Summer’s end: cool mornings, then, bright warm afternoons. Heat will build this week to make the State Fair uncomfortable for a couple days but it won’t be as bad as the scalding temperatures in the middle of August.
A poem by August Kleinzahler, “La Belle Ville” captures the moment. When you read, you can be inside the poem and outside also. In the last week of August (the month, not the poet) meaning is set aside. Something is ending, but not quite. Autumn’s exertions are not yet begun.
Kleinzahler’s poem takes a holiday. The poet seems to be in Canada. “Passenger jets” across thunderheads “float silently” in the “direction of Chibougamau and Matagami Lake”. The outrageous toponyms, part of the joke, name places in central Quebec; Chibougamau, near Matagami Lake is a town with about 8000 inhabitants. It’s near a Cree Indian reservation, hence another joke: perhaps, the people on the jets are flying to attend the “Midsummer Meti Mosquito Festival” – an imaginary event featuring “live performances, dance workshops, handicrafts...” (There’s a mosquito festival in Texas, but not north-central Quebec; the Metis are Canadian tribal people with French and Indian ancestors.) The poet watches the planes through a “skylight” where he is “stretch(ed) out on the yoga mat.” Apparently, he is in a city: authorities have snapped a “wheel clamp” on a vehicle on the street below the poet’s studio. The “wheel clamp”, I imagine, immobilizes a car that is illegally parked. The “snapping” sound causes a nearby Rottweiler to experience a “paroxysm of rage.” Although the car is entrapped, the sun goes on a jovial excursion, riding a bicycle across the sky (“from point A to point B”) with a picnic lunch of “Brie and ham on a kaiser roll, twelve grapes, a Fanta” attached to the bike’s “rear rack.” Thus, the biking summer embodies time, one grape for each month, and, then, “the leaves begin to fall” and “the first snow arrives” necessitating “different footware.”
The poet muses on the busy people on the planes, hurrying to their strenuous vacations (midsummer mosquito festivals) bound for their “groovy software design studio and columbarium”, the last word reminding us that it’s all in vain anyway, and that all travels end in the grave. These people, our contemporaries, have things to do and love affairs to manage – they are “enorbed” with such considerations. The poet, however, considers these concerns to be part of another cycle, the wheel of Samsara, that is the material world to which we are bound by desire, the pattern of death and rebirth “with its lesions, exhortations, lost appointment books, gratuitous slights –“. The poet confesses: “I can not move” – surprisingly, this is not because he has taken a holiday from life’s furious and futile pursuits, but, rather, because he has absorbed “the cycle of Samsara” into himself. There’s no place for him to go because he is everything, the “entire body of the world” in which his veins bear “semi-trailers and tank cars filled with ethanol.” This traffic poisons him with exhaust that “accumulates in (his) arteries” the “particulate matter taking on the viscosity of despair.”
This is a very strange poem and one that takes an unanticipated turn. At first, the poem intimates that the poet in his “belle ville” has stepped outside of the world, disclaiming its business and exhausting amusements. He seems content to let the seasons pass as the sun “cycles” through the sky. Quebec’s lakes and resorts seem a figure for vacation, holiday. But the poet’s lassitude and indolence have a sinister aspect; the wheel is clamped and can not turn – this wheel is both the cycle of Samsara while simultaneously invoking the jaunty bicycling sun. What began in serenity ends in paralyzed capture. No one escapes the wheel of suffering conditioned by desire. In fact, our existence is that very wheel; it defines us and, far from being indifferent to Samsara, its highways and toxic exhaust are exactly what characterizes the “body of the world” which is our body. The “clamped wheel,” in fact, keeps on turning furiously, but without moving. The poem’s twist (or “turn of the wheel”) from faintly amused contemplation and satire (the mosquito festival) to “despair”, the last word in the verse, is more than a little shocking.
The inflection point at which the poem “turns” is a striking metaphor: the poet declares “I am the Body of the World pinioned like poor Gulliver in Lilliputt”. “Lilliputt” is another place-name like Lake Matagami or Chibougamau; the “pinions” that restrain the poet’s giant “Body of the World”, like Blake’s sleeping Albion, contain within that word “feathers” or wings – “pinion” is a poetic word for wing (you cut off the “pinions” of a bird to keep it from flying away). So the winged jets going nowhere although at high speed return in the shadow cast by the word “pinion” which also the restraint that holds the poet, paralyzes him while the seasons pass, the “wheel-clamp” that keeps him from moving.
Not five minutes after reading Kleinzahler’s poem, I looked into a book called Die Stundentrommel vom heiligen Berg Athos by Erhart Kaestner. Composed in highly poetic prose, Kaestner’s book is a travel narrative in which the author describes two visits to the Greek Orthodox monasteries on the Athos peninsula. At the ancient monastery Dionysiu, Kaestner enters a tiny chapel about four meters wide but entirely clad in gold, ivory, and precious gems. The place astonishes him and here is how he characterizes his reaction to this marvelous chamber:
Viel ist nicht zu beschreiben am diese Kapelle, die doch zu dem Allerschoensten gehoerte, das ich auf dem Athos ueberhaupt sah: einer der Punkte, die man in eine imaginaere Landkarte eintraegt, worauf sich alle Orte befinden, an welchen wir wie Gulliver an seidenen Liliputfaeden an dieser geliebten Erde festgepflockt sind.
“There’s not much to describe about this chapel, nonetheless one of the most beautiful that I saw on Athos: it was one of the points, inscribed in that imaginary map in which we situate those places by which we are pinioned to our beloved earth like Gulliver in Lilliput by silken threads.”
I have translated “festgepflockt” (literally “pegged fast”) with the verb “pinioned” as a connecting point between the two texts. Desire, the engine of Samsara, the impulse that turns the great wheel in Athos is imagined as “turtle shell, ivory, and many precious woods together with gemstones” – such things delight the eye and the mind. The Byzantine chapel’s stones represent power, possession, and immortality; the fine wood, however, symbolizes growth, music, consolation, an image of the changing seasons (bildgewordene Jahre – years transformed images). The wood in the chapel’s door is like the wood in ancient violins or cellos. Kaestner says you can hear the whisper of the forest in the wood inlaid in chapel’s walls and door.
Strange, I thought, to find Gulliver here in two places at almost the same time in the last week of the Summer.
August 28, 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment