Orphic Paris

by Henri Cole

  Once, at Lincoln Center, I sat behind a former principal dancer who long ago was the foremost interpreter of the role of Apollo. Now he is an old man, and it was moving to see the young Apollo onstage discreetly acknowledge him in the front row during the curtain calls. In the ballet, there are two solos. In the first, Apollo is childish and playful, but starting to carry himself in a strong way; in the second, he is no longer so light and airy. There is a moment, after he has been shown knowledge from each of his half sisters, when he becomes an adult. Throughout the ballet, there is a rawness of movement that expresses emotion, yet everything seems to be anchored in a classical ballet vocabulary.

  Sometimes I wonder if a dancer’s emotions are as important as calculated movements, because even when the choreography is abstract I sense a story—two figures seek each other out; a man searches for his ideal partner; when he finds her, they dance together, but then he loses her. “Don’t think, dear, do,” Balanchine said to his dancers, borrowing from Paul Valéry’s poem “Sketch of a Serpent,” in which he writes, “Dance, dear body, don’t think!” In Apollo, I see imitative scenes from life, in part because the music makes me aware of time expressing form, though each time I see the ballet I come away with a different plot, which is the one the dancers inspire in one another, combining the classical past with the nervous anxiety of the present. “Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful,” Balanchine said. “A flower doesn’t tell you a story.” But even in the most abstract speech, there is something communicated, and this is true for poetry and for ballet, too. Still, a ballet is under no obligation to reveal transparent narrative or meaning—two figures dancing together is enough, metamorphosing the rigid movements of imperial dance into something more supple and pliant. “I don’t create, I just assemble,” Balanchine said, and this is exactly how I feel while I am assembling language into poetry. There isn’t inspiration, there’s just work.

  In Apollo, there’s also Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical score—playful and solemn—for string instruments, an audacious orchestration with an abrasive rhythmic structure. Referring to the music, Balanchine wrote, “It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate.” There are thirty-nine Balanchine ballets set to music by Stravinsky, whom Balanchine revered as a genius. Recalling their first meeting, in 1925, Balanchine said, “Stravinsky was the greatest comfort I ever had.” He really enjoyed cooking for Stravinsky and said that he could always “cook him out of a bad mood.”

  There are so many things I love in the great modernist Apollo: the narration stripped down to tone and feeling (as in a fine lyric poem); the pristine white (ballet blanc), lyrically spare costumes (Apollo’s toga with a diagonal cut) and staging (Balanchine doesn’t have sets, he has non-sets); the bent, turned-in, weighted-to-the-floor modern movements. When I last saw the New York City Ballet perform the piece, its beauty still seemed radical to me. Watching the child-man becoming a god, I felt as if Keats’s sun god were greeting me.

  WANDERING THROUGH the Louvre today, I came upon the Archaic torso of Apollo that could have been the subject of Rilke’s intense sonnet written in German, which was published in 1908. The great spectacle of Paris, with all its harsh modernity, had begun to work a change on Rilke, and he was trying to bring a new vocabulary to his poems, writing not about his own abstract ideas and moods but instead about concrete things apart from himself that had to be seen and understood—a panther in a cage, blue hydrangeas, a broken sculpture of a torso. Rilke’s apprenticeship with the sculptor Rodin (in whose studio he worked) most certainly influenced him, too.

  Rilke is one of the most popular foreign-language poets in the English-speaking world, even more highly esteemed in the States than in Germany. His most recent translators render his poems into English in an unrhymed, loose, vernacular style that sounds very much like the contemporary American poetry sponsored by William Carlos Williams. Though it’s not possible to judge poetry translated from a foreign language, I am able to describe the impression a new translation has on me. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” we have the message imparted by the sensuous, broken torso of Apollo and the poet’s apprehension of it.

  It is an ekphrastic poem (a poem about a visual work of art), in which the poet describes an ancient fragment of a statue, whose arms, legs, head, and genitals are missing, leaving the poet to imagine how the statue might have looked and why it seems more real in its damaged state—so real, in fact, that the marble torso is transformed by art into something nearly spiritual that addresses the reader in the final line, proclaiming, “You must change your life.”

  The poem begins with a statement of fact: that the observer cannot know what the missing head of the Greek statue looked like. Here are three translated versions of the first sentence:

  “We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit.” (Stephen Mitchell)

  “Never will we know his fabulous head / where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened.” (C. F. MacIntyre)

  “We never knew his stupendous head / in which the eye-apples ripened.” (Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann)

  The remainder of the sonnet contemplates the statue’s torso, and various translations differ even more as the poem proceeds.

  “But / His torso still glows like a candelabrum / In which his gaze only turned low, / Holds and gleams.” (M. D. Herter Norton)

  “And yet his torso / is still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, / gleams in all its power.” (Stephen Mitchell)

  “—yet something here keeps you in view, / as if his look had sunk inside / and still blazed on.” (Don Paterson)

  Is the torso a candelabrum, a lamp, or neither? Does the torso gleam or blaze? Is the light turned low or sunk inside? Was the absent head legendary, fabulous, or stupendous? Were the eyes ripening fruit or eye-apples? Should the tense be present, past, or future? I think it is impossible to attempt a close reading of a poem in a language one doesn’t know. But what is plain is that the defaced sculpture has agency. And the poem is about the effect the imperfect classical statue has on the beholder, who must change his or her life as a result of a direct human response to it.

  IN PARIS, there are endless encounters with the principles associated with Apollonian beauty—order, rationality, harmony, restraint—reminding us of the remarkable civilization of Greece, rather than something darker, lacking discipline, unbridled, violent. Does this make Paris more human, more truthful, more fragile, more tragic? Surely, these two forces—the Apollonian and the Dionysian—must be reconciled for us to be content in our lives.

  Today I pondered this when I happened upon a two-room gallery of prints by Renaissance and baroque masters. Many of the images were exquisite, anatomical sketches of the male body, which perhaps explains the gallery’s location at a medical school. Roaming through the long corridors of the college afterward, I found a little museum of anatomy, a vast, dusty hall lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying fragments of the human skeleton. After the serene old masters, it was a sobering, grotesque spectacle. Here, instead, was a godless, unsentimental coroner’s laboratory. In one corner was shelf after shelf of jars containing fetuses floating in sickly-sweet-smelling formaldehyde. The human skin was bleached white, and the open eyes shone a perfect sapphire blue. Afterward, out on the street, I felt chastened, and Paris seemed to tilt beneath me, the bright sun penetrating my dark glasses.

  Part XV

  LAST NIGHT, after another attack in Paris, I dreamed the dream called France. Mother was in the post office exchanging money, and signed all her traveler’s checks in the wrong place. What pretty handwriting, I thought, as she exclaimed, “Sainte Vierge!,” using an expression I had not heard since childhood. The postal clerk looked over her glasses and replied glibly, “Madam, in this matter the Blessed Virgin cannot assist you.”

  Then Mother and I were discussing Uncle Marius’s name, whic
h came from Gaius Marius, born in 157 BC, the son of a laborer who was elected Roman consul five times. He was the first citizen to break into the exclusive governing class of aristocracy. His wife was Julia, sister of Julius Caesar. He was beloved for having delivered Provence from the barbarians in a great battle at Aquae Sextiae, modern-day Aix-en-Provence. He was a brave soldier and skilled with his troops. The carnage from this battle was so great that, when heavy rain fell the following winter, the earth soaked up the putrefying bodies and bore a prodigious crop. When I was a young man visiting Uncle Marius, we would sit at his dining-room table drinking milky white pastis. He raised pale blue and yellow canaries and would let them out of their cages to fly around our heads. He was unemployed and fixed radios, which he sold at the marché every weekend. I loved him.

  Then Mother and I were at the Paris Opera House, craning our necks to admire the ceiling mural painted by Marc Chagall. “This noble France, this poet of the Nations,” Mother said, looking up, quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Nothing one has seen before prepares one for Chagall’s unmistakable rainbow of colors (“Color, not technique, conveys a painter’s character and message,” he insisted). I don’t remember what I saw in that ceiling of unidentifiable figures and creatures—roosters, goats, fish, donkeys—sometimes with human bodies, but they seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Sometimes chased by flowers. Sometimes like angels hovering, with sweeping white flame-like wings. Is it possible that Chagall was not really a surrealist but a supernaturalist?

  Then Mother and I were at a restaurant overlooking the dark violet Seine. There were barges knocking against each other in the current. Overhead, the gnarled limbs of plane trees cast shadows on us. It was Mother’s birthday, so we ordered kir royals, which I splashed a little on the immaculate white table linens. In honor of Marseille, Mother’s birthplace, I ordered bouillabaisse, which arrived in two dishes, a bowl of murky bouillon and a side plate heaped with filleted scorpion fish, dories, monkfish, eel, capon, and spider crabs. I smeared a garlic paste on little toasts and plopped them in the bouillon with chunks of the fish, whose skeletons lay on a white platter and seemed to lift their heads to admire the purple night, as we did.

  “The French are great optimists: they seize upon every good that flies, and revel in passing pleasures,” Washington Irving wrote, and this is how it seemed in my dream, where life was gentler than back home. Mother and I meandered along the river, which shimmered beside us and splashed against its banks. The moon shimmered, too, like a big gold coin, and for a moment the grinding of gears on the motorway and the bustling city above seemed to halt. As we watched the light mirrored in the river, the city seemed to be as old as time itself.

  “Every man has two mother countries: his own, and then France.” I think Benjamin Franklin said this, and this was the feeling of my dream, in which sweet, sweet cherries were being delivered at the market, along with the delicious Cavaillon melons, which are smaller but tastier, like a poem compared to a novel. Suddenly it was time to say goodbye, and Mother was carrying the worn suitcase her own mother brought from the old country, Asia Minor, in which there was a dress made of rough fabric, almost as rough as burlap, with five gold buttons sewn into the hem to help with the new life she would make in Marseille.

  But I do not want to say goodbye. Come back, I cry, though I know she cannot. “Remember to put more commas and semicolons in your life,” Mother says. And I tell her I will. “Remember to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance,” she says, and I promise to strive to do this. Then she disappears, like smoke from a train, or oblong rain clouds. Some dogs joined me in my walk along the Seine. I could see from the markings on their coats and in how they held their tails and moved their ears that they were all related to one another, as we are. Sniffing one another, gamboling, and licking each other’s coats, they seemed to be teaching me something.

  Part XVI

  “WHAT DO YOU WRITE ABOUT?” the coiffeur asked. I was sitting in his shop near the rue Cler, with a bright sheet tied around my neck. It was the end of a long rainy day, at the end of a week of rainy days. There were rivers in the gutters. When I was a boy, I sat on a kitchen stool out on the back porch, with a towel around my neck, as my father gave me a military crew cut. I had thick, curly brown hair then and squeezed my eyes shut at the sound of the clippers, but now, in middle age, I looked in the mirror with wide-open eyes at my changing face. I was embarrassed to tell him I wrote about evil, suffering, death, and, occasionally, paradise. “And how do you write?” the haircutter asked, tapping his black comb against polished scissors to get the loose hairs out.

  Each day, I wake up and look at the small clock next to the dusty lamp with a lightbulb burn on the shade, and at the books and magazines scattered on the floor from my reading the night before. I want to go to the toilet, but I stay under my covers a little longer. Without sleep, it is impossible for me to concentrate. I sit down with paper and pencil, but there are no little explosions that result in some lines of poetry.

  How do I write? Standing barefoot in the kitchen, I stare at the espresso pot. Did I forget to buy demi-écrémé milk? Isn’t today Jean de La Fontaine’s birthday? He is the French Aesop. His poems have body and soul, by which I mean a narrative and a little moral. They were written for adults, though mostly children read them now. They have a stoicism, tenderness, and dignity.

  How do I write? I walk along the Seine, where I sit on a concrete bench and watch the gulls ride up and down on the wind. The river is gunmetal gray, with little whitecaps, and very moody. Walking helps me to clear out the cobwebs of the night. Suddenly, a gull catches a fish that is too big to swallow, and he or she must spit it out. This is a metaphor for writing poetry, I think. I want my poems to seem rebellious but also to be the servant of order. I want them to be definite, self-sufficient, and true in what they represent, like expressionist paintings.

  Look, a woman is leaning from a window above the quai. She waves a dust rag at a young man on the street and tosses a coin for him to buy her a baguette. Nearby, handsome horse-chestnut trees are blooming. I feel like a human plant striving for sustenance. With a nice fountain pen, purchased on the rue Saint-Dominique, I write something down and cross it out and then write it again, changing only one word. Then a cell phone rings in the distance. Perhaps caffeine will help me to concentrate, I say to myself. And on and on this goes, with life intervening upon creation. Not rough but gentle. Soon it is late afternoon, and I am walking beside the river again. Is it possible that all of life is like a river? We must either yield to it or struggle against the current. At home, I watch the news, with the intense faces of migrants floating across the screen. Then the telephone rings, but instead of answering it I sit down on the floor and write out a sentence, and another, which come to me out of nowhere, like small boats appearing in the valley of the Seine.

  MY GRANDMOTHER VARTERE (which translates as “roses”) Bedrossian’s first husband, Sarkis Sarkisian, was killed by the Turks six months after the birth of their only child. A short time later, she married Sarkis Derderian and bore him two sons and four daughters. Little more is known, except that there is said to be a priest in the family, for “priest” is the translation of the family name.

  These are facts, but what is to be made of them, if anything? I try to understand why they matter and if they can be relevant as I write this now. I await some strange enchantment to make them interesting. I put on my dark glasses to impose some new way of seeing, but they are just the same facts. Eventually, I shall make use of them, though perhaps without even knowing it. Or I will write about other facts, lost forever in my representation of them. The power is not in them but in the language, innocent and bold at once. My voice will say whatever it must, hurting, fearing, doubting, moaning, grasping for verbal connections that might possibly, miraculously explode into meaning. I think this is a kind of love, or self-love, and the resulting progeny is original language. A distant voice, and the ravish
ment from it (let us call it the hallucinatory power of language), can occasionally become even greater than the real, true, indiscreet version of love, the one between men and women. Here in Paris, there is a special mothering comfort, delight, and fulfillment for me, as if the real mother, with her mother tongue and mother heart, were coaxing me forward. There is no heaviness or melancholy. Instead, I find forgetfulness, like a fisherman accepting what comes to him from the sea. I am no longer an armored animal as I stroll along the bookstalls and cafés with wicker tables and polite policemen with their long guns.

  I HAVE READ how the gardens and lily ponds at Giverny are not the landscape we enter in Claude Monet’s radical paintings. In the same manner, the bathroom in Pierre Bonnard’s home is unrecognizable from the shimmering, mosaic-like canvases that depict his wife bathing. The same is true for poetry, where the poet is like a steeple with a carillon of bells. There is only the sound of language making stanzas into feeling. When the imagination is role-playing as God, one is caught between the yawning ordinariness of being and another inrushing experience, of seeing, where it is as if one were being penetrated. The poet is like a peasant eating figs, nuts, almonds, and some fish from the river. When he looks out the window at the landscape, he sees spear-like cypresses, puffy swollen clouds, birds, oxen, and bleating lambs, but also high-tension wires supported by gigantic steel pylons that resemble dark stick-figure men, who complicate the idyllic landscape, as when one is hiking alone in the forest and trackless crags complicate a safe journey home.