sear, that is, never browned) holly on his brow: an allegorical figure, & not just another old man suffering from the cold.

The close of the year is a time when farm-work is as much in abeyance as it's ever going to be, which is a good reason for the shepherd, his wandering sheep gathered safely home, to be glad. He has his roaring fire & his nut-brown ale (a type of brown ale made in northern England). One similarity with our current Christmas is that this is a family holiday; he watches his ruddy prattlers, that is, his children. Ruddy presumably because they are vigorous & healthy, prattlers because they are still young enough to speak in a childish, maybe even babyish, way. There is a young couple, or couple-to-be, flirting over roasted crabapples (the usual meaning of crab in early modern English). No sign of the shepherd's wife, who is possibly off somewhere keeping the household running, but otherwise a fun & festive holiday scene, though one devoid of our tinsel & the piles of presents.

The closing sestet hails Christmastime, vowing to greet it always with merriment & singing, no matter how it appears: in snowy white and hoary [frosty] veil, something like the White Christmas of our recurrent fantasies, even here in California, or wrapped in a dark cloud, preventing us from seeing his features. There's uncertainty here, as there always is about the future, but also a determination to greet whatever it is in an open spirit: not a bad resolution to keep, at any time of year.

I took this poem from A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, edited by Paula R Feldman and Daniel Robinson.

Museum Monday 2024/52

 

detail of The Adoration of the Shepherds by Joachim Anthonisz Wtewael, at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco

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