Museum Monday 2024/33

 

detail of a hanbok (birthday dress) from late 20th century Korea, now at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Friday Photo 2024/32

 

Embarcadero Plaza, San Francisco, California

Poem of the Week 2024/32

Theater Impressions

For me the tragedy's most important act is the sixth:

the raising of the dead from the stage's battlegrounds,

the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,

removing knives from stricken breasts,

taking nooses from lifeless necks,

lining up among the living

to face the audience.

The bows, both solo and ensemble –

the pale hand on the wounded heart,

the curtsies of the hapless suicide,

the bobbing of the chopped-off head.

The bows in pairs –

rage extends its arm to meekness,

the victim's eyes smile at the torturer,

the rebel indulgently walks beside the tyrant.

Eternity trampled by the golden slipper's toe.

Redeeming values swept aside with the swish of a wide-brimmed hat.

The unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow.

Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,

in Acts 3 and 4, or between the scenes.

The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace.

The thought that they've been waiting patiently offstage

without taking off their makeup

or their costumes

moves me more than all the tragedy's tirades.

But the curtain's fall is the most uplifting part,

the things you see before it hits the floor:

here one hand quickly reaches for a flower,

there another hand picks up a fallen sword.

Only then, one last, unseen hand

does its duty

and grabs me by the throat.

– Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Theater occupies a strange liminal space, culturally, intellectually, emotionally. It is both popular & elitist, low & high art, respectable & subversive, mocking & empathetic; filled with fakery & with truth; it both imitates & inspires real life, or perhaps that should be "real" life, as there is always the sense that we're playing parts offstage, even if we don't think we are: famously, All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players. (At the time Shakespeare wrote those words, women were of course not allowed on the English stage, so Jacques's theory is truly all-encompassing.)

Szymborska, with characteristic lightness & penetration, investigates the selvage of an evening at the theater: not just after the play has ended, but in that more precise in-between space & time in which the players emerge, in costume but out of character, & take their bows, while we applaud our acknowledgement that we've known all along that the action that has absorbed us for several hours didn't, in some sense, really happen. (To quote another of Shakespeare's plays, What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?). She adds an imaginary sixth act to the canonical five of classical tragedy. I've always found the minutes before a play begins a weird blank space of non-time; Szymborska finds, in the moments after the play has ended, a richness & a fruitful ambiguity.

It is a sort of resurrection, as the dead are raised; as in a film run backwards, fatal knives emerge out of the wounds; & deadly enemies clasp hands & bow together. Smaller things happen as well: wigs gone askew during the action get adjusted: that would be distracting in a performance, but the actor wants to look appropriate for the bows. The things that mattered so much during the play – whatever love or treachery or loss made the action tragic – fade in significance. Even "redeeming values", presumably whatever message we're supposed to take from the play, gets swept aside by the elegant gestures of an actor in a fancy hat.

And the unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow: we know, at some level, that what we've been seeing will be repeated, night after night, for the duration of the run, with the words & actions all pretty much the same, over & over. And given that this is probably, given the description of the costumes & actions, a classical tragedy, it may be something we're intimately familiar with on the page, even if we've never seen it brought to life on stage. We may even enjoy the show so much ("enjoy" is such a strange word to use of a tragedy) that we buy a ticket for another performance or two, eager to see again what we've already seen.

As the poem moves on, Szymborska gradually increases the emotions she is expressing during her sixth act. The beginning mostly describes the actions of the actors taking their bows, collecting both precise moments (adjusting a wig or gown, a "dead" performer bowing gratitude for the applause) & ironic juxtapositions that make us question whatever reality we're in: the rebel & tyrant walking out together, the victim & torturer smiling in their theatrical complicity. But then she moves to the actors who weren't in the finale, who have been waiting patiently in full make-up & costume to have their moment of applause: their patient waiting to show themselves to us, hoping for our approval, when for all practical purposes they could have already been home & in bed, she finds moving, more moving that the tragedy's speeches, which she dismisses as "tirades" (obviously the word would be different in Polish, but I believe the translators knew Szymborska & are faithfully conveying her intent here). They are perhaps a figure of the artist, staying in costume even when it's inconvenient, waiting patiently, hoping for their artistry to be noted & appreciated.

But it's at the very last stanza that we are told why she loves her sixth act so much, as Szymborska deftly transitions between amusing & interesting ironies towards an emotional clenching. We begin with another ironic & ambiguous image: the curtain falls, & that's uplifting. Down means up! We are again in the strange world of the theater, both unreal & very real. And a curtain falling is a frequent image of death: the description of life's end as a curtain falling on someone's personal tragedy is an example of how theatrical our lives can be, & how we tend to see our lives as theater. There is a sense of finality, but in those remaining moments, before we really do have to enter whatever world we consider "real" – as we stop applauding & appreciating, & gather our belongings, & trudge towards the restroom & then the subway – we are shown a few, final, very human gestures: someone reaches for a flower, a fragile bit of beauty. Someone else picks up a sword, continuing whatever unending fight had been fought. . . .

A few fleeting moments of beauty, or of longing for recognition, for being seen, before the curtain, literally & metaphorically, descends. The poet describes her reaction to this ultimate ending in vivid physical terms: the emotion grips her by the throat. This unseen hand "does its duty": is this why she has come to the theater? Not for the official show, the classic tragedy (whose purpose, according to Aristotelean authority, is to purge the viewer of pity & terror), but for the strange moment that brings us from dramatic action to our less well arranged world? Here, in the unending attempt to impose order, meaning, significance, & beauty on the chaotic world, & the inevitable confusion & dissolution between the borders of theater & life, is the true source for the poet of the cleansing emotions. At last she is moved, just as she's moving away, a mirror of our own ambiguous relation to the truthful lies of the theater.

I took this poem from Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska.

Museum Monday 2024/32

 

detail of Water Lilies by Monet, seen at the de Young Museum in 2019 as part of their special exhibit Monet: The Late Years

Friday Photo 2024/31

 

Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California

Poem of the Week 2024/31

Legacies

her grandmother called her from the playground

    "yes, ma'am"

    "i want chu to learn how to make rolls," said the old

woman proudly

but the little girl didn't want

to learn how because she knew

even if she couldn't say it that

that would mean when the old one died she would be less

dependent on her spirit so. 

she said

    i don't want to know how to make no rolls"

with her lips poked out

and the old woman wiped her hands on

her apron saying "lord

    these children"

and neither of them ever

said what they meant

and i guess nobody ever does

– Nikki Giovanni

Some lyrics strike me as perfect: so balanced, so specific yet widely encompassing, so beautifully phrased; I'm thinking of poems like Larkin's This Be the Verse or Housman's Loveliest of Trees & this poem, which I just love so much.

The situation is simple & the language pared down, but both are rich in implication. We open with the grandmother, but from the eyes of her young granddaughter, out playing: the first person we hear of, right in the second word, is the grandmother, but the very first word, her, tells us we're seeing the old woman from the viewpoint of someone else, & in relation to someone else. The two are connected, but also with a certain distance between them. One has been in the kitchen (she's wearing an apron & is about to bake rolls), the other outside playing. There's a certain formality & respect from the youngster to the elder; again, the first speech we hear is not from the grandmother herself (her call is reported indirectly) but from the child, who addresses the old woman with the dignified title ma'am. What the old lady says is expressed as her desire; she doesn't ask the child if she wants to learn to make rolls, or if she has the time to learn now (she's just out playing, of course she has time!). She just says she wants her to learn how to make rolls.

And she says this proudly. This is one of the most beautiful word choices in the poem; a  bit unexpected but all the more perfect for that reason. We can assume, since Giovanni is a writer of the Black American experience, that the people here are also Black Americans, probably Southern, with the background of difficulty & struggle that suggests. Southern cuisine is largely the product of Black workers like the grandmother, & rolls/biscuits are usually a cook's centerpiece, a cause for fame. Food of course is one of the central ways in which families pass on not just cultural but familial traditions, & we're fortunate to live in a time when a fairly new genre, the memoir/history in the form of a cookbook, has achieved prominence. I've heard interviews with Southern Black women who have written such books in which they describe feeling, or hoping to feel, their grandmother's guiding spirit as they try to recreate the dishes she was famed for. We can guess the grandmother is proud of her rolls, proud of her ability to make them, proud of her knowledge, proud of being able to pass on that knowledge, maybe even proud of the child she has chosen as an appropriate recipient of that knowledge. The line breaks are handled with great finesse in this poem. The line in which the grandmother speaks ends with old, often an ambiguous if not downright negative term in youth-obsessed America, but the next two words – woman proudly – stand emphatically alone, on their own line: a proud woman stands before us.

The granddaughter has a complicated emotional reaction that she is too young to articulate, even to herself. She is already aware that her grandmother's age means she is moving towards death (is that why she wants to pass on her knowledge?) & love leads her to dread that moment of parting. Her emotional state is parsed in the heart of the poem: but the little girl didn't want: the child has moved from being her, the one whose viewpoint we're given, whose viewpoint we see from, to being seen as the grandmother would see her: as a little girl. to learn how because she knew: this line is balanced between what the girl is supposed to learn – what can only come from an outside person – & what she knew, that is, what her instinct & internal spirit are telling her. It's significant that knew is in the past tense; this is something she's known or felt for a long time; even if this is the moment when it first rose to the surface, it's been there inside her, this fear of separation from one she loves, waiting to crystallize. Again, the line break is important; we end the line with the emphasis on what she knew, balancing what she is supposed to learn, but we aren't given what she knew even in the next line, which is, instead, a reminder of a child's inability to dissect & articulate her feelings.

It's in the next two lines that we are given what the child knew: that would mean when the old one died she would be less / dependent on her spirit so. . . . Again, note the line break: when the old one dies (the child is very aware of age & death & impending loss), she, the granddaughter, would be less. The loss of the grandmother would be a diminishment, a lessening of the granddaughter. But that implication floats ahead of the words in the next line: less dependent on her spirit. The child is counting on her grandmother continuing with her, guiding her, in spirit. This is obviously a difficult, painful concept to speak out loud, & it's difficult to imagine the old woman accepting it, even if she feels the same way. It's a complicated welter of pride, love, impending loss, pain & fear, uncertainty about what really happens after our physical death. . . .

The narrative then moves from these complicated internal states to outward actions, as the two characters try to express or to hide what is roiling inside them. The granddaughter pokes her lips out in a pouty way & says she doesn't want to learn how to bake the rolls. The old woman balances the poked-out lips by wiping her hands on her apron & saying lord / these children: given the granddaughter's level of talking back here, & the grandmother's fairly mild reaction, does the old woman have some feeling for what we know the girl isn't saying? Is it just a kids these days kind of remark? Is she on some level actually asking the Lord to help either her or the children?

and neither of them ever / said what they meant: So this particular episode was never "talked out" by the two; it remains one of those instances, often painful to the younger one once the elder is gone, in which something was offered but not accepted for complicated reasons that one later regrets. But we can infer from ever that maybe this isn't an isolated example, & the two women, old & young, caught in a complicated web of love & dependence & life-distance, often spoke at cross-purposes like this. The situation remains ambiguous, unresolved: in other words, heartbreakingly true to life. And the splendid final line – and i guess nobody ever does – expands the emotionally complicated moment of speaking at cross-purposes, of knowledge offered & lost, & of love & the dread of losing love, into a sort of moral summation of life.

This last line is the first moment in the poem when the narrator offers some sort of official commentary as opposed to narrative description, & guess is another perfect word choice: it sounds offhand, casual, as if we're being told something by a friend, but it also suggests that the narrator is literally making a guess: she may be as uncertain of what's really going on inside other people as her loving & cross-purposed pair of grandmother & granddaughter. We all walk in uncertainty. What are the legacies the title refers to? The knowledge of how to make rolls, of course, but the word is plural; in addition to the specific recipe involved here, there is the complicated, ultimately inescapable heritage of knowledge offered & not quite accepted, at least at the moment of offering, or not in the way the one offering was hoping; of emotions not quite connecting, fears not quite surfacing, connections inexorable but not quite bridging the gaps between people: you know, the stuff of family life.

I took this poem from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998.

Museum Monday 2024/31

 

detail of Titian's The Rape of Europa, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Another Opening, Another Show: August 2024

A lot going on, even as we gear up for next month's start of the autumn season. . . .

Theatrical

ACT's Young Conservatory is putting on Carrie: The Musical, which, in true Broadway Big Flop style, is now a cult classic (music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, book by Lawrence D Cohen); this revival is directed by Becky Potter & you can see it at the Strand Theater from 1 to 11 August.

The Marsh presents the In Front of Your Eyes Performance Festival, featuring works by women & non-binary people, at both their San Francisco & Berkeley stages; the festival runs from 1 to 25 August, & you can check out the full schedule here.

Golden Thread Productions presents the New Threads Reading Series: on 2 August you can experience Where can I find someone like you, Ali? by Raeda Taha, directed by Hala Baki, & on 9 August The Return by Hanna Eady & Edward Mast, directed by Hanna Eady; both shows are at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco & admission is free but you must register at their website.

BroadwaySF presents Thank You For Listening: An Evening of Songs and Stories with NPR Host / Pink Martini singer Ari Shapiro at the Curran Theater on 8 August.

PlayGround presents its third annual Free-Play Festival at the Potrero Stage from 9 to 25 August, featuring 11 different shows from a wide range of creators on a wide range of topics; you can get some specifics here.

BroadwaySF presents Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in Concert at Davies Symphony Hall on 16 - 17 August.

42nd Street Moon presents Laurie Roldan Sings a Song for You: A Cabaret Concert Inspired by the Music of Karen Carpenter, written. directed, & performed by Laurie Roldan, at the Gateway Theater on 17 & 25 August.

The Shotgun Players Champagne Staged Reading Series presents Pluck, written by Jan Rosenberg & directed by Molly Van Der Molen, a "play about gender identity, dysphoria, twins, and monsters in the age of AOL", on 19 - 20 August.

BroadwaySF brings back the ever-popular Oz fan fic musical Wicked at the Orpheum Theater from 28 August through 13 October.

Operatic

The West Edge Opera Festival takes place this month, with three works, all staged at the gorgeous Scottish Rite Center on the beautiful shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland: there's the world premiere of Bulrusher, with music by Nathaniel Stookey to a libretto by Eisa Davis based on her original play, conducted by Emily Senturia, directed by NJ Agwuna, & starring soprano Shawnette Sulker, & that plays on 3, 11, & 15 August; Jacqueline, about cellist Jacqueline du Pré, with music by Luna Pearl Woolf to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, directed by Michael Hidetoshi Mori & starring soprano Marnie Breckenridge & cellist Matt Haimovitz, & that plays 10, 16, & 18 August; & The Legend of the Ring, David Seaman's one-show reduction of Wagner's Ring cycle, conducted by Jonathan Khuner, staged by Sam Helfrich, & starring Philip Skinner as Wotan, Tracy Cox as Brunnhilde, & Alex Boyer as Siegmund & Siegfried, & that plays 4, 9,  & 17 August. & though we're told the show is a West Edge favorite & back by popular demand, & friends of mine are anticipating it eagerly, I will freely admit that I just don't really get it, & if you want a more detailed explication of my feelings on the subject, go here to see my entry on the 2010 production.

The Merola Opera Program presents Don Giovanni, conducted by Stefano Sarzani & directed by Patricia Racette, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 1 & 3 August; for tickets call the box office at 415-864-3330 (no idea why you can't buy tickets on line, but in previous years Merola hasn't allowed buyers to choose their own seats, so you're probably better off calling anyway).

The Merola Opera Program Grand Finale will take place at the Opera House on 17 August.

The Lamplighters present the ever-popular Pirates of Penzance, with musical direction by Brett Strader & stage direction by Michael Mohammed, on 3 - 4 August at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 10 - 11 August at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, & 17 - 18 August at YBCA in San Francisco.

Choral

The Oakland Symphony is holding a Summer Sing-In series, in which community members are invited to join the orchestra & chorus at the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland to sing along in some favorite works of the orchestra + chorus repertory: on 31 July, Ash Walker leads Ralph Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem & Fauré's Requiem; on 7 August Buddy James leads the Mozart Requiem & Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna; & on 14 August incoming Music Director Kendrick Armstrong leads Orff's Carmina Burana.

Vocalists

The Transgender District & Opera Parallèle present the third annual edition of Expansive - A Showcase of Transgender & Non-Binary Classical Artists, featuring baritone Lucas Bouk, bass-baritone Wilford Kelly, & violinist Queen Angelina, with Afrika America once again hosting, along with Taylor Chan on piano, & that's 8 - 9 August at the Strand Theater.

Chamber Music

Duo Penseur (violinist Chantel Charis & pianist Alex Fang) perform Minding the Gap, a program featuring works by Jessie Montgomery, Beethoven, Clara Schumann, & William Grant Still, at Old First Concerts on 2 August.

Noontime Concerts at Old Saint Mary's in downtown San Francisco has the following programs this month: on 13 August, cellist Evan Kahn & pianist Amy Zanrosso will perform Beethoven's Sonata for Cello and Piano #4 in C Major, Opus 102, # 1, Britten's Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Opus 65, & Glazunov's Mélodie, Opus 20, # 1; on 20 August, cellist Angela Lee & pianist Elizabeth Schumann will perform Frank Bridge's Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor & Chopin;'s Cello Sonata, Opus 65; & on 27 August, in a co-presentation with the San Francisco International Piano Festival, violinist Ariel Pawlik-Zwiebel & pianist Markus Pawlik will perform a movement of Schubert's Violin Sonata #2 in A minor, Fauré's Nocturne in B Major Opus 33 #2 & his Barcarolle in F-Sharp Opus 66, Ravel's Tzigane, & César Franck's Violin Sonata  in A Major.

The Zēlos Saxophone Quartet (Jonah Cabral, soprano sax; Johnny Selmer, alto sax; Alessia Garcia, tenor sax; & Barry Galbreath, baritone sax) will perform works by Bach,Jean Baptiste Singelee, Astor Piazzolla, Carly Florio, Eugene Bozza, & Philip Glass at Old First Concerts on 16 August.

The Eos Ensemble (Craig Reiss, violinist; Evan Kahn, cellist; Elizabeth Dorman, piano), will play piano trios by Haydn & Dvořák at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland on 18 August.

Instrumental

The 7th Annual San Francisco International Piano Festival unfolds from 23 August to 1 September, with a particular emphasis this year on the works of Gabriel Fauré; check here for a full list of events.

Modern / Contemporary Music

Motoko Honda’s Simple Excesses Quartet, self-described as Uncharted Sonic Adventures: Jazz, Chamber, Avant-garde, and Beyond (Motoko Honda, composition & piano; Cory Wright, woodwinds; Matt Small, bass; & Jordan Glenn, drums) will perform a concert of compositions & arrangements, most of them new, by Honda on 17 August at Old First Concerts.

Jazz

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, with special guest Irma Thomas, will play at the SF Jazz Center from 15 to 18 August.

Dance

The State of Play Festival, featuring new & in-progress works by local & national dance creators, takes place at the ODC Theater from 1 to 4 August; check out the full schedule here.

A new dance company, Eight/Moves, will inaugurate its first season at Z Space on 16 - 18 August, featuring world premiere dances by Rena Butler, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, KT Nelson, & Founder and Artistic Director Mia J Chong.

FACT/SF presents SF Summer Dance Festival at the ODC Theater with two programs, the first on 16 - 18 August & the second on 23 - 25 August.

World Arts West Dance Festival, which will spread over three weekends, opens on 25 August (the other two weekends are in September) at the Dance Mission Theater, with a series of panels & programs exploring Queer Identity, Dance as Resistance, & traditional Indian dance.

Art Means Painting

The Cartoon Art Museum hosts Gorey Elephants on Parade, featuring art prints created by Edward Gorey featuring elephants, from 5 August through 15 December.

Two new shows are opening, both on 10 August, at the de Young: About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift runs through 28 September 2025 & Robert Bechtle: Prints and Drawings, exploring the work of the Bay Area photorealist, will run through 5 January 2025.

To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection opens at BAM/PFA on 14 August & runs through 6 July 2025; the exhibit "draws from BAMPFA’s art and film collections to explore how museums collect, care for, and amplify the work of artists who celebrate ideas of impermanence and cycles of decay and regeneration."

Cinematic

The Roxie in San Francisco has a mini-celebration of The Archers: Powell & Pressburger this month, featuring the documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, in which Martin Scorsese discusses his cinematic passion for the two, as well as showings of The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life & Death, & I Know Where I'm Going! (I hated that one so much I am tempted to watch it again).

Blade Runner, the [allegedly] Final Cut, will be shown at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco on 2 August.

A couple of classic German silent films are coming to the Balboa Theater this month: Fritz Lang's Metropolis on 4 August & The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with live accompaniment by Sleepbomb, on 9 August.

On 3 August, City Arts & Lectures presents Jon M Chu, director of In the Heights & Crazy Rich Asians, in conversation with Awkwafina about his new memoir, Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen.

The San Francisco Symphony will show La La Land with live orchestral accompaniment, conducted by the score's composer, Justin Hurwitz, on 3 - 4 August. La La Land gained some extra notoriety a few years ago when it was initially but erroneously announced as Best Picture at that year's Oscar ceremony; after some confusion, the actual best winner, Moonlight, was announced, & the show came to an abrupt & awkward conclusion. Afterwards there were some "think" pieces claiming that La La Land, a musical about jazz & Hollywood show business during the mid-twentieth century, represented the Past & Moonlight, an artfully shot & beautifully performed film centering Black & queer experiences, represented the Future. I'm not so sure things divide that easily (spoilers ahead, as I will be talking about the films' endings). In the last part of Moonlight, the protagonist goes to a new city where he re-unites with the man he had a brief sexual encounter with in high school. This man is still good looking, employed in an "interesting" job (he's a cook), available, & still interested in the protagonist. Re-uniting with your high school crush who is still attractive &, though clearly a good catch, still available, as if waiting for you? This is an ending straight out of the Hallmark playbook (I say this as someone who has seen an embarrassing number of Hallmark Christmas movies – a friend & I would watch them during the lockdown, that's my excuse). The ending of La La Land, on the other hand, in which our two leads meet again but do not end up together, though lifted from Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is actually a more realistic & emotionally tougher ending. I think the artiness of Moonlight & the (let me add, welcome) emphasis on Black & queer experiences disguised for many viewers how similar the ending is to a conventional romance.

A new restoration of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai will play at the Roxie in San Francisco from 9 to 14 August.

On 11 August at the Roxie in San Francisco, there will be two showings of Dancing with the Dead: Red Pine & the Art of Translation, in which director Ward Serrill tells us about Red Pine, the celebrated translator of ancient Chinese poetry; Serrill & Red Pine are scheduled to attend in person, & the performance includes a Director Q&A, a conversation with Red Pine moderated by May-lee Chai, & a musical performance by Spring Cheng; a book signing will follow.

BAM/PFA will present The Films of Lynne Ramsay from 22 to 25 August.

On 30 August, as part of the San Francisco International Piano Festival, Old First Concerts will host pianist Stephen Prutsman with the Telegraph String Quartet (Eric Chin & Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, viola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) in Schumann's Piano Quintet Opus 44 followed by Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, in my view possibly the best of Keaton's films, with Prutsman & the Quartet performing the pianist's original score.

Friday Photo 2024/30

 

an artichoke, going to seed

Poem of the Week 2024/30

Water

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

– Philip Larkin

You could probably create a whole Agnostic Anthology of twentieth-century poetry based on the receding (some would say loss) of organized religion as a guiding, unifying social principle. Though organized religion continues to influence or control much in the modern world, for large segments of the population, it is irrelevant, or one factor among many, or seen negatively, & in any case if you decide your religion is oppressive or unhelpful in some way, you can easily find another. There were always alternatives, but with them often came social strictures & social consequences that no longer apply. There is no longer the sense that someone who doesn't go to church regularly is a bad person or a bad citizen; the indifferent average person who trudged to church dutifully mostly no longer feels the need to keep up the act. The theological disputes that tore countries apart in earlier centuries are now smoothly elided, even by church-goers, who mostly want some sense of ritual & community. It's that loss of centuries-old ritual & (alleged) community that lingers in the twentieth-century mind, for some as a sort of golden past in which there was a common understanding of life & its meaning, for others as . . . maybe just a sense that something that used to be so important is now a semi-forgotten relic, something for the tourist trade, like the old churches dotting the English countryside that Larkin grew up in. (You do have to wonder how true that sense of universal guidance & community ever was; people do tend to think the past was simpler than the present, & the people back then maybe less sharp than we are.)

You can sense this nostalgia in this poem, in which the poet receives the unlikely task of constructing a new religion (the old ones just don't cut it anymore. it seems). But there's a bit of tart comedy underlying the whole concept; who is calling him in? This apparently isn't a desire he felt on his own. When he imagines the situation, he imagines someone (or some organization) calling him in, as if he were a lower-level employee receiving a big project at work. And anyway why are they asking him to create a new religion from scratch? Some sort of social need, we can guess.

That brings us to a genuine social need, water. As with many actual religions, the poet's construction begins with one of the essential elements: water. Living in a frequently drought-stricken state, as I do, you become very conscious of the power of water, &, yes, its sacredness, though as with many holy things you see it wasted & despoiled foolishly. Water is often taken for granted, not given the respect it deserves as one of existence's requirements. The speaker here sees its importance; in describing how he would construct a religion, he tells us he should make us of water; should not only indicates an action one will take in the future (this is mostly a British usage, I think) but also something that one ought, really ought, to do. This first stanza is a single sentence, building up to that one word: water; the rest of the poem flows from that one word in a single continuous sentence, climaxing with the final word, endlessly..

The two middle stanzas give us some details about the new religion; interestingly, no mention is made of any theological underpinning, or any Creator, or any sense that there is something significant beyond or behind or in the water. There is no mention of drinking the water (imperative for the continuation of life, of course) or washing anything (clothes, dishes, oneself) in it. Instead we are given views of the social / community & ritual aspects of religion. Fording a stream & changing your clothes to dry ones: this is not the same thing as bathing oneself or washing one's clothes, of course. But it echoes Biblical injunctions to put on the new self (see for example Ephesians 4:24), & donning new robes or new outfits is a long-time way of announcing a change of status (which may be why Thoreau cautions us against enterprises that require new clothes).

Then we have the Images of sousing, / A furious devout drench, which echoes the cleansing, re-birthing experience of baptism (particularly of the total immersion variety). But we only have images of the soaking in the liturgy, much as traditional religions invoke blood & sacrifice but serve you wine in its place; rituals can only go so far before what is memorable turns into what is too inconvenient to maintain. Again, there is an undercurrent of slight mockery: souse means not only to soak or drench, but is also a slang term for a drunkard; yoking furious & devout conjures up the intense, often destructive, energies that organized religion often unleashes (along with the suggestion of total immersion baptism, this makes me think of downmarket Pentecostalist sects).

But the mockery disappears in the final stanza, whose beauty is striking after the slightly silly images of people fording streams & changing clothes & being drenched furiously. The earlier stanzas are limited to three lines, but this final one breaks out into four. Should makes another appearance, again underlining not only future action but that this is an almost obligatory action. I should raise in the east: again, there are echoes of older religions, particularly Christianity; raise may bring to mind the Resurrection, or the raising of Lazarus, or the raising of the dead during the Last Judgment.. The east is the direction in which the sun rises, & is therefore a traditional symbol of rebirth & new beginnings. What does he raise in the east? That simple but necessary thing in life, a glass of water.

Clear glass, presumably, so the sun rising in the east can hit it & refract in shimmering prisms, the way light so gloriously does. Light of course is also a traditional symbol of the Divine, & of knowledge (see the opening of Book 3 of Paradise Lost: "Hail holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born, / Or of th'Eternal Coeternal beam / May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light . . . "). And in the water the light will congregate endlessly; congregate not only means to come together or gather but brings to mind the congregations that used to fill the now mostly emptied English churches. Only this time the congregants are not people, but rays of light, light transfigured by the water, & unlike the human congregants, who drift away or die, the light will gather endlessly: a poignant image of humanity lightened into beauty, given an eternal, endless life that the poet can no longer pretend to believe in but still, apparently, longs for.

I took this poem from the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.