Suzerain (Lord) by René Char - translated by Eliot Cardinaux

Suzerain (Lord)

We begin our lives always in an admirable dusk.  All that will help rescue us later assembles around our first footfall.

          The behavior of men in my childhood was always like a smile of the sky, addressed to the charity of earth.  One treated evil like a prank of evening, the fall of a meteor moved us to tenderness.  I can account for the child I was, prone to love, prone to be hurt, and in all this I had so much luck.  I walked on the mirror of a river filled with coiling snakes, with dances of butterflies.  I played in orchards in which robust old age bore fruit, crouching in the reeds under the care of beings strong as oaks and sensitive as birds.


                              René Char, from Fureur et Mystère
                              Translated by Eliot Cardinaux, 12/19, ’10

Mark's novel, "Indian Poem" for download, paperback.

Download  e-book:
http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/indian-poem/4193933?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/3


Paperback:
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On Barbarism (Sean Ali)

On Barbarism

            When the Greeks used the term “barbarian,” it implied something more specific than an uncivilized person. The term barbarian refers to idea that man is made uncivilized through violence towards the language he speaks. “Bar-bar” is the Greek onamonapia for grunting sounds,   sounds in which man does not communicate anything to each other. I would suggest the modern English equivalent would be something like “blah blah,” for this is our sound for ceaseless, meandering chatter. Such chatter is strongly perpetuated by a technologically pervasive world such as our own. For have not the internet and text messages denigrated our language into words that have surgically removed all letters in the traditional spelling of a word that have rendered superfluous? Silent letters are mercilessly decapitated from words. Silent letters are like relics that indicate a time in the history and geography of the language when they would have been spoken. Though they have gone silent in our speech, they had lived on in the written word, until they recently have begun to be shaven off, one by one. Then there are those who would introduce numbers into the language simply because it saves time on writing extra letters: “h8” for “hate.” Perhaps if this play with language were being done with truly conscious experimentation, perhaps if it were done by a person that delved so deep into his language that he could do nothing but experiment, then we would be talking about something altogether different. But as it stands, this alteration of language only shows that the multitude perceives language as a limited store-room where space must be utilized as efficiently as possible. In essence, written English is degenerating into something that looks more like chicken scratches than it does a written language. Technology has increased our ability to chatter, which is nothing other than meaningless sounds, hence, chicken scratches will suffice as the written medium. And, of course, the easily predicted irony: the machines designed to enhance our communication have only put it in route towards annihilation. Barbarism, it seems, is not only the genesis of civilization, but also its end.

Prose Poem: Sky Burial (Sean Ali)

Sky Burial

    Without you, the cold is bitter and stings the toes. Without you, the snow only reflects the tundra in my soul, a white plane stretching miles in all directions. Without you, I long to butcher myself with my memories, drown in a pool of serene recollection. Without you, I am crawling in the dark holding a candle that the wind has snuffed. Without you, I am a pile of brown, wilted pine needles looking up at the tree from which they have fallen. I am frail and sharpened from your neglect, your cold neglect burning fossil into stone. Without you, I strangle myself with the vine growing joyful cluster.
 
    I will gaze at you forever while insects gently gnaw away at my bones. I will caress you forever while I drown in a barrel of wine. I will sing songs to you when wild animals want to eat me. Your name shall be the only thing to moisten the dry, cracked lips of my soul. When my limbs are tossed between the beaks of scavenger birds, then my blood will gush with more opulence than to be found in the fountains of Versailles, all for your glory.
   
   For with you, my cup spills over and stains my hands red. With you, my harvest is plump and swollen. With you, my dreams are resplendent with joy. With you, my bed is blessed with beauty of the earth. With you, my words fall to the ground as a stone plummeting to the earth. With you, unheard melodies dance wildly on the thin membranes of my eardrums. With you, my eyes are blinded with light so that I weep tears of blood. With you, my heart falls into a chasm that knows no bottom.

Links to two stories by Alex Hampshire

Shock  by Alex Hampshire  -  http://sickofem.com/2010/11/29/shock-alex-hampshire/

A Monthly Trim

(also by Alex Hampshire)  -  http://sickofem.com/2010/11/17/a-monthly-trim-alex-hampshire/

Check it out! 

also, if you're compelled to please vote for my story. This confirms a certain readership and  gives me the ability to put up more work.

Take care,

Alex Hampshire

Prose Poem: The Vast Sky (Eliot Cardinaux)

  The Vast Sky

       I still cannot cross this vast sky, this vast sky vaster than the sea.  He sees like a bird, shaking its feathers, this internal beast of mine, like the sun in the distance, far out in the distance, like the sun, sinking halfway into the sea. 
       Because I am in motion, and motion a testament to its own beauty, the river is sunlight, beaming nowhere, beaming from itself like a rose.  
       I think, a pigment in the imagination of another man, the beast that is no more, what comes of the imagination in this vast sky, this vast sky vaster than the shore? 

the story of someone else's life

Having enjoyed my recent tell all memoir which you can get on "the facebook" and "the bsa tra la la page of web things" a friend of mine asked if I would write a similar piece for him, which he could some day use on his own website and in professional press releases for his art.  Naturally I obliged...       

       Eliya Stein was born in a Soviet Gulag in 1933. The world was in turmoil and for those in the camp, like Stein’s parents Sonya and Rodya Stein, the Gulag was the personification of it all, laid bare in its curt brutality. Stein however was a peaceful boy who seemed all through his childhood to be unplagued by the suffering around him. He became a source of hope and inspiration to the prisoners who, having finally clung to religion to stem the tide of anguish, made him a maharajah at age 9. But the Gulag Maharajah could not be contained. Sensing the hopelessness of his situation he defied both the Soviets and his admirers, and fled the camp at age 12, heading west towards the iron curtain. On his way he encountered many officers returning from the front and from them divined much information about Soviet industrial routes and military checkpoints. He befriended one officer, Leftchensky. Leftchensky was left-handed and a notorious drunk, and together they would become partners in crime. Leftchensky deserted, and Stein used his savvy to gather information that protected them, while Leftchensky educated Stein in the art of drinking Vodka. By the time the duo reached the East Berlin it was 1946 and the direction of things was crystallizing. Eliya went out on the Oberbaumbrücke one night and faced the most difficult decision of his life: stay in the USSR and try to liberate the Gulag where his parents might still have been toiling, or make a run for West Germany and never look back. He took his last swig of Vodka ever, chucked the bottle off the bridge and never thought of Russia again.

                Stein managed to get all the way to England where a cousin of Leftchensky , a travel agent, helped him secure passage on a luxury ocean liner to New York City. Stein enjoyed upper-class comforts for the first time in his life. He became close friends of the stage band, of which one of the members could speak a little Russian. And so his studies in English began. He would never tell anyone about his past as the Gulag Maharajah, but his way with people continued to be charismatic. Everyone wanted to be near him. By the time their ship reached New York Harbor, Stein was hiding up in the hold, having acquainted himself with one too many of the wealthy passengers' wives. He made his dash as soon as they docked and went in search of work in America.

                It was at this time that Stein took up painting. He was working at a book-binders by day and an Italian restaurant by night and when he discovered the erotic works of Gustav Klimt in a book at his day job, he suddenly found he had a calling. His early drawings were painstakingly detailed designs that filled entire canvases, a way of exorcising the palpable burden of his history perhaps. Soon his work evolved to include female nudes that interacted with abstract forms. Stein spent many hours on the Brooklyn Promenade selling canvases and the emotions elicited by these early paintings were appreciated by art collectors. He was soon selling enough to quit both jobs and pursue another passion he’d discovered at the book-binder’s, astrophysics. Initially, he had dreamed of creating his own atomic bomb with which hold the entire world hostage and demand the release of all Gulag hostages “worldwide”, but he resisted those thoughts of the past and his interest soon developed into a full-fledged understanding of particle theory.

                By the early 60’s Stein was selling paintings on the far-out liberal art scene in New York, while conducting early research on anti-matter at Columbia University. He grew his hair long and started smoking marijuana, swearing that he could see atomic particles when high. But by the end of the decade a notorious story that involved his possibly having started the mudslide at Woodstock as well as the riot at Altamount damaged his credibility in the science world (not in the art world) and he left Columbia. Sobering up in the 70’s his art reached a new stage of maturity and the critical reception was nuclear. Critical careers have been made and broken on analyses of Stein’s works. “Stein rarely uses explicit symbols, but when he does they are detached, awash in a sea of muted colors and vague impressions” read one review. Some critics called him the new Picasso while others dismissed his paintings as “outsider art”, there was never a consensus, always an uproar.  In 1985 at the age of 52, Stein shocked everyone by publishing an article in Rolling Stone that declared “All of my art career has been a sham. A deliberate sham. I’ve enjoyed nothing in this life more than watching critics try to read deeply into my paintings only to arrive at their own conclusions, which have no relationship to my life. The critics might be right, but I always consciously tried to create meaningless art. I also enjoyed the immense sums of money for which my paintings sold, and the many women in whom I’ve found great company and pleasure. With that, it’s time for me to say ‘later dudes.’”

                He turned the art world on its head and ceased to paint for the public. Instead he enjoyed his fortune, traveling extensively in the tropics and Pacific Islands. But in the 1995, inspired by a telephone conversation with friend Stephen Hawking, he came up with a new particle theory that once again rendered everything meaningless and stupid while making Stein even more awesome and adored. I dare not attempt to print the theory here for its complexity could only boggle one’s mind unless one happens to be any of six physicists worldwide who can grapple with it. But suffice it to say, the theory drove Eliya Stein to a new conception of painting and he has been diligently turning out fresh canvases ever since. He currently resides in New York City, though he spends much of his time in Tahiti where he says he prefers the women and the weather. 

Opening the Gates: A response to Ali's "Lyrical Dissonance" (Daniel Levine)

(see Sean's original essay on Lyrical dissonance:
http://bsa-prose.blogspot.com/2010/11/lyrical-dissonance-sean-ali.html)

Opening the Gates:

A Response to Ali's "Lyrical Dissonance"

    When reading one of my favorite creative writers (and musicians), Sean Ali, on "Lyrical Dissonance" I could not help but disagree with the reductive characterization of voices in the contemporary music world. Though in many ways one of the strongest critical pieces on the blog, it is so characteristic of a method here on the Bridge Blog that utilizes great associative freedom in its prose aesthetic, but clings to some awfully dogmatic archetypes in its structure and conception.
    Ali leaves us with a rather staunch paradigm for understanding the current trends. First off, to classify things still in terms of  dissonance vs. tonal, harmonic, pretty music is, I believe, quite dated, not only because the association of dissonance with the downtrodden has been blurred, if not shattered long ago, but because composers (in every medium) are no longer compelled to confront such a schism. There was for many years, in the middle of the twentieth century, a prevailing vogue in the classical conservatories that was prohibitive of the triad. They would laugh at you for a triad because the conservatories were concerned mainly with the practices of serialism. But that time has past.
    Ali mistakenly associates the dissonance of serialism with the "Avant-Garde" while in fact no such association holds. Serialism as a school that grew out of modernism was from its inception formalist and traditionalist. It's techniques were quite explicit and it eschewed influences outside of itself. Most importantly it took a distinctly non-avant-garde stance towards the role of art within society (see Babbit, "Who Cares if They Listen") For our understanding of Avant-Garde let us stick to the Frankfurt School conception that unifies it with its social context: art that pushes boundaries. Perhaps this confusion in Ali's paradigm is attributable to his role as an improvising musician of a certain credo, which certainly embraces dissonance, but moreso as an element of chance (in a Cage-ian way) than any pre-supposed emancipation of the harsher intervals. In this, Ali's music,and my own work with him, Eliot Cardinaux and Flin VanHemen, (see myspace.com/sonic.chilidog) is most definitely Avant-Garde. Through its open approach to form and content it challenges notions of hierarchy as well as the very notion of value judgments, instead taking a subversively humanist standpoint that holds that all sincere expressions are whole and valid. This music, though it may at times bear a superficial sonic resemblance to serial works is about as far from serialism as it gets.
    And dissonant idiomatic choices alone do not qualify music as modernist. Ralph Shapey embodies that truth with his music of (0,1,6) tonalities and other dissonant sonorities, (he, who dismissed Messiaen's music as saccharine and maudlin) while continuing the practice of repetition and return and the use of classical forms, all of which had been finally and utterly rejected by the Second Viennese School. It is for that reason that Shapey proudly wore the badge of "radical traditionalism".   
    Next, the claim that "any modern music that allows itself to be infuenced by the wealth of the past is derided as being traditionalist" practically (inadvertently) denies the existence of post-modernism in music. In jazz in particular we can point to the example of a number of piano trios who tear down that barrier, most strikingly, Keith Jarrett's standards trio, which is anything but traditional. There is also Jason Moran's work and that of the Bad Plus, both of whom draw on material from the past, examining it in fresh light, deconstructing it, allowing its inner reflections to illuminate new angles. Dave Douglas with his series of tribute albums in the 1990's brought new freedom to mainstream jazz composition, while looking back, and provided (along with a host of other downtown musicians) a refreshing foil to the neo-traditionalist movement that did exist at the time. It is no real surprise that the music of the downtown scene of that era has finally proved more enduring than the "Young Lion Thing", but that makes it no less relieving.
    The defense of the "pretty chords" in music dates back to the sixties, when it comprised a part of minimalism. The unapologetic triads of Philip Glass assert the claim boldly. Others, like David DelTredici, made their triumphant return to the idiom of traditional tonality enriched by twentieth century sensibilities with regard to form and structure. He called his music neo-romantic.
     But what we see now in the "classical composition" world is generation of composers unhindered by the schism, and it brings a sigh of relief. No "pretty" music has ever been so unremitting as Glass's, which often seems to be self-conscious of its own incessantness . But young composers like Ryan Francis (see myspace.com/ryanfrancis)  have no problem composing sentimental short works of great beauty or of using fleshed out major and minor tonalities.
    A teacher of post-tonal music theory at the City College of New York once instructed my class that if you want a precise definition of tonality, you can really only apply it to the cannon of 'Bach to Brahms'. Therein were the composers who used tonality, as it is understood to be a music rationally defined by the notion of a tonic chord and a common practice dictating the ways in which one might go away from and approach the tonic. By such a definition, music based on a series of major seven chords, pretty and palatable as it may sound, would be distinctly atonal. More broadly however, tonality might be thought of as a measure of degree-- to what extent a piece of music is defined by a tonal center or tonal centers.
    As chromaticism made its brimming appearance with Beethoven and was boiling over the top by the end of the nineteenth century, it became apparent that harmonic functionality was an extremely relative identity. While Shoenberg may have made a quantum leap then, spawning a new path for composers that was more concerned with the rational development of music than the surface sound of it, it took several more generations for most people's ears to catch up to the late romanticism of even Wagner. Bebop according to George E Lewis existed in a post-wagnerian idiom, employing its flat fives and nines.
    It is a combination of factors that liberates our generation from the paradigm of dissonant/consonant as well as a number of other onerous schisms. First, as I have shown, that schism hasn't applied for many years, though some may have defined themselves within its terrain. It was late romanticism more than any other movement that showed the true relativity of harmonic thought, and no piece is a more shining example than Schoenberg's Verklate Nacht. But more currently, we are children of the information age, the iTunes age, where all the history of music is available to us in a single playlist and shuffle mode is taken for granted. As composers we can finally work from the basic elements of music up in any way we want to. We have total freedom from (and with) tradition. The tempered tuning system has in one sense exhausted its possibilities, but progress is far from being sought primarily though alternate systems or through microtonality. Rather, conceptual approaches, the historical perspective, exploration of the lands between genres and mediums, and of course the integration of electronics into an organic soundworld, these are the elements that make music modern now.
    I have mentioned in the course of this paper, composers, spanning three hundred years who were aces of lyrical dissonance-- Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg, Charlie Parker, Jason Moran, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus. Let's not be mired in the debates of the past, thus reinforcing shattered conservative notions.  That said, intuitively Sean Ali creates music of the utmost quality and most wonderful rebelliousness, which only goes to show the nature of art as opposed to criticism: that art will continue to refuse definition and to embody a flippant attitude, even when singing praise. The act of creation itself encompasses destruction and it's what this does to the psyche of the creator that causes the glint you see in the eye of a truly contemporary artist. Jason Moran has it, and so do the Bad Plus and Ryan Francis, and so does Sean Ali.    
  

Prose Poem: We Are Romans - Sean Ali

We Are Romans

          We are Romans. The trilling violin makes us giddy while our city burns to the ground. The sword dangles above our head, and we are titillated. We play death-games as a form of reprieve from war. And for every million that is smothered by the burden of history, one manages to escape with poetic grace. We throw Christians to the lions to fulfill their legacy of martyrdom and our legacy of brutality. We are Romans. We revel in orgies by night; Roman law judges us by day.
          Leather is wrapped tightly around flesh in order to initiate the not-yet-tainted into the agony of carnal relish. We are the nightmare of history that has scattered its broken symbols all throughout the realm of the present. We are Romans, Egyptian gold will make our blood boil hot enough to burn libraries. Our decadence grows with our nihilism until we are nothing but empty hunger. In our coliseums, we hang the bodies of freshly murdered foreigners in order to fragrance our city with the perfume of death. For Roman wisdom knows that glory is a destination which can only be arrived at by following the path of violence.
          We are Romans, and everywhere we go, the masses throng together and shout a clamorous death-roar.

A review of Bei Dao's "The Rose of Time" (Eliot Cardinaux)

The Distance Between the Hunter and the Hunted

A review of Beijing born poet, Bei Dao’s

most recently translated release,

The Rose of Time, New and Selected Poems

 - New Directions Paperback

 

On December 23, 1978, Bei Dao launched the first non-institutional literary journal in China since 1949.  It wasn’t long after that, while traveling in Berlin, that he received word that he was banned from ever returning to his native land. 

In the interim, he had been writing. a form of poetry that the establishment had labeled menglong – as being “misty” (a less literal translation would be “obscure”) a calling which had occupied him since he took to darkrooms to explore the language he was forbidden to take to the streets. 

Bei Dao’s poetry is based in image.  But the images themselves are not where the poetry lies.  The images unlock  a world that is both dark and free, from which Bei Dao cries out: “Let me tell you world, I do not believe!”

            Bei Dao’s poetry is a far cry from a cry against humanity, however.  On the contrary, it is filled with compassion for those “humble flames” that might peer up at his words and nod in shaky agreement.

            For as Bei Dao explains,  freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the hunted.  And while, in our age one might imagine one is being hunted, by forces unreachable, great or small, Bei Dao suggests a freedom in poetry: “when you are hunting poetry, it turns out you are hunted by poetry.  In this sense, you are both hunter and hunted, but poetry is the distance like freedom.”

 

Eliot Cardinaux

Essay - Lyrical Dissonance (Sean Ali)

Lyrical Dissonance

Too often is truly powerful music in our contemporary age judged with either one of two possible criticisms. The first critique takes on the guise of “traditionalism,” and argues that modern music is too dissonant, formless, pessimistic. Such criticisms are like to be heard from the babbling mouths of neo-classicists, students of all kinds, classical musicians, jazz musicians, rock musicians, pop musicians, and a good majority of populist opinion. The second critique is the precise opposite. It is the critique that modern music is still too safe, tonal, harmonic, “pretty,” sentimental. This critique is more often than not made by the supposed “avant-garde” residing in cities the world throughout. Any modern music that allows itself to be influenced by the wealth of the past is derided as being a “traditionalist” and ultimately boring. This latter critique is particularly alarming because the very element often interpreted as “sentimental,” is nothing other than a music that shares emotion with expressivity when it is being performed.  The current so-called “avant-garde” in America now wishes to degrade the human to a piece of functioning machinery.
          Too often are musicians and composers with true talent thrust into the narrow space that separates these opinions, both of which are grounded in nothing more than a loyalty to ideology.
           Our age is such that the only true musician is one who is “lyrically dissonant.” Lyrical dissonance is the skill possessed by a few noble musicians that do not succumb to either force. Most musicians, when confronted with the absurdity of the paradox, will break down, lose their strength, and pick a side. Musicians who cannot bear the necessity to be a dissonant musician will turn into the kind of players that approaches music through such preconceived notions as genre, style, idiosyncratic accuracy, and so on. Musicians who cannot bear the burden of being lyrical will succumb to soft avant-gardism and play only formless noise under the pretense that it’s being ironic or meaningless gives it a reason to be called art.
           Lyrical dissonance stands in opposition to the “binary forms of nihilism.”[i] For in fact, there is a great necessity to utilize dissonance and tension for it is the state of the modern world. To banish dissonance from music is to banish humanity. To cast out lyricism is to cast out the effort to make coherent the inner turmoil of the human soul. Lyricism is the redemption of the suffering human soul; it is beauty.

Prose Poem: The Ashes of the Dead - Sean Ali

The Ashes of the Dead

          I am only six minutes away from your decaying opulence, breathing crystal breaths of golddeath. Our freedom was the currency with which we purchased pleasure, our lemongrass whoredom from whence faceless worms poke their head up to stare at the moon while drowning in the rain.                                                        
          Life has left this body abandoned in the alleyway in the same manner as an exhibitionist who, upon amorous impulse, leaves his clothing forsaken in the street. 
          Our gaze into the sun has been lifelong, and our blindness is our sole inspiration. Those were the days when we drew blood willingly, because we could not resist the erotic suggestiveness of the void. A horse is greedily lapping water from a stream where the villagers have just scattered the ashes of the dead, where the forgotten rustle the tree leaves like the windsong of historical violence. In the beginning was the word, and then man’s ears went deaf, his tongue mute.
          Time is harvesting his crops for the next generation’s mythology. Oh Miserere, oh Dios, oh nights of stillness and bloodlessness. Oh night of flowering spring, loving and itching. You cripple me with the weight of heaven, loving my lifeless body like a sumptuous banquet, devouring my lifeless body like a submissive and suppliant virgin.          
           For all of us were deflowered by the world’s brutality. Raped and spat on on a bed of artillery shells, each one a blank memorial for a member of the silent dead, no longer made cold by the blanket of snow, no longer burned by the midday sun.
           I want you so, the marrow in my bones dance a death waltz. I want you so, my blood is pounding furiously at an aging dam where maintenance has been neglected. I want you so, that my heart throbs in unison to the decaying metropolis. I want you so, the stars mutilate us with their brilliance. I want you so, that the worms convert our apathy into life. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus…