Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Joseph Brodsky - Part III (Respect for W.H. Auden)

W.H. Auden

Somewhere in Less Than One Brodsky refers to Cavafy as his favorite poet; but it was W.H. Auden whom Brodsky almost likens to a god. In "To Please a Shadow," an essay on Auden, Brodsky writes: "While in the flesh, this man did so much that belief in the immortality of his soul becomes somehow unavoidable. What he left us with amounts to a gospel which is both brought about by and filled with love that's anything but finite -- with love, that is, which can in no way all be harbored by human flesh and which therefore needs words. If there were no churches, one could easily have built one upon this poet, and its main precept would run something like this:


If equal affection cannot be
Let the more loving one be me.

After studying Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" the young Brodsky pondered the words "Time ... worships language."

"... the train of thought that statement set in motion in me is still trundling to this day. For 'worship' is an attitude of the lesser toward the greater. If time worships language, it means that language is greater, or older, than time, which is, in its turn, older and greater than space. That was how I was taught, and I indeed felt that way. So if time -- which is synonymous with, nay, even absorbs deity -- worships language, where then does language come from? For the gift is always smaller than the giver. And then isn't language a repository of time? And isn't this why time worships it? And isn't a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language plays to restructure time? And aren't those by whom language 'lives' those by whom time does too? And if time 'forgives' them, does it do so out of generosity or out of necessity? And isn't generosity a necessity anyhow?

"Short and horizontal as those lines were, they seemed to me incredibly vertical. They were also very much offhand, almost chatty: metaphysics disguised as common sense, common sense disguised as nursery-rhyme couplets. These layers of disguise alone were telling me what language is, and I realized that I was reading a poet who spoke the truth -- or through whom the truth made itself audible."

A few paragraphs later, Brodsky sees Auden as the nurse of humanity: "The most frequent charge that's been leveled against him was that he didn't offer a cure. I guess in a way he asked for that by resorting to Freudian, then Marxist, then ecclesiastical terminology. The cure, though, lay precisely in his employing other terminologies, for they are simply different dialects in which one can speak about one and the same thing, which is love. It is the intonation with which one talks to the sick that cures. This poet went among the worlds graver, often terminal cases not as a surgeon but as a nurse, and every patient knows that it's nurses and not incisions that eventually put one back on one's feet."
---------
Another of the essays in Less Than None is comprised of 36 pages devoted to Auden's poem "September 1, 1939".
---------
Okay, I'm done with the great Brodsky for the time being.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Joseph Brodsky - Part II

I've spent the last couple weeks packing, moving (8 miles down the road), unpacking, sorting, getting settled, all the while being further enthralled by Brodsky's book of essays Less Than None; I had barely begun the book when I raved about Brodsky in my post-before-last.  I finished it yesterday.

Once in a while you read a really great book and you can say just that: "I read a really great book."  Then you come across one such as Less Than None, written by a guy with a mammoth intellect and an enchanting style.  You don't know how to describe it.  It deserves more than a great.

It was published nearly 25 years ago.  Brodsky, born in the same year as I was, died, sad to say, in 1996.  Also sad to say: I wouldn't have been smart enough to appreciate his intelligence 25 years ago.

And how much less, for instance, I'd have appreciated his essay "Flight from Byzantium" without having first read Orhan Pamuk's Instanbul: Memories and the City, which would not be published until some twenty years after Less Than None?  Considering this, my ploddy slowness, my round-aboutness, does not disappoint me.

Sometimes Brodsky is puzzling, profound, and funny all at once.  Regretting the absence of footnotes in a translation of poems by Italy's Montale, Brodsky writes, "After all, a footnote is where civilization survives."

Later in the book one encounters an essay entitled "Footnote to a Poem" -- a 75-page explication of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva's homage to Rilke, "Novogodnee".  Much civilization does survive therein!

Brodsky was politcally astute too.  From the essay "On Tyranny":  "Today, every new sociopolitical set-up, be it a democracy or an authoritarian regime, is a further departure from the spirit of individualism toward the stampede of the masses.  The idea of one's existential uniqueness gets replaced by that of one's anonymity.  An individual perishes not so much by the sword as by the penis, and, however small a country is, it requires, or becomes subjected to, central planning.  This sort of thing easily breeds various forms of autocracy, where tyrants themselves can be regarded as obsolete versions of computers .... But if they were only the obsolete version of computers it wouldn't be so bad.  The problem is that a tyrant is capable of purchasing new, state-of-the-art computers and aspires to man them.  Examples of obsolete forms of hardware running advanced forms are the Fuhrer resorting to the loudspeaker, or Stalin using the telephone monitoring system to eliminate his opponents in the Politburo."

Of the near-east, mid-east, and far-east, he noted in "Flight from Byzantium" what the Soviet leaders and then the American leaders seem incapable of realizing:  "... no matter what extreme of idealization of the East we may entertain, we'll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy."

I think it'd be hard to find a mean bone in Brodsky but he did pen the following passage:  "There is nothing more appalling to me than to think about the family album of the average Japanese: smiling and stocky, he/she/both against a backdrop of everything vertical the world contains -- statues, fountains, cathedrals, towers, mosques, ancient temples, etc.  Least of all, I presume, Buddhas and pagodas."

On art, from the essay "The Child of Civilization":  "A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker.  Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying.  But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one write is not so much a concern for one's perishable flesh as the urge to spare certain things of one's world -- of one's personal civilization -- one's own non-semantic continuum.  Art is not a better, but an alternative existence; it is not an attempt to escape reality, but the opposite, an attempt to animate it.  It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words."

I'm gobsmacked by Brodsky.
-----
P.S. A movie titled "A Room and a Half" -- "a heady fictionalized biography of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky," according to New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden -- has just been released.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Joseph Brodsky: Life Under Communism


There have been countless accounts of life under the Lenin-Stalin versions of Communism.  None, including The God That Failed (comprised of essays by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and Andre Gide), which I read back in 1961, comes close to what a great Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) accomplishes in relatively few words in his 1976 essay "Less Than One".

This country, with its magnificently inflected language capable of expressing the subtlest nuances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity (a good result of its otherwise tragic history), had all the makings of a cultural, spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization.  Instead it became a drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.

My generation, however, was somewhat spared.  We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn't look after us very well.  We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around.  You cannot cover ruin with a page of Pravda.  The empty windows gaped at us like skulls' orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy ... the amount of goods was very limited, but not having known otherwise, we didn't mind it ... we didn't develop a taste for possessions ... somehow we preferred ideas of things to the things themselves ....



Monday, January 11, 2010

Casting Eyes

Just how does one cast a cold eye on life, on death?  
Grave of William Butler Yeats - Drumcliffe, Ireland

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Found! In color!

Re: My 12/25/09 post.  Thanks to my friend Lisa at work, who, as an ex-museum employee, knows on-line museum-searching like I know how to type really fast, I now know that the picture I most want to see is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; and, thanks to Google, I've now seen a color reproduction of it for the first time. 


Monday, January 4, 2010

Most Memorable Books Read in the Aughts

Alphabetical, by author (and not necessarily published in the aughts):

Fiction

1. Call Me By Your Name - Andre Aciman
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
3. The Gathering - Anne Enright
4. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
5. The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford
6. The Abomination - Paul Golding
7. Crabwalk - Gunter Grass
8. Plays Well With Others - Alan Gurganus
9. The Kite-Runner - Khalid Hesseini
10. Grief - Andrew Holleran
11. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
12. Garden, Ashes - Danilo Kis
13. The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
14. At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill
15. Autumn Quartet - Barbara Pym
16. Vertigo - W.G. Sebald
17. Dorian - Will Self
18. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
19. Journey by Midnight - Antal Szerb
20. My Other Life - Paul Theroux
21. Summer in Baden-Baden - Leonid Tsypkin

Non-Fiction: Memoirs, Autobiography, Essays

1. Out of Egypt - Andre Aciman
2. Untold Stories - Alan Bennett
3. Writing Home - Alan Bennett
4. Dry - Augusten Burroughs
5. Running with Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
6. Stranger Shores -Essays - J.M. Coetzee
7. Where I Came From - Joan Didion
8. Bitter Lemons - Lawrence Durrell
9. Peeling the Onion - Gunter Grass
10. Bartleby in Manhattan - Elizabeth Hardwick
11. Deep Romantic Chasms - Diaries 1979-1981 - James Lees-Milne
12. Holy Dread - Diaries 1982-1984 - James Lees-Milne
13. A Writer's Life in Wales - Jan Morris
14. The Happiness of Getting it Down Right - Letters of Frank O'Connor & William Maxwell
15. The Journals 1973-1982 - Joyce Carol Oates
16. A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz
17. Istanbul: Memories and The City - Orhan Pamuk
18. Good Hearts - Reynolds Price
19. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris
20. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
21. Sir Vidia's Shadow - Paul Theroux
22. George - Emlyn Williams

Rant

1. God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens

History

1. The Great Deluge - David Brinkley

Friday, January 1, 2010

New Year's Eve 1999

I drove up to Provincetown ten years ago last night and took a picture of everyone I ran into whom I knew or to whom I was introduced.  Then I guess I came across a time when I needed something to do so I cut out the background of the photos and made a collage.  Two persons are photographed twice, each having changed their attire from the first shot to the later one.

Last night I didn't run in to anyone; I stayed home.  What a difference a decade makes.