The older I get the more important poetry becomes. Not all poetry, of course. As is the way of things, most poems are superfluous, including the ones I write myself. But some poems are indispensable.
The other day I was at the bakery near my office, listening to a gypsy quartet that plays French swing there on Saturday afternoons. Gypsy swing, with its mixture of lightness, sweetness, joy and melancholy, always makes me think of the opening sequence of Louis Malle's wonderful film, 'Milou in May'. Many of Malle's films have that same mix of qualities. There's something quite Gallic about that mix.
Afterwards, by chance, I fell into a conversation with the leader of the quartet, a Hungarian Gypsy called Jozsef, who lives in Dandenong. He believes he's the only truly Gypsy musician in Melbourne, possibly Australia. When he told me his name, I was reminded of the Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef, a beautiful man who led a beautiful life, and who wrote my favourite poem, the only poem I have ever learned, and relearned, by heart, and kept there. I came across it in an anthology of poetry editd by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes called The Rattle Bag. There have been times in my life when I can honestly say it has sustained me. I even set it to music. It's called The Seventh.
It's not a great poem, it's a favourite poem - there's a difference. 'The Seventh' is after all merely a series of lists. At the same time, as a poem, it's incomparable: incomparable in its virtuosic use of suggestion, imagery and analogy; incomparable in its understanding of the multiplicity of self, and of the arsenal of inner selves required to endure, to love, to create, and finally to die; and finally incomparable in its insistence on the sequestration, in the midst of the demands living makes on us, of a separate space, a place for pure selfhood, independent, fully aware, and beyond the reach of all those other selves we deploy to survive and to thrive - a point in the space of one's inner self in which one is more than merely alive. Some might call it a soul.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Quartet for the End of Time
If you look hard enough, it becomes evident that everything is connected. Stories do not run in straight lines but in circles and figures of eight. I sit here at my office at the Abbotsford Convent and I am reminded of the first time I came here, when I was still at university. I was living with my girlfriend at the time, who was a cellist. She had a friend called Elvira who played violin in a string quartet. They played Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time' at the chapel here. We lived just across the road for a whole year and I didn't have the curiosity to explore.
Messiaen was the pre-eminent twentieth century composer of - what shall we call it? Music in the classical tradition? Orchestral music? Abstract music? Music nobody listens to? That last moniker isn't really fair because people did listen to Messiaen and still do. In fact, Quartet for the End of Time is one of my favourite pieces of music, period.
Messiaen himself was an ardent Catholic - one of those Catholics, like Gaudì and Robert Bresson, so ardent that his faith bordered on the mystic. This mysticism became enveloped with the art, and with the reputation of the artist. Much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, audiences fall in love with artists - with the projection of an artist's myth - as much as they do with their art. Nabokov scoffed at the idea, and yet at least some of his considerablelegend is due to his remarkable life (the event in his life that sticks out most prominently in my mind is the story that he witnessed his father's assassination at a political meeting - his father was shot while shielding another Russian politician in exile sitting beside him from bullets intended for his neighbour, not for him).
There is so much paradox folded into that word 'mystic'; one thinks of Rumi, of Meister Eckhart, of Ramon Llull and Schopenhauer's account of his conversion, even of TS Eliot. One thinks of the creative tension that has always existed between mystics and religious and political institutions. Mysticism's theme has always been the interconnectedness of all things, thus with pantheism and its grotesque new age corruptions: "And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe," in Pessoa's words.
Music has its own mystic traditions - Liszt was a classic mystic, according to Schopenhauer's definition: "... men who have led a very adventurous life under the pressure of passions, men such as kings, heroes, or adventurers, have often been seen suddenly to change, resort to resignation and penance, and become hermits and monks." Other than Catholicism, Messiaen himself was obsessed with bird calls, an interest clearly discernible in his music.
But to get to the point. When France capitulated to Germany near the beginning of WWII, young conscript Messiaen was taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent much of the war in a POW camp, where he composed Quartet for the End of Time for clarinet, cello, violin and piano. The unusual instrumentation is explained by the fact that interred in the camp were a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. Messiaen himself played piano. The work was first performed at the camp, in front of a crowd of prisoners and guards numbering around 5,000 - surely a concert that trumps Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison prison gig as the greatest musical performance in a prison of all time (not that I'm keeping a list). Itsd inspiration was chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, when the seventh angel descends, consummates the mystery of God and obliterates time itself - not a bad day's work. It is said that the piano he played at the work's debut was in such poor shape that some of the notes would stick when they were pressed down - but this may be legend.
When I was in my final year of boarding school, I had a South African piano teacher assigned by the school who would dribble at the mouth and who wore a brace on her forearm - supposedly because of repetitive strain injury - which prevented her from playing the piano herself. When I finally complained, I was recommended to another music teacher, the very old but very elegant Miss S, the most marvellous and angelic of all my music teachers (not that the competition was very stiff). Miss S had taken her maiden name after the death of her husband, a prominent bureaucrat of whom she spoke with very little affection. She must have been a very beautiful young woman, spirited, gifted - a fine match for a young man of means and ambition. Unfortunately, it had not been a happy one. I would cycle to her modernist home by the river, where large paintings by prominent members of the school of Angry Penguins adorned the walls. She would be sitting at her piano, waiting for me. She walked with a cane and shook a little but played brilliantly and read music with astonishing ease - astonishing to me, at least, for I was a slow and dimwitted pupil. That much she could see straight away, and very quickly my lessons became conversations - or, rather, monologues. Miss S was in the summary part of her life, when the brain begins to be overwhelmed by the past. Sitting in front of her polished baby grand piano while she sat beside me, I was only too happy to forego whatever Beethoven or Chopin I had chosen to play for my final exam to listen instead to the procession of reminiscences, sometimes uncomfortably candid, for Miss S was not in the habit of censoring herself. They would never proceed in a straight line, but went round and round in circles and figures of eight, a stream of a higher, wounded consciousness that when pieced together composed a mural of Melbourne and Australia in the 50s and 60s, when she toured Australia extensively with visiting musicians She remembered with particular affection the great Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. I remembered being mesmerised by her luminous skin, which was almost unblemished. Then, five minutes before the end of the hour, the next student - an Asian boy from a neighbouring school - would ring at the bell, and Miss S would have me run through a few scales and play one of my pieces, hacking ten minutes off the next student's hour, and off I would go, back to the grimness of my boarding school.
My last lesson with Miss S was at the end of my last year of boarding school. I had just finished my final exams - the music exam had not gone well. I'd played with a hangover and fell apart. At home, everything was falling apart too. My father's business was sinking in a sea of debt. Instead of declaring bankruptcy, he'd secretly applied for jobs all around the world, and had been hired by a company in the United States. So my parents and my sisters were preparing to leave Australia once and for all. I had decided to go to France to live in the country of my birth. I had dreams of settling there, and becoming a writer. Before I left Melboure, for what I thought was the last time, I went to visit Miss S for a final lesson. As usual, we spent almost the entire lesson talking. When I told her I was moving to France, she told me that if I went to Paris, there was a particular church I should visit, but I instantly forgot the name of the church, and the reason why I should go.
The year I spent in France was a melancholy year. I lived with my Armenian grandparents; I spoke very poor French; I was an incurably shy loner and made no friends and met no girls; and to cap it all off I had to enrol in a local high school (two years younger than me) to escape being drafted into the French army. But I did travel - to Italy, in June, and to Paris, in August. I had a cousin in Paris who, in Parisian style, was going on holiday all August. He and his girlfriend had a flat in the 18th arrondissement, which I lived in for three weeks while they were away. I hardly spoke to another living soul for all of those three weeks. I went to museums and saw the sights, of course, but mostly I just wandered the streets aimlessly, nursing coffees for hours while I read Baudelaire's 'Fleurs du Mal' and Peter Carey's 'Oscar and Lucinda', seeing old movies like 'An Angel at my Table' at the tiny neighbourhood cinemas on the Left Bank, and visiting churches because they were free. I was no longer a believer, but having been to Catholic school I suppose I found solace in the familiarity of a church. I had almost no money and no idea how to acquire more. One of my favourite churches was Saint Eustache, next to Les Halles. I liked it because it was such an ungainly mix of architectural periods and styles - early and late Gothic, a Baroque altar, a Classical façade. It had changed with Paris, and with the history of the world. My last day in Paris was a Sunday, and before catching a train back to my grandparents' apartment in Marseille, I decided to visit Saint Eustache one last time. It was late morning, and a sunny late summer day. I arrived halfway through Mass. The cool air in the church was heavy with the perfume of incense. The beams of sunlight that streamed through the stained glass Gothic windows were made almost solid by the smoke of the burning incense. A choir sang Mozart during the Eucharist, accompanied by a pipe organ.
At the end of the service, the organ struck up as the procession left the church. The music it played was glorious, thundering, cacophonic, and so loud that I felt the vibrations in the wood of the pew. Old ladies in front of me turned around and looked up at the organist with frowns on their faces. As I left the church, at the entrance, I saw a rack filled with CDs. I had a closer look, and noticed that the CDs were all of Messiaen. It was then that I remembered what Miss S had told me in her soft, quivering voice: if you go to Paris, you should go to Saint Eustache, where Olivier Messiaen plays the organ every Sunday morning.
Messiaen was the pre-eminent twentieth century composer of - what shall we call it? Music in the classical tradition? Orchestral music? Abstract music? Music nobody listens to? That last moniker isn't really fair because people did listen to Messiaen and still do. In fact, Quartet for the End of Time is one of my favourite pieces of music, period.
Messiaen himself was an ardent Catholic - one of those Catholics, like Gaudì and Robert Bresson, so ardent that his faith bordered on the mystic. This mysticism became enveloped with the art, and with the reputation of the artist. Much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, audiences fall in love with artists - with the projection of an artist's myth - as much as they do with their art. Nabokov scoffed at the idea, and yet at least some of his considerablelegend is due to his remarkable life (the event in his life that sticks out most prominently in my mind is the story that he witnessed his father's assassination at a political meeting - his father was shot while shielding another Russian politician in exile sitting beside him from bullets intended for his neighbour, not for him).
There is so much paradox folded into that word 'mystic'; one thinks of Rumi, of Meister Eckhart, of Ramon Llull and Schopenhauer's account of his conversion, even of TS Eliot. One thinks of the creative tension that has always existed between mystics and religious and political institutions. Mysticism's theme has always been the interconnectedness of all things, thus with pantheism and its grotesque new age corruptions: "And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe," in Pessoa's words.
Music has its own mystic traditions - Liszt was a classic mystic, according to Schopenhauer's definition: "... men who have led a very adventurous life under the pressure of passions, men such as kings, heroes, or adventurers, have often been seen suddenly to change, resort to resignation and penance, and become hermits and monks." Other than Catholicism, Messiaen himself was obsessed with bird calls, an interest clearly discernible in his music.
But to get to the point. When France capitulated to Germany near the beginning of WWII, young conscript Messiaen was taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent much of the war in a POW camp, where he composed Quartet for the End of Time for clarinet, cello, violin and piano. The unusual instrumentation is explained by the fact that interred in the camp were a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. Messiaen himself played piano. The work was first performed at the camp, in front of a crowd of prisoners and guards numbering around 5,000 - surely a concert that trumps Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison prison gig as the greatest musical performance in a prison of all time (not that I'm keeping a list). Itsd inspiration was chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, when the seventh angel descends, consummates the mystery of God and obliterates time itself - not a bad day's work. It is said that the piano he played at the work's debut was in such poor shape that some of the notes would stick when they were pressed down - but this may be legend.
When I was in my final year of boarding school, I had a South African piano teacher assigned by the school who would dribble at the mouth and who wore a brace on her forearm - supposedly because of repetitive strain injury - which prevented her from playing the piano herself. When I finally complained, I was recommended to another music teacher, the very old but very elegant Miss S, the most marvellous and angelic of all my music teachers (not that the competition was very stiff). Miss S had taken her maiden name after the death of her husband, a prominent bureaucrat of whom she spoke with very little affection. She must have been a very beautiful young woman, spirited, gifted - a fine match for a young man of means and ambition. Unfortunately, it had not been a happy one. I would cycle to her modernist home by the river, where large paintings by prominent members of the school of Angry Penguins adorned the walls. She would be sitting at her piano, waiting for me. She walked with a cane and shook a little but played brilliantly and read music with astonishing ease - astonishing to me, at least, for I was a slow and dimwitted pupil. That much she could see straight away, and very quickly my lessons became conversations - or, rather, monologues. Miss S was in the summary part of her life, when the brain begins to be overwhelmed by the past. Sitting in front of her polished baby grand piano while she sat beside me, I was only too happy to forego whatever Beethoven or Chopin I had chosen to play for my final exam to listen instead to the procession of reminiscences, sometimes uncomfortably candid, for Miss S was not in the habit of censoring herself. They would never proceed in a straight line, but went round and round in circles and figures of eight, a stream of a higher, wounded consciousness that when pieced together composed a mural of Melbourne and Australia in the 50s and 60s, when she toured Australia extensively with visiting musicians She remembered with particular affection the great Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. I remembered being mesmerised by her luminous skin, which was almost unblemished. Then, five minutes before the end of the hour, the next student - an Asian boy from a neighbouring school - would ring at the bell, and Miss S would have me run through a few scales and play one of my pieces, hacking ten minutes off the next student's hour, and off I would go, back to the grimness of my boarding school.
My last lesson with Miss S was at the end of my last year of boarding school. I had just finished my final exams - the music exam had not gone well. I'd played with a hangover and fell apart. At home, everything was falling apart too. My father's business was sinking in a sea of debt. Instead of declaring bankruptcy, he'd secretly applied for jobs all around the world, and had been hired by a company in the United States. So my parents and my sisters were preparing to leave Australia once and for all. I had decided to go to France to live in the country of my birth. I had dreams of settling there, and becoming a writer. Before I left Melboure, for what I thought was the last time, I went to visit Miss S for a final lesson. As usual, we spent almost the entire lesson talking. When I told her I was moving to France, she told me that if I went to Paris, there was a particular church I should visit, but I instantly forgot the name of the church, and the reason why I should go.
The year I spent in France was a melancholy year. I lived with my Armenian grandparents; I spoke very poor French; I was an incurably shy loner and made no friends and met no girls; and to cap it all off I had to enrol in a local high school (two years younger than me) to escape being drafted into the French army. But I did travel - to Italy, in June, and to Paris, in August. I had a cousin in Paris who, in Parisian style, was going on holiday all August. He and his girlfriend had a flat in the 18th arrondissement, which I lived in for three weeks while they were away. I hardly spoke to another living soul for all of those three weeks. I went to museums and saw the sights, of course, but mostly I just wandered the streets aimlessly, nursing coffees for hours while I read Baudelaire's 'Fleurs du Mal' and Peter Carey's 'Oscar and Lucinda', seeing old movies like 'An Angel at my Table' at the tiny neighbourhood cinemas on the Left Bank, and visiting churches because they were free. I was no longer a believer, but having been to Catholic school I suppose I found solace in the familiarity of a church. I had almost no money and no idea how to acquire more. One of my favourite churches was Saint Eustache, next to Les Halles. I liked it because it was such an ungainly mix of architectural periods and styles - early and late Gothic, a Baroque altar, a Classical façade. It had changed with Paris, and with the history of the world. My last day in Paris was a Sunday, and before catching a train back to my grandparents' apartment in Marseille, I decided to visit Saint Eustache one last time. It was late morning, and a sunny late summer day. I arrived halfway through Mass. The cool air in the church was heavy with the perfume of incense. The beams of sunlight that streamed through the stained glass Gothic windows were made almost solid by the smoke of the burning incense. A choir sang Mozart during the Eucharist, accompanied by a pipe organ.
At the end of the service, the organ struck up as the procession left the church. The music it played was glorious, thundering, cacophonic, and so loud that I felt the vibrations in the wood of the pew. Old ladies in front of me turned around and looked up at the organist with frowns on their faces. As I left the church, at the entrance, I saw a rack filled with CDs. I had a closer look, and noticed that the CDs were all of Messiaen. It was then that I remembered what Miss S had told me in her soft, quivering voice: if you go to Paris, you should go to Saint Eustache, where Olivier Messiaen plays the organ every Sunday morning.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Bee Keeping
One of the most poetic lines that has ever been said to me in conversation was, 'Beekeeping is a cruel and hideous thing.' It's a thought that came to mind on Monday, the first truly springy day of spring. 'Spring': what a beautiful Anglo-Saxon word it is, bristling with coiled elastic energy, truly onomatopoeic. Not for the Angles the Latin detachment of 'primavera' - 'first green'.
On Monday morning I came into my office, which faces north onto a courtyard with a big old elm tree - sick, I'm told, because it was potted as a seedling. This tree is taking its time blooming. It's seen a few springs and knows better than most that one swallow doesn't make a summer.
The sun was streaming in and the air was noisy with the buzz of bees. I have no idea why, but the bees were swarming in their untold thousands around a corner of the old convent building. Had there been a disturbance? I shall never know. But the effect was magical, almost uncanny. It was as if the bees were heralding the change of seasons, and in so doing had brought the air and the sky to life.
Later that day, Steve, who keeps the bar in the building, told me that the bees tend to nest in the crevices of the building. This is why the vents beside the windows, which date from a time before air-conditioning, have all been covered over with fine gauze meshing. Steve said that there have been occasions when honey has leaked from these bee nest and dripped down the walls. That image, of a great grey convent building sweating honey, has stuck with me all week.
Lately I've been working in my office until very late at night. My office itself is a cove of comfort and solace, but when I step outside very late at night, with only the 'Exit' safety signs for illumination, there is a coiled elastic energy to the corridors of the place that keeps me on edge until I dash out of the ground on my bicycle - although there's nothing spring-like about it. It's all that unrealised womanhood, said a friend of mine the other day, who went to convent school.
Until it was closed in the mid-70s, this place was a day school, a boarding school, a home for orphaned girls and a home for 'fallen' girls - delinquent girls or girls who'd fallen pregnant, which was considered a form of delinquency. The latter would typically be required to stay here for a period of about three or four years, so if you came here because you were pregnant, you would give birth to your child, the child would be removed without you having been given the chance to see it, and you would stay here another three years or so. The convent earned an income by industrial laundry - right now, the laundry is being converted into studios for industrial artists.
All this seems rather remote until you meet someone whose life has been shaped by this - a woman who works at my local bank branch, for example. Her mother fell pregnant (with my bank manager's older brother) when she was 16 and her parents brought her here. Thankfully, the girl and her boyfriend decided to marry, so she was allowed to leave the convent and keep her baby.
As a sad post-script, I noticed this morning that the uncovered balcony outside my window is littered with dead and dying bees. Perhaps the pest controllers have paid a visit, and this spring the convent walls will not be sweating honey.
On Monday morning I came into my office, which faces north onto a courtyard with a big old elm tree - sick, I'm told, because it was potted as a seedling. This tree is taking its time blooming. It's seen a few springs and knows better than most that one swallow doesn't make a summer.
The sun was streaming in and the air was noisy with the buzz of bees. I have no idea why, but the bees were swarming in their untold thousands around a corner of the old convent building. Had there been a disturbance? I shall never know. But the effect was magical, almost uncanny. It was as if the bees were heralding the change of seasons, and in so doing had brought the air and the sky to life.
Later that day, Steve, who keeps the bar in the building, told me that the bees tend to nest in the crevices of the building. This is why the vents beside the windows, which date from a time before air-conditioning, have all been covered over with fine gauze meshing. Steve said that there have been occasions when honey has leaked from these bee nest and dripped down the walls. That image, of a great grey convent building sweating honey, has stuck with me all week.
Lately I've been working in my office until very late at night. My office itself is a cove of comfort and solace, but when I step outside very late at night, with only the 'Exit' safety signs for illumination, there is a coiled elastic energy to the corridors of the place that keeps me on edge until I dash out of the ground on my bicycle - although there's nothing spring-like about it. It's all that unrealised womanhood, said a friend of mine the other day, who went to convent school.
Until it was closed in the mid-70s, this place was a day school, a boarding school, a home for orphaned girls and a home for 'fallen' girls - delinquent girls or girls who'd fallen pregnant, which was considered a form of delinquency. The latter would typically be required to stay here for a period of about three or four years, so if you came here because you were pregnant, you would give birth to your child, the child would be removed without you having been given the chance to see it, and you would stay here another three years or so. The convent earned an income by industrial laundry - right now, the laundry is being converted into studios for industrial artists.
All this seems rather remote until you meet someone whose life has been shaped by this - a woman who works at my local bank branch, for example. Her mother fell pregnant (with my bank manager's older brother) when she was 16 and her parents brought her here. Thankfully, the girl and her boyfriend decided to marry, so she was allowed to leave the convent and keep her baby.
As a sad post-script, I noticed this morning that the uncovered balcony outside my window is littered with dead and dying bees. Perhaps the pest controllers have paid a visit, and this spring the convent walls will not be sweating honey.
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