The Last Week (short fiction by Eliot Cardinaux)

Today I took a walk.  Back behind my house there is a woods, with trails that lead back further in to where there is a pond.  I had been working all day, setting things up for my life to keep moving along, filing papers, writing forms, making lists of things to do before I got started on a job I had just been hired to do, and a place I was looking to check out.  My thoughts were huddled up inside my brain so that, whenever I stopped working, or ran the course to its end, I was left alone, unmoving and in search of something that would keep my mind afloat.  After a few minutes I lay down on the couch.  A book lay on the table, and barely glancing at the title, I picked it up and started reading.  The book, which was about a magician who had gone in search of others in his field and ended up with tribal sorcerers and healers, learning about their magic and the like, I read with a feeling of the utmost contentment.  At times though, with an incomprehensible sense of discontent and agitation.  I could remember feeling this way about a lot of books.  Well, in fact, I didn’t have to remember feeling like this.  Sometimes books open gateways to pain or pleasure whose existence I can be otherwise unaware of.  I’m not suggesting they’re the only avenues for revealing these sensations, only I remarked on it for some reason.  I read on.  The author was outlining a thesis I had heard before: that in the modern world, we become more and more detached from the reality of what he called the non-human world around us – what he meant by this were animals, plants, winds, rains and the like.  And he went on to assert that, because of our detachment from these forces, in a way we often replace our surroundings with our thoughts, so that these non-human entities are holed up inside our very skulls.  This is what disconcerted me.   

.           .            .            .            .            .

A military helicopter flew overhead.  The music bore my thoughts into the ground like a self that had cast off, a mixture of fear and wonder scattered about my head so that all that I heard was the drone of the chopper and above it, a chorus of tree frogs in the distance.  It reminded me of the song my mother used to sing to me as a child – an eerie ethereal calliope-like melody.  To me, as a kid, it was like noticing my own mortality and at the same time feeling like everything was going to be ok.  I looked down at the tulips and daffodils in the garden.  It didn’t seem fair that American choppers were killing civilians in Libya.  But the garden was beautiful.  It felt like a privilege, and yet it felt like something I had to be ashamed of.  The night sky was gray, and the sound of the chopper faded into the distance, leaving only the soft ocean-like voice of the tree frogs and the silhouettes of trees, waving like shadows in the night air.

.           .            .            .            .            .

That night I sat inside and read a few lines.   For all this time, I thought, art has been social in origins, and what of the time I’ve felt stuck inside, dreaming that someday people would read my poems and commune under their stars.  An undertaking, I thought as I read on, since no one really cares for poetry beyond the poets, and the time of the poem that caused social change has been dead for over fifty years.  No, that time I read one of my poems at a Jewish friend’s house at Passover, I had felt a sincere gladness in the room on the hearing of my poem.  Even amidst all that painful history I had felt another’s ailments transformed in my own voice.  That seems silly to say.  Like a poem could do all that.  It mattered more to the Greeks what the tribe felt than what the poet/artist himself was feeling.  I stepped off the porch to smoke a cigarette.  Maybe it didn’t matter at all. 

            For a time I’ve lived in a house not too far from the city, and a fog surrounding the house lay thick in the woods, dampening the sound of trains and traffic, causing a stillness that the birds would occasionally break.  I’d gotten started on a novel, but I didn’t feel that ambitious.  Probably I’d lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and drop the manuscript in the recycling bin.  Better that it be turned into office paper than end up in a garbage heap.  I resolved I’d finish something at least, one chapter, one page, one good paragraph a day before the sun set.  I’ve always liked watching the sky turn colors just before twilight, but tonight the fog and clouds were yellowed by industrial light.  I thought of getting in the car and turning on the radio, going for a drive into the city, but then I remembered that it wouldn’t tune.  The antenna was always the first to go.  I stubbed out my cigarette and watched a bird slowly hopping through the wet grass.

.           .            .            .            .            .

            I have this friend.  He whistles.  Not that whistling in itself is that uncommon, but he whistles in a particular way.  Every Saturday he comes over and we watch the news, eat dinner and sit for a while at the kitchen table, talking about the state of things.  He’s not particularly politically inclined, but he knows what’s going on in the world.  We talk for a while, and when I stand up to do the dishes, he takes his leave and steps out onto the porch.  This is an unspoken ritual between us, every week, the same routine.  The porch is an outdoor porch, so it’s screened in.  No glass to keep out the sound.  I’ve always thought of putting in windows, but on this particular night, the air was cool and damp and made a nice covering for the sounds in the woods; an eerie undercurrent of voices that was softened to a quiet mezzo-piano.  As I start doing the dishes, the sound of my friend’s whistling hits my ears.  Always, it’s like awakening to a dream, the opposite of what people call objective reality.  He has a way of commanding someone’s listening; not to the sounds coming from his own lips, but he seems to hold you in a state of acute awareness as to the sounds that surround you.  When you watch him, he’ll pause, and put his hand up to his ear, as if compelling some unknown audience to listen.  But you have to know my friend to understand this.  He is compulsively joyous, and infectious in his way of greeting things as they come.    

            The thing was, I hadn’t seen my friend in over two months.  I had lost my job, and the littlest things had started bothering me.  I knew my friend had nothing to do with this, I just couldn’t force myself to call him, or to head over to his house on a spontaneous whim like I used to.  Occasionally I would hum a tune and realize, it was his whistling, that bright, melodious and ethereal bell-like quality, suspended in the air around me.  One day when this happened, I found a bright white moth lying on the ground at my feet.  Its dead form seemed to reverberate with a touch of life, as if some secret had come to it in death, that its dead body was somehow truer, more delicate than its living form itself.  That night I dreamt of forest fires that consumed the house.  Only one bright white moth escaped, fluttering its wings and winding into the sky.   

.           .            .            .            .            .

Torrential rains fell on the roof of the house the day before I was scheduled to start work.  Everything seemed to be waiting for the rain, and now that it fell, there was a cease in the sounds of the woods.  The street was empty of cars, the people were all in their homes, and I stood alone on the porch, watching the rain pour down.

            I had come to love this place, and in a few days, I would be gone.  This realization dawned on me more and more as the rain subsided.  The silence of the woods around me broke into a subdued chatter, at the heart of which one hermit thrush began to sing.  From his post in the uppermost branches at the middle of the wood came a laughing, warbling trill.  A car splashed by on the street passing the house.  “How little reverence people have,” I spoke aloud.  Partly I was shocked by the sound of the my own voice.  I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days.  A group of birds fluttered noisily up onto the branches of the low brown oak across the lawn.  They went on chirping as the car passed, and I stood in silence, listening, watching the haze of the clouds grow fainter. Sunlight glinted on the drops of rain suspended on the tips of the branches.

Eliot Cardinaux

May, 2011

A Furious Devil - Eliot Cardinaux

  A Furious Devil

And carelessness rolls across hills, it does not see.  Forgiving, and forgiving what,

that name, that doesn’t know it’s sadness!  Like a myriad of pictograms, its sly,

shadowless verse is that of a nuptial grace, wise as it is fool, and captures devils in its praise.  It will seize its own heart, as if a crime had been its own, and stupefy the mind of even chaos, that would have its reign.  And it produces poetry, pure and simple, Alas! – to which it could never lay its claim.

4/4  '11

Memory

(EC 2/20 '11)

it is when feeling some life not my own, a view from a moment in the past and into the future, like a dream is, or a memory that brings say, with a glass of wine a fear, that is not to say -    what?  that the future is made up of past moments?  That a dream is never life because a dream is neither succeeding nor failing but simply is, a dream - thread out of what was.

And value is put on this dream.  Why?

    simply put it has no value
    but is valuable,
    just like it is to say
    when two sides to a given
    motion are unveiled,
    we sit beneath it,
    neither bowed to it
    nor standing over,
    that is the dream
    and so I think
    is dreaming.

"you need a form to dream"  - Bei Dao

hence, the necessity for poetry, music, etc.

good night. 

2/20  '11.

René Char - "Seuil" ("Threshold")

Seuil (Threshold)

          When it gave way, the barrage of man, sucked in by the great rift of the abandonment of god, of the divine, words in the distance, words that wished themselves not to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant push.  There was decided the dynasty of their meaning.
          I have run to the very end of this diluvian night.  Planted in the trembling dawn, my belt full of seasons -my friends, I wait for you.  Already I can make you out behind the horizon's black.  My hearth never tires of wishing your houses well, and my cypress stick laughs, for you, with all its heart.


                        from Fureur et Mystère
                           Trans.  Eliot Cardinaux

The Story of Abian - Daniel Levine

Abian Sacks was born in 1761 in a farm outside of Geneva, Switzerland at the height of the Calvinist era where skilled tradesmen– watchmakers, blacksmiths, printers made their livings in the humble Puritan way. Abian's father was a watchmaker, who was apparently rarely on time for anything, in spite of his trade. Journals discovered in the twentieth century that had been kept by Abian's brother, Bartholemew Sacks, reveal that their father devoted much of his time to hobby architecture– secretly of course, because the strict Calvinist doctrines governing work in Geneva at the time would never have allowed such a diversion from one's vocation. Nonetheless, Mr. Sacks, whose name is not known and is referred to in Bartholemew's journals only as "father", attempted to design museums, city squares, homes, a church and even a prototype of a peculiar flying machine. It is safe to say that the sacks boys grew up well-to-do for their time, although when speaking of Calvinist Geneva, well-to-do is a relative concept. The boys never wanted for food on account of their mother's distinguished garden in which she planted a number of vegetables and herbs. And it was right there in their mother's garden that Abian and Bartholemew first discovered the mystical herb known as dagahnj. Little Barty had found a patch growing wild in a far corner of the property, beyond some foreboding, thorny shrubbery that concealed it from all but the bravest. Barty was attracted by the dank scent of the flowers and fetched his brother, who set out to make a potion with the mysterious, redolent plant.

    Abian and Bartholemew surmised that dahganj might have acute medicinal properties and it was Abian's idea to brew it in butter, which could then be lathered on toast or used in the baking of sweets. The effects were sublime. Their father's clocks (hundreds of them about the house, always ticking, often a great source of anxiety) suddenly seemed to be playing together in a fantastic symphony. Where before they had seemed at times to Abian to be counting down the seconds of his life with heartless indifference, now they echoed their blithely satisfied tick-ticks in cavernous dimensions, and Abian became aware of how each clock with another clock, having been set off at different times created an endless parallelism, and how other mechanical ticking objects that moved at different speeds (the hand powered ceiling fan they had helped their father build for instance) created repeating loops of ticks that came together and went apart, expressing in circular form some fundamental difference– a sonic relativity. And it was when the boys were playing with their father's metronome and the mechanical fan and all the clocks after having eaten some dagahnj toast that it first occurred to Bartholemew to compose music. He soon asked his father for a cello and instead was given a lute, which he practiced for some time before winning an apprenticeship to an orchestra in Lucern, where he eventually did pick up the cello and become a distinguished soloist.

    The Sacks boys were approaching their teenage years and they knew that with dagahnj, they had something very special. But their wild patch was going to run out soon and they needed to find a way of getting more. They would have to bring their parents into the know on this one, they decided, and so first they told their father, thinking that he would be impressed by the plants wild effects. But this was not necessarily prudent, because once Mr. Sacks had tasted dagahnj toast, it was just like another Sacks boy with an equal appetite for the plant had appeared and now the supplies were dwindling. Mr. Sacks was such a devotee of the dagahnj that by his first week on board with the boys, their supply was dwindling twice as fast. They had to talk to their mother. She knew how to grow things. Only she had the ability to renew their supply of the splendid herb, but would she do it? The boys knew that the experience of eating dagahnj toast was a distinctly un-Calvinist one, and they wondered if their mother would not be so appalled as to end the fun decidedly. So with the help of their father, they set out to feed her some toast covertly, so as to watch her reaction. It was fantastic.  "Abian, Bartholemew, have you listened these clocks lately??" she called as she walked languidly about the house. Needless to say, once the boys were able to explain to her that dagahnj was responsible for her euphoria that night, she set out to salvage the remaining plant from the garden and grow more, much more.

    It was lucky that this occured in Switzerland, for Mr. Sacks new a man in the chocolate trade (that perfect Swiss chocolate that even today has the power to conjure all the coziest sensations and sentiments of an alpine village in ski season) and before long the Sacks boys were manufacturing little dagahnj chocolates that would revolutionize Geneva. The clock makers stopped being on time, the architects  started foreshadowing cubism in their designs for houses and city buildings, the printers were printing words all out of order and in groovy new fonts. It was an upheaval, and needless to say it was shut down by authorities before long.

    But Abian earned enough money to go to Paris to study and it was there that he made two lasting friendships, predicated on a mutual love of dagahnj, and the fact that Abian's heightened sensibilities concerning aesthetics impressed many, but none so much as young Jean-Jaques Rousseau, and the man known only as Athos.

    Athos you may know from his famous exploits with the musketeers Porthos, Aramis and young D'Artagnan. But shortly before meeting those auspicious characters he had been a prolific wino, a romantic, wandering the streets of Paris, living in a little flat, mingling with artists, scientists, whoever he found interesting, who he could engage in a little chat, always drinking, and often making a fine impression on distinguished members of society, so that he had cultivated a sort of bohemian fame. He and Abian first met in a cafe, aptly enough, where Athos was sipping a hot chocolate, and Abian, drawn to Athos' wistful manner, offered him a little helping from his basket of toast. It was not long before Athos was persuaded to leave the bottle behind and take up dagahnj as a healthier substitute. He and Abian would go on long walks in the countryside around Paris looking for a new wild stash, and to pass the time they would look at the birds too. Athos' father had been an ornithologist as a hobby and Athos seemed to know everything there was to know about the creatures, from distinctive markings to migration and mating habits right down to the birdcalls, and Abian took note of all of it.

    Now, although Abian met Jean-Jaques Rousseau quite accidently, (in the same cafe where he first met Athos) Rousseau had been an absolute devotee of dagahnj chocolate in Geneva. He said it helped him to think, to throw off the shackles of oppression in the mind and be at one with his creator and with the object of his desire. He wrote the Social Contract under the influence of a generous supply of toast from Abian. Together they would discuss politics and women and music, but mostly Jean-Jaques would talk, as he was prone to doing at length.

     It was during the Revolution that Abian decided to get out of Paris and he chose England as his next destination. He'd heard great things about the birdwatching there and decided he might make a book, cataloguing the taxonomy of birds. He was there for two decades, receiving packets of toast from Bartholemew in the mail, and cataloguing his many birds. Bartholemew was in Germany apprenticing in the studio of Johannes Brahms.

    It was around this time that a young American upstart named John James Audoban travelled to England seeking culture and adventure and didn't care how he got what he wanted as long as he got it. When their paths collided one fateful day, Abian was birdwatching and John James was hunting game-bird and it made for an awkward beginning but Abian offered the man some toast and they soon met again and had a congenial friendship for a while. But cunning Auduban, always looking for a leg-up, got it in his mind to invade Abian's flat one night and steal the recipe for this magical toast that, by the way, greatly heightened his shooting abilities on the hunt. Abian was out at the cafe drinking hot chocolate and going over some notes when Audoban snuck into his flat, but he did not find any recipe, nor any considerable stash of dagahnj, which Abian only had in a small portion (whatever Barty could send him) on account of the scarcity of good growing conditions that time of year in Great Britain. Instead, the scoundrel Auduban found volumes and volumes of detailed notes and sketches pertaining to ornithology, and so he took what he could get. The volumes were intended to be published under the title "Hawkee-boos". Bartholemew had persuaded his brother to title the work "Abian's Book of Birds" but, now Abian's book became Auduban's book, and the scoundrel had great success. Perhaps it was for the best, for Auduban would return to America and begin birdwatching in earnest, finally publishing his seminal work, "Birds of America", but Abian would never be able to publish "Hawkeeboos" and for a time after the loss of his work he was depressed and so he decided to seek new surroundings.

If he had known that John James Audoban had gone back to America, Abian never would have gone there, but it is good that he didn't for many adventures and riches lay ahead for him there. It merely seemed the only step forward– the New World– a place where surely adventure must be waiting, where surely there were new ideas at play and things to be done. Well, Abian settled just north of New York City and it was not long before he realized that dagahnj grew in the New World in great abundance. He had come to the right place. And with the help of an Iriquois man he met on the birdwatch one day, a man named Winocki, Abian learned things about the plant he hadn't ever realized. For one thing, apparently it could be smoked.

    Some years passed and Abian spent some time marketing a new dagahnj  chocolate with Winocki called Hawkeeboos. They were shaped like little birds and packed with dagahnj, which Winocki called "Cheebers". The pioneer boys loved them. They were used during the civil war to treat a variety of injuries and ailments. And they were popular among a certain social crust in Manhattan– artists, writers, socialites. He had always been incredibly disciplined where it came to marketing his chocolates or the study of birds. And he maintained a boutique character in his business, refusing to take investments from outsiders, to have his company swallowed by the new titans of America, the corporations. He had offers from men who represented men who represented the gas company, the railroad, General Mills, toy companies, the company that made little instruments for dentists– it seemed everyone had been visited by a little bird who whispered something about a mystical flower and a man in the Bronx who could make into candy.

    But Abian kept a low profile, in fact he scoffed at the attention and when it finally became too uncomfortable, he closed his business and looked for a new trade. He was 120 years old.

He decided to try sports and found he was rather good at it. He learned of a new game called baseball and quickly got into it, playing for a while on the New York Giants alongside Honus Wagner. When he retired from the game Willie Mays was on the team. Dagahnj has been connected to longevity in scientific studies especially when cooked in butter and lathered on delicious toast. The Sacks boys must be living proof. In the later part of the century, Abian became friends with a Soviet born painter and an old ex-hippy atheist debater, and the three of them collaborated on a number of stop-action animation films explaining some of the early flying machines designed by the senior Mr. Sacks, which were apparently quite functional and could be used in a new sport called urban handgliding. As for Bartholemew, he had long since changed his name to Charles Mingus and moved to LA. Abian still resides in the Bronx where he lives by the 5 train. 

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


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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…