Julien Gracq | Le Roi Cophetua (King Cophetua) / 2003

how things are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julien Gracq Le Roi Cophetua, translated from the French as King Cophetua by Ingeborg M. Kohn (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2003)

 

King Cophetua is one of those wonderful fictions which call up more questions than they answer, a work that so involves the reader that he or she will find it difficult to transform the experience of reading into an easy analysis or summarization of the text. In short, the sensuous pleasure of  reading this work is at one with the meaning of the work, and one feels one could easily return to the text with little diminution of that enjoyment.

     In Gracq’s short work the focus, indeed, is all upon the senses: the appearance of the small, northern French village, Braye-la-Forét, to where the narrator has been lured, its grey-dark and green buildings and surrounding forests, the feeling of the intense wind and storm, the smells of the wet soil and nearby ocean, and the sounds of that storm and distant gun-fire of the war. So evocative are Gracq’s descriptions (not realistic, necessarily, but poetically charged) that I found myself in that blissful situation of willingly reading many pages several times!

      The story is nearly invisible, in fact, is so transparent that it has little substance. A man who has fought and been injured in the “Great” War feels all of the fatigue of the years of battle. Living in wartime Paris, he is invited to the country by a long-time friend, an experimental composer and aviator, Jacques Nueil, to visit his villa. A somewhat dandyish figure who reminds the narrator of a time before the war (of Apollinaire’s poems, of the stories of the gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin, and of images of Mauriace Chevalier with his fashionable sailor hat “set jauntily over one eye”), Nueil, a “voisin” (neighborhood) pilot fighter, has been granted leave and will meet him there on the afternoon of All Saints’ Day.

      As the storm brews, blowing piles of dead leaves across the lawns of the villa, the narrator awaits the arrival of Nueil. As night comes on, the guest, left in Nueil’s studio by the servant girl, begins to hear the far-off sounds of warfare. His emotions—alternating between the excitement stirred up by the sounds and smells of the storm and the despair and terror he feels in the distant flashes of bombs exploding and volleys of cannons—exhausts him as he sits alone in his host’s house, attempting to makes sense of the invitation and events of the day. The mix of sounds of tree branches scraping against the house, the raging storm and the sound of distant gunfire calls up an image of Goya’s La Mala Noche, which seems to parallel his feelings:

 

                   La mala noche…. These words came to mind, opening up

                   a stream of thoughts. In the trembling twilight of the candles,

                   images slipped in and out without resistance; suddenly, the

                   memory of an etching by Goya blotted out all others. Against

                   the dark background of black graphite, two women emerge

                   from a stormy night: one black form, the other white. What is

                   happening on that lonely moor, in the middle of that moonless

                   night: Sabbath—kidnapping—infanticide? All the forbidden,

                   disputed elements of this nocturnal meeting seem to have taken

                   cover underneath the heavy, billowing skirts of the child ravisher’s

                   black silhouette, and in her shadowed face with its Mongolian,

                   impassible traits and slanted, heavy-lidded eyes. But the light

                   of the limestone which sharply outlines the white silhouette

                   against the night, and the furious wind blowing a light-colored

                   petticoat high up on her hips, revealing perfect legs, wind that

                   whips her veil like a flag and outlines the draped contours of a

                   shoulder and a charming head, are entirely the forces of desire.

 

The combination, indeed, of the forces of nature, beauty, terror and desire—all silhouetted, hidden, confused, interfused—become the themes of this novella, as the narrator sinks into the silence of the house and experiences a time apart from the world which he has temporarily escaped.

     He realizes at last that his host will not be returning that night, that he is left alone in this strangely unfurnished, museum-like home with the servant girl, whom it suddenly flashes upon him, perhaps, is a servant-mistress of the master of the house. 

     The girl leads him into the dining room where he is served dinner. As he observes her silent ceremonies of serving the food in a nearby mirror, he begins to feel an excitement in her very presence: “whenever she approached to serve me, even at a distance from the faint yet vital warmth of her bare arm, I instantly felt a burning sensation on the back of my hand.”

     When she momentarily leaves the room, he rises to look more closely at the only image hung upon the walls—the second picture that dominates Gracq’s tale—King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ version of which hangs in the Tate Gallery). The image is based on the ancient tales of the African king who, apparently, disdained women (“From natures lawes he did decline, / For sure he was not of my minde, / He cared not for women-kind”) until one day, upon glimpsing a barefoot beggar-girl dressed in grey, he fell suddenly in love with her and asked her to marry him.

      Mentioned in several Shakespeare plays, set to poetry by Lord Alfred Tennyson and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this story is also sometimes cited as a source for the Pygmalion myth used by George Bernard Shaw, and is even referred to by Agatha Christie in the novel The Body in the Library as the “Cophetua syndrome,” a malady that strikes the upper-class Englishman who becomes infatuated with a working-class girl.

    That is generally what happens in Gracq’s work, for as the evening progresses the narrator becomes more and more agitated, temporarily escaping the house, and returning to the village to discern whether a message has been left in the post office. But after ringing the bell, which no one answers, he is left with no choice but to return to the villa, where he is led silently upstairs by the girl into her bed.

     In Gracq’s version, the girl is, like the figure in the Goya painting, all in silhouette, her long black hair almost indistinguishable from her dress, her face turned away from him, even in their sexual embraces. Only after they fall asleep and he awakens to watch her, does he have the opportunity to look into her face.

     Upon rising in the morning, he escapes the house to a nearby café for coffee, realizing that a “parenthesis had closed, but it left in its wake something tender and burning inside of me that only time could erase.” Even in the last line, “and I thought that today, all day long, it would still be Sunday,” we are unsure whether or not he will return to the house and resume his relationship or perceive it as simply an enlivening episode in an otherwise fatigued life.         

    As I suggested previously, more questions arise than are answered. Had Nueil intended to show up? Has he been killed in battle? The narrator even seems to ponder—quickly dismissing the idea—that perhaps Nueil (as Herminien brought his lover Heide for his friend’s approval in Gracq’s The Castle of Argol) has planned for the encounter between the narrator and servant.

     One thing seems to be clear: despite her near total silence and subservient position throughout, the serving girl apparently is in complete control. Twice, the narrator recognizes in her demeanor an acceptance of things “as they are,” almost imagines her speaking:, “This is how things are.” Even here, however, we wonder, is this a justification for his sexual encounter? Although she seems to have been a willing participant, has she simply acquiesced to an act over which she recognizes she has no control?  In a sense, the story is not at all about the male “conquerors,” in either their wartime battles or their sexual encounters, but concerns the silent woman and the power she holds within which keeps her apart from the would-be conquerors of her heart. As in several of Gracq’s works, there is an unsettling homoerotic element in the heterosexual act; as the narrator observes the sleeping woman, he is overwhelmed not as much by her presence as by Nueil’s:

 

               Suddenly, I visualized quite clearly the loaded airplane flying in

               the midst of its roar high up in the starry night, its course charted

               by readings of the earth down below punctured by fires and lined

               like a map by the criss-cross network of piano strings—the dust-

               encrusted bulk of the pilot, barely awake, wrapped in his shawls

               and furs, the face illuminated from below, not so much by the

               lights of the instrument panel as by the fixed image of that woman,

               appeasing yet cruel, perhaps the only image where she could

               again take shape and live only for him.

 

In Gracq’s mysteriously sensuous world, men seem to enjoy sex most fully only through the eyes of their fellow men. Man, in short, is an eternal outsider to his own sexual appetites, and, accordingly, is never truly at home with the pleasures of life.

     What does that, in turn, say about the very causes of war and the suffering which results? Perhaps if men could find a home within which, like Nueil’s servant, to live peacefully with “how things are,” they would not need to destroy others in their searches and struggles for satisfaction. If the narrator has found, at least, a temporary peace, we recognize that time will eventually erase it and the war resume.

 

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2006

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2008).

 

 

 

Harold Pinter | The Dumb Waiter / 1961

in service

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter in The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961)

 

The "dumb waiter" of Pinter's play of the same name is, of course, Gus, who with his partner Ben murders unknown individuals they are assigned. Each time they meet in a room and wait for the arrival of the victim, accomplish the dark deed, and leave. This time around they are holed up in a small room that appears it may once have been a kitchen for a restaurant or bar above, a presumption they must accept since there is a dumb waiter and a speaking-tube between the floors.

    Gus is dumb not only in his inability to fully express himself but in his choice of career—although unlike his partner, Ben, he seems to have some sort of sense of guilt, at least for their last job, the murder of a girl:

 

                     GUS: I was just thinking about that girl, that's all.

 

                     GUS sits on the bed.

 

                     She wasn't much to look at, but still. It was a mess though, wasn't

                     it? What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one.

                     They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser

                     texture, like. Didn't she spread, eh? She didn't half spread. Kaw! But

                     I've been meaning to ask you.

 

                     BEN sits up and clenches his eyes.

 

                     Who clears up after we've gone?

 

    It is perhaps these second thoughts, emanating from the horrible memory of the body obviously torn asunder by their gunshots, that threatens the end of his service. For what character and audience simultaneously discover in the final moments is that he is the victim this time around; as he goes out for a drink of water, he returns to find himself facing Ben with gun in hand.

     Yet the dumb waiter is also an object with which the two men become hilariously involved when they began receiving orders for various dishes, including Macaroni Pastitsio and Ormitha Macarounada. The stove has no gas, and the men have little in the way of sustenance, except for Gus' biscuits, a bar of chocolate, a half pint of milk, and one Eccles cake, stale. Yet, despite his own hunger he gives up these precious objects as replacements for the foods they cannot provide. In short, he remains in service not only to his dreadful job of murdering unknown beings, but his attempts to obey any demand they make of him. He is a born lackey, a man who was determined from birth to act out the demands of those in control, whether they be of some nefarious upper class or of the criminal underground. It hardly matters for Gus. And given the absurdity of the demands for the various dishes ordered up, he might as well have been murdered for his inability to live up to the demands.

     At least he questions, wonders if those in charge are not toying with them, giving them matches, for example, when they know there is nothing to light. Ben, although more literate—he reads the newspaper over and over, commenting on the ordinary events it describes as if they were more horrendous than the murders he commits—but he does not ever challenge the authority of what he describes as the "organisation." For him it is a large system with "departments for everything."

      Ben, in fact, although smarter than Gus, may be a sort of dumber waiter, about which the men's final staredown at the end of the play hints. This time he must kill Gus; but next time might it not be himself who is called upon to unknowingly pass through the doorway?

      This play premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Company in England in 1960.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater (October 2010).

Joel Gold and Ian Gold | Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness / 2014

the invisible line

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel Gold and Ian Gold Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness (New York: Free Press, 2014)

While working at the Bellevue Hospital psychiatric emergency room in his first month as a doctor, Joel Gold encountered a seemingly mellow and laid back individual—dressed in a “tie-dyed shirt, cargo shorts, and flip flops,” his long hair held back in a bandana—who seemed to be suffering from a strange delusion:

 

                            Albert believed that he was the subject of a TV show

                            or movie. In describing his experience, he compared it

                            to the acclaimed 1998 film The Truman Show…directed

                            by Peter Weir. The protagonist, Truman Burbank…is

                            being watched by the whole world. Adopted in utero by

                            a television corporation, Truman lives with every moment

                            of his life being captured by thousands of cameras located

                            around Seahaven, the island community he never leaves

                            until his climatic escape to the “real” world. 

 

      The patient “believed that all of the significant people in his life were involved in a conspiracy to keep him on the air and in the dark about his own show.” At first this strange delusion did not register with Gold as anything but yet another variation of several delusions as outlined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now, its fifth edition, described as DSM-5, which recognizes numerous categories of disorder: “of development, mood, trauma, sex and gender, sleep, drug abuse, and personality, among others.

    Over a number of years, however, Gold, discussing the various delusions with his brother, Ian, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at McGill University, began to see the “Truman” delusion as a series of delusions which a substantial number of his patients had developed. And working with his brother, Gold began to catalogue and explore what they called “The Truman Show Delusion,” culminating in their book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.

     This book, however, uses this delusion—limited, apparently, to individuals who have seen or heard about a popular motion picture—as merely the starting point for the Golds’ exploration of contemporary psychiatry and the problems facing doctors and patients. The field that once focused, given Freud’s influence, on personal discussions with the patient and analysis of problems, has shifted increasingly over the last few decades to become an issue of neuroscience, with drugs and other mind-altering techniques. As the Golds point out, Freud’s activities generally did not to delusions, which he felt were incurable.

     Moreover, what we quickly discern through the writers’ rational explanations of delusions and their possible causes, is that psychiatry and its related activities has yet developed into a true science in which one can explain causes and effects. A great deal of what we know about the mind (and even its physical manifestation, the brain) is purely speculative. While the American Psychiatric Association has been able to create a kind of “check-list” delusions, doctors have still no certainty as to how these delusions come about or, even more interestingly, why there are so few delusions when one might imagine that human beings might suffer from several thousand of such abnormal viewpoints. Yet nearly all delusions, no matter how they differ within the specifics, can be said to involve patterns that fall into these few categories.

     Suspicious Minds is not only comprehensible by the layman, but the Golds allow the reader to speculate—through the several various theories they recount of how the brain of sufferers becomes damaged—why.  At the same time, Joel Gold shares several cases with us, both historical and current, helping us to at least to explore various theories, and even imaginatively listen in on their patients’ dilemmas. Through chapters titled “A Short History of Madness,” “One Hundred Years of Delusion,” “Hell Is Other People,” “Belief Unhinged,” and “Beyond Belief,” the brothers take us through a thumbnail history of the psychiatric profession then and now, detailing the shifts in theories, and outlining new avenues of thought that have recently arisen.

     By allowing us to get a sense of the shape of this field of a future science, the Golds help confirm their theories that not only are the specifics of delusions subject to cultural and social changes, but that delusions themselves arise from our encounters with others, deriving from our need as a species to evaluate our social positioning within our worlds and perceive possible dangers others represent such through deception, jealousy, and numerous other behavioral patterns. Slowly and carefully, the Golds lay out evidence that delusional behavior, and, in particular, schizophrenia, is higher in urban areas and within particular groupings of individuals who have suffered childhood abuse, immigrant adversity, social inferiority, and other forms of stress that heighten our inbuilt “suspicion system” we have developed as a species.

     Although the Golds are perfectly willing to admit that some of these forces may physically alter the brain through, for example, an increase or decrease of dopamine and through other chemical substances created within the body, as well as admitting that certain drugs clearly do alter the behavior of their patients for the better, the brothers also imply that a newer kind psychiatry, far less passive than Freudian analysis, for example, does profoundly effect and sometimes cures their patients.

    Moreover, the Golds point out that what we might describe as “insane” behavior is often based on seemingly sane solutions to the appearance of danger that have simply gone awry. Delusional patients, they explain, are not much different from healthy individuals except for their delusions from which, with supportive conversations and drugs, patients can be dissuaded. If contemporary “aspirational psychiatry” has, as the Golds write, “hitched its wagon to the star of neuroscience,” they feel that, until we know more specifics of the mind, that psychiatry should open itself to a broad range of therapy. Quite convincingly, it seems to me, the Golds, recognizing that delusions shift as our cultural perspectives change, suggest that biology alone cannot take account of mental illness.

     In a world in which most of us realize that we are being watched by others, locally, nationally, and internationally, is it a delusion to be slightly paranoid. Perhaps those suffering from a delusion such as “The Truman Show” syndrome are not expressing delusions of grandeur (which seem to be implied by the patients’ feeling that they are being “watched” by everyone) as much as they are attempting to explain their fears that arise in a society where the NSA is capturing nearly every message of their social communications, and where computer communities such as Facebook and Twitter suddenly create complex and sometimes dangerous urban-like groupings that once might have been experienced only in large cities.

       If suspicion can become the source of a dangerous delusion, it can also help to protect us from even more damaging encounters with others in our increasingly global community whom we must daily face. A wise and suspicious e-mail user knows that a letter from an unknown individual who claims he is willing to send millions of dollars to the recipient if only he provides his bank account number, providently deletes the message without answering. But when suspicion begins to inform all of our email encounters it changes the way in which an individual thinks, and surely will alter his or her ability to daily communicate with others. How do most of us “draw that line” between healthy suspicion and a mind infected by general mistrust?

     The Golds hint that perhaps there is no one “point” at which one has crossed the invisible “line,” between sanity and insanity; just as importantly, they seemingly argue that psychiatry does yet understand why some individuals more easily enter a zone of fear and doubt that puts them into jeopardy. When clinical neuroscience becomes the entire structure through which one approaches mental illness, the Golds argue, it is like looking though a keyhole. Such a narrow viewpoint “misses the wide biological perspective in which living things, humans included, are best understood. The problem with aspirational psychiatry, then, is not that it is too biological. The problem is that it is not biological enough.”  Environment and the social world around us, in short, help us to explain not only what delusions are, but why we develop them, and how we can work to resolve them.

 

Los Angeles, January 1, 2015

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2015)

 

Gerhard Roth | The Will to Sickness / 2006 || Eva Sjödin | Inner China / 2005

two fragmentary fictions

by Douglas Messerli

 

     How did Kalb endure the inconclusive events in his brain? The word-fragments

    that were caught incessantly by his ear, his absorption of idiosyncratic time, bits

    of incidents, snippets of events? What made him suffer through this uninterrupted

    series of fragments? What made him experience these agonizing circumstances as

    normal?

                —Gerhard Roth, The Will to Sickness

 

Gerhard Roth Die Wille zur Krankheit, translated from the German by Tristram Wolff as The Will to Sickness (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck, 2006)

Eva Sjödin Det inre av Kina, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida as Inner China (Brooklyn: Litmus Press, 2005)

Made up of 99 paragraphs and a short section of 34 “notes,” The Will to Sickness tells the story—if you can describe this as a “story”—of a man named Kalb who wanders about an unnamed city encountering various visual and visceral sensations that, in their ability to set off a series of reactions in his brain, are ultimately painful, and lead to his recognition that he is undergoing the “symptoms” of some strange sickness. The astute reader recognizes the “symptoms” quite easily as those of a man of the edge of despair, a man whose connection with others is limited primarily to unsatisfactory meetings with prostitutes, waitresses, barkeeps and others he accidentally encounters on the streets, in restaurants and offices.

     The financially and emotionally impoverished Kalb spends most of his time alone in his room or simply wandering, like the hero of Hamsun’s Hunger, following various individuals and, occasionally, even attempting some vague sort of communication with them—all to no avail. Kalb’s most daring interchanges include an occasion in a restaurant where he approaches a man at another table, asking for his glass; when the puzzled man nonetheless reaches for it, Kalb “boxes he ears” and is dragged to the door by the waiter.  In another restaurant a middle-aged woman nods to him, and as Kalb sits down at her table she puts hand upon his knee. Later, while drinking cognac on a sofa, the two suddenly undress each other and engage in sex.

     By this time in Roth’s surrealist-like tale, however, we recognize that what seems to be happening may in fact be a hallucination, for as the narrator has told us, “Kalb hallucinates reality.” By the end of this short fiction, what we formerly thought might be a mimetic description has slipped into utter fantasy:

 

            Through the telescope of his isolation he examined the image of the street.

            Today’s dream came in green and red. The elderly lady hauled a jug of milk

            along the sidewalk, overtook and tread upon her own shadow, which ac-

            companied her anew immediately thereafter, on the other side of her body.

            THE MOST TEDIOUS DETAILS ARE THE MOST LIKE DREAMS.

            Two flies buzzed about angrily. He engaged them in psychic congress….

 

Combined with Roth’s medical-like examination of Kalb’s surroundings and the author’s inclusion in the text of various scientific terms, The Will to Sickness presents, in fact, a dream-like reality that may suggest a complex subtext, but also self-mockingly recognizes itself to be the delusions of a fláneur, an aimless intellectual trifler.

     Accordingly, any great significance we seek in these 99 paragraphs, given its completely fragmentary structure, are of our own making. But that is exactly why this fiction is so compelling. For we cannot help ourselves: it is almost impossible not to attempt to connect the pieces with which one is presented and discern a significance in their whole. Of course, that is exactly what we do in every day of our living experiences; we make meaning often where there is none. Is that a sickness? Yes, the symptoms are clear; as with Kalb “the physiognomy of objects [touch] us” just as the safe societally-condoned distances at which we remove ourselves from others equally draws us toward them, for it is only through our connection with the world and one another than we can comprehend who, what and where we are.  Man not only desires meaning, he demands it, must have it in order to survive. It is a grand sickness, and living life is to accept that one is willingly infected with the disease.

      

Swedish author Eva Sjödin’s Inner China may at first appear to be a short narrative poem. The publishers, however, describe it as a “tale,” and I am inclined, despite the work’s obvious poetic aspirations, to agree with them. Like Austrian-born Roth’s The Will to Sickness, Sjödin’s work is a fragmentary fiction. The two works are similar in other ways as well. As in Roth’s work, Inner China is a story of sickness, different kinds of sickness. The central narrator is a young girl whose sister Edith is obviously retarded. The mother, evidently, is a alcoholic (or suffering some other drug or drugs) who spends most of her life in bed, coming only to life when she can bed a passing lover. Forced to be the caretaker of her sister, the young narrator creates a world outside of the home—in the forest, fields, deer and other habitats around their troubled house—a world apart from the emptiness within her supposed domicile. Creating a fantastical world of lost children amid dangers of kidnap and death, the young girl “plays” the game of Tehseng and Laiseng, two imaginary Chinese children subject to various rules and regulations of her creative imagination.

     Like Kalb, these two explore a world of visual and physical sensuality as among the rocks and fir trees they eat dirt, dog biscuits, worms and other debris. Although the two are never sexually accosted, they are approached by a man and sense sexual danger everywhere in the rural world they inhabit. Neighboring children mock Edith, and in one instance, as they attend a village festival, an old woman appears to attempt to lure Edith away, but just in time her protector-sister steers her in another direction, warning her never to trust anyone in the town.

      Ultimately, welfare workers, recognizing that the often sick child is not being properly cared for, take her from the home. Almost at the same moment, the young girl’s dog grows ill, and she if forced to carry it to the village veterinarian, who recognizing it is beyond saving, mercifully kills it. The girl takes the body home, forcing her unwilling mother out of bed to watch her bury it.

     The fiction ends with the young girl caring for her own now child-like mother almost as she has previously had to care for Edith, forcing a bit of porridge into her Mother’s mouth while the older woman whimpers: “I-do-not-want-to-I-do-not-want-to.” She too has become another being who the young girl must take into her the unknown terrain of “inner china.”

     I should qualify my statements above, however, by saying that this summary represents my reading. Others will take these same poetically fragmentary paragraphs and weave the tale together in another pattern, willing these evocative germs of meaning into another kind of “sickness unto death.”

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2009).

 

 

Hugo Claus | Greetings / 2005

sparse song, dark thread

by Douglas Messerli

Hugo Claus Greetings, translated from the Dutch by John Irons (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2005)

 

Soon after having finished the review of Desire above and having put the Project for Innovative Poetry anthology of the Dutch Fifiters—of whom Claus was a member—to press, I discovered that Harcourt had just published a new collection of Claus poems, which I immediately ordered through Amazon. Upon its receipt, however, I wondered perhaps if I’d ordered the wrong book. It seemed amazing to me that this poet, whose work—as the fiction above suggests—often portrayed an almost brutal depiction of sex and the human beast, might have a book titled, Greetings, as if the bitter ironist I knew had suddenly joined the card writers of Hallmark. If there was one thing that Claus never seemed to do was to merrily “greet” his readers. The strange photograph on the cover, depicting, I presume, I underside of a bridge (in Flanders?) continued my confusion. Was Claus’s dark vision being presented as a “soaring bridge” between beings. The poem which with the volume began—inexplicably reprinted on the book’s back cover—was, moreover, one of the worst poems by Claus I had ever read. Its end rhymed lines, “crow/glow,” “ways/ablaze,” etc and its conventional subject matter—the days become shorter, “slighter than a butterfly,” all because of love—seemed almost unrecognizable of what I knew of the Claus canon. 

     Who was this translator, John Irons (the internet suggested he was a British translator living in Odense, and, if it is the same gentleman, a rather tepid poet—

                                  

                              pa was six days gone

                              in a coffin of pale wood

                              clad in a white shroud

                              with pale blue ribbons

 

begins one of his “Pa” poems titled “Farewell”)—and what was the standard for the poems which he had chosen? The book contained neither introduction nor introductory note, no substantial statement about Claus (a short 6-line bio and photograph appear on a jacket leaf) and, even more oddly, no copyright line, which would at least tell us from which of his books the poems had been collected. It was if the book had simply willed itself into English.*

      Although I would have chosen another selection of Claus’s poems—particularly when it comes to the rhymed sonnet-sequence of 12 pages near the end of the book (the alternating and sequential rhymes—“design/Einstein,” “detect/neck,” “damp/camps,” etc nearly drown out any message that the poet might have wanted to convey)—there are, nonetheless, important poems in this volume representing some of Claus’s best writing.

     As I have indicated—and the vast majority of these poems support my argument—Claus’s Flanders is a dark world, a place of “Sparse song dark thread / Land like a sheet / That sinks…,” a world in which “A glass man falls out of a pub and breaks.” If the recurring themes of his poetry seem predictable and almost maudlin—the difficulty of growing older (what I described above as the “rickety-boned” subject matter of Desire, and his life-long love of his wife and man’s desires in general)—Claus’s presentation of these subjects is quite the opposite of sentimentality: the wife and husband as represented in his elegiac poem “Still Now,” for example, battle out their life and love, he “scratching and clawing for her undersized no-man’s-land,” she a “giggling executioner,” beheading him in her “cool glistening wound.” The poem ends with an image of their continuing struggles:

 

                         Still now riveted in her fetters and with the bloody nose

                         of lovers I say, filled with her blossoming spring:

                         “Death, torture the earth no longer, do not wait, dear death,

                         for me to come, but do as she does and strike now!”

 

     Again in the poem “His Prayers,” Claus presents the act of loving—something he often portrays in crude and occasionally scatological terms—as a kind of beautiful punishment:

 

                         I dreamed I pulled off my eyelashes

                         and gave them to you, merciful one,

                         and you blew on them as on a dandelion,

                         oh, hold back your punishing hand!

                         ……

                                       —I submit

                                       to your pleasure

 

     There is a sense of submission, in fact, in nearly all of Claus’s poems. The world of his Flanders is, in its stench of human misery and flesh, highly unjust: “Do not talk about the natural hygiene of the universe / which justifies death (from “His Notes for ‘Genesis 1.1’”). In one of his most parable-like poems, “Elephant,” Claus spells out this perpetual cycle of love and destruction which ends nearly always in his work in submission and death: meeting an elephant, the narrator and the beast become “good friends,” until one day he catches the animal “giving me a look. / an ice-cold look, a plaice’s look.”

 

                            Then I put on my wishing cloak

                            I donned my wig of cunt-hair

                            and topped it with my dreaming cap

                            with circle, stars, and stripes,

                            and then I recited my formula of murder

                            from the Catalogue of Changeable Signs

                            The elephant was an instant corpse.

                            Without a sigh he fell on his rump

                            and rumbled, crumbled, tumbled into ash,

 

     But if the world is unjust, its inhabitants are heroes for simply living. The image of the one-legged dance (reminding me of the tradition of Flemish painting) appears again and again in Claus’s poetry. It is the dance itself, as painful and impossible as it is, that redeems the brutal world he evokes. In the poem “Simple” he weaves several of his dominant themes—love, submission, fear, death—together

 

                            the two of us dance on just one leg.

                            When I kneel at your knees

                            and I bring you to your knees

                            we are fragments full of pity and danger

                            for each other.

                            With chains around their necks

                            the dogs of love come.

 

That is not what I might describe as a world of “greetings,” but there is no question that Claus’s vision is of a humane redemption of the sorrow and suffering we all must face.

 

*I have since discovered on the translator’s website that the poems include the works of Claus’s ik schrijf je neer with the exception of two poems. Irons is indeed the author of the “Pa Poems.” I believe readers would have been better served to know this information and the fact that John Irons has translated a great many other Dutch, Danish, and Swedish, and Norwegian poets as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 2 (March-April 2006)

Reprinted from Jacket, No. 31 (2006)

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008), on-line