Le scaphandre et le papillon

Review of Le scaphandre et le papillon. (“The Diving Bell [sic] and the Butterfly.”) Theme of the movie: we are imprisoned in the murky depths of a hostile element in our flesh-encased diving suits (i.e. our bodies).  French scaphandre: old-fashioned salvage-diver's suit with copper helmet, air hose (lifeline to the true world of imagination and memory) thick rubber skin and leaden shoes. Not a "diving bell." Cocooned in the present within these clumsy “diving suits” (bodies) catastrophic illness—a massive stroke for example—forces a rare few of us to find our butterfly "wings," our past and future. That is, to emerge from the chrysalis of the present into the past and future and transcend death through imagination and memory. This is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, managing editor of Elle magazine, and this movie is his story. Julien Schnabel's cinematic realization is uncluttered, from the painful recreation of Bauby's post-traumatic awakening in a hospital in Berck, Calais, in 1998 to the closing credits, which feature planetary ballet on an epic scale: triumphantly upward-leaping glacial ice filmed in reverse motion to the singing of Joe Strummer and Tom Waits.

2008

On Hearing a Musette in a Rameau Opera

Prancing ponies! High-kicking cancan girls! The skip, step and cha-cha of things! The choreography of time. Space furnished like a wardrobe with cumulus clouds, frilly knee-high petticoats and marching boots. Making a fool of distance, which collapses like an accordion dresser screen painted with Chinese landscapes! O landscape of time in a Rameau opera! From whence did you import your measures? And the stamping, sliding, tumbling objects of the earth, silly creatures of the forest, sky and workshop waiting in a long line at the backstage entrance for an audition—how much did you pay those clubfoot jesters, those upstart hooligan extras to portray time intervals in your opera? And the marble nude in the shrubbery showing her derriere: even she seems like a distillation of quotidian time in a moonlit operatic garden. The seldom-revealed, still backside of time. Her stone buttocks make your optical glands throb with the imminence of motion. Frozen in time, commanded into stillness by a poised orchestra conductor’s baton.

The garden of movement. When did movement coarsen, become false? When did it lose its luster and become dingy? Behold motion, new-washed by music. Plunge your body into freshly-laundered space like an arm through the sleeve of a crisp white Sunday linen shirt. I am here. Presto! Now I’m there. It’s as easy as music. Or dancing. The thing in motion is matter daydreaming. Mind made flesh. Wanting without remorse, hungrily, as a petal lunges to the earth, gracefully falling through space as a dancer hurls herself through time from one sequence of movements to another, always falling to a new height which overlooks all the previous history of the dance.

O sound of musettes in a Rameau opera! Sounds I never heard before until now! (Or maybe I heard you in a former life—eighteenth century France, par example, since even my present life feels decidedly ancien régime.) Why has it taken me so long to hear you again, unknown familiar sound? Whose voice are you? To which of these moving things, these gallant moving things stampeding like circus animals through the sky, along the sidewalk, down our department store aisles and tumbling off our desks and out of our kitchen pantries and from the top shelves of our closets, do you belong? Must that thing not stop in its tracks and channel all its energy through its nose in order to make that sound, the sound of a musette? It seems to twist all the diffuse strands of life into a metaphysical circus act. It bristles with obscene chalumeaux. “Some men, when the bagpipe sings in the nose, cannot contain their urine” said the slandered Venetian. It waddles, the vulgar French musette, like a bawdy-looking brown leather duck into the blazing center ring and draws a reedy, whining acrobatic high-wire out of its nose along which an absurd assembly of goofy cartoon characters slide in pompous, stately procession, with heart-breaking precision, solemnity and nonchalance. Like Philippe Petit between the World Trade towers—which no longer exist (like Rameau). Suspended in time like a conductor’s baton,

6/12/2015

Trees

Are trees bodies? Or merely nerve synapses, sky sutures, marshy river deltas with no defined geographical boundaries where night flows into day? Portals between dimensions? In the roots of the elm, earth plants her feet, reaches upward to the sky. In its leaves, the sky palpates with tender fingers the mortal flesh of the beloved, showers the earth with gifts of light and rain. There are no “trees,” only the wedding feast of the marriage of heaven and earth.

Lords and ladies in attendance. Vertumnus and Pomona. Vertumnus has sturdy limbs, split, crackled seams under his knees and smooth, silver, livid-blotchy bark with assorted lesions, knots, burls, cankers, butt swell and minor girdling at the soil line caused by root weevils. Pomona is graceful-limbed, purple-shaded, polished  bronze, with tarnished bosses, light verdigris and a speckled bole. Ruddy-skinned pamplemousses glow like orbed lanterns in the glade. Amid the darkness at the center of the fruittree, the lemon glow of unblinking gapefruit (grapefruit). Wedding in the orchard. Lords and ladies in attendance. Pre-school flower girls in festive leaf, dressed in orange blossom cambric. Tall willowy bridesmaids in peachskin satin sway over the assembled throng, the verdant multitude of earthly foliage.

To Carla Coneely

                             "These are but wild and whirling words, my lord"—Hamlet.

                             My words, they whirl. Now let the whirlwind thresh
                             The kernel from the chaff! I stand the test,
                             I find the center of the storm. My best
                             Monstrous congested nimbus, towering, fresh,
                             Inseminates the cloud-folds of your flesh.
                             A cushion-push, the tremor of a breast,
                             The flutter of a plaice or pilchard pressed
                             Within an ocean trawler’s nylon mesh—
                             Caught in the meshes of my twisted nets,
                             Alive and bound by finger bonds it frets
                             And flounders in the strict embrace of love.
                             Consider yourself warmed! And glisten up:
                             These words that clink like tiddles in a cup
                             Are space debris and lethal miles above.

                             1/16/2015

Around the Curve of the White-Cheeked Moon

The curvature of bodies.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice—and injustice.

The curvature of the earth is imperceptible, but it bends toward sunrise—and sunset.

The curvature of bodies is slippery, elusive, but it bends toward truth—and enigma. Like a cloak. Like a child.

Bodies are cloaked in their own alluring, inviting, beckoning plenitude and curvature. They retreat over the horizon of themselves—the plumpness of a calf, the apple of a cheek—and draw the eye with them into darkness and doom. Into their lady-recesses. Their secrecy. Pretty scary, yes. Pretty scenery though.

The curvature of time. The pregnancy of space. Moon-swallowing. Mind-shattering.
                                             
                                   Around the curve of the white-cheeked moon
                                   The night’s face gouged with her scalloped spoon
                                   She  licks and sips with trembling lips,
                                   Cements and seals her own eclipse.
.
                                   What lies concealed around the curve
                                   Of the white-cheeked moon will shatter nerve
                                   And end the life of mortal man
                                   Emerged from darkness, drowned again.

                                   Around the curve of the white-cheeked moon
                                   Notched by the teeth of her scalloped spoon
                                   Darkness she sips with trembling lips,
                                   Cements and seals her own eclipse.

                                   What lies concealed around the curve
                                   Of the white-cheeked moon will quite unnerve
                                   And spoil the plans of modern man
                                   To supersede his mortal span.

Sooth, a silly song. In my opinion your opinion that this is a silly song is a silly opinion. Cary Grant. Marilyn Monroe. Monkey Business. Hello? Griffith Park Zoo. Snake department.

First light was last light was alright when the circle married the line (from another silly song).        

12/28/2014                                                                

The Waist of Time

                                                      Spendthrift as the day is long,
                                                      I spend my time to write this song.
                                                      I lick each line with longing tongue
                                                      Like a man whose knell is rung,                                      
                                                      Exhausted, wasted, gone to seed—
                                                      Sweet, you fill my deepest need
                                                      To watch you grow, aspire, advance
                                                      Strutting in your underpants.                                          
                                                      Tasty as a drop of dew,                                                  
                                                      You eat me and I eat you.
                                                       Little song, run to your mother
                                                      While we join to make another.
                                                      She is sweet as you are sweet.
                                                      We suckle both at Fancy’s teat.
                                                      What a joyful waste of time
                                                      To embrace the waist of Time.

                                                      12/3/2014

Hunter Gatherer

Hunter coeds. How many jeweled navels shimmer and undulate under flannel and denim, clean crisp college linen and fuzzy sweaters? And what goes on in their heads? Quelques choses étranges, insondables, repoussantes, délicieuses. Five-borough houris from Pakistan, North Africa and the Middle East, some with pelvic tattoos and jewelry no doubt she has designs on me I will lick your tattoos with my eyes become fluent in the colubrine contortions of your abdomen.

                               As though in Cupid’s college she had spent
                               Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent.

Ungeschändet. Unspoiled. Still virtuous. Unhandled. Wrapper intact. With the bloom still on. Plummy. Keep your grimy mitts off my unblemished epithets. A girl with loose accommodations.

Human flesh liable to spoilage. Unspoiled youth. Refrigerate to prevent spoilage. Morgue locker. Age. Liver spots. Discoloration. Like darkened banana peel.

The air was full of seditions, discords, Islamic fervor. Boiling out of my blood.

Patterned animal. Tattooed floozy. Pale smoke. Smooth skin. Curved white instep. Sandals.

Saracen moon. Her voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear. He rose like a throbbing star at those voluptuous accents, ethereal, flushed. Divine high piping Pahlavi. He melted into her dream, solution sweet, as the rose blendeth its odor with the violet.  Mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose. Thank you, Keats. As she dozes before her iPad, hard drive crammed with medical knowledge, criminal justice, political science, Eastern languages, medieval romances, radical declarations, terrorist chicanery, recipes for explosives. Robust youth. Fair maid. Planted at the Hunter College Classics table, kenning Ovid with serious mien.

Splinters From Exile. Name for a volume of poetry. Vituperation, sparks and splinters, flashing bile: splendida bilis. Splinter XXLVII, dated July 6 etc. etc.: “I carved this splinter out of my flesh while sucking down coffee in the College lounge” etc. A grey old man in a caravansary. Accredited seraglio for those seeking advanced disgrace. Institution of higher leering.

A veritable produce aisle full of plump, perky comestibles, untouched by human hands, blooming around the room in air-conditioned contentment, in the apple orchards of knowledge, releasing their odor to the air vents. Refrigeration to retard spoilage. Scented soaps to retard "soilage." And here and there a few well-preserved (or just plain retarded) old parties, as transparent as soap bubbles, trying to look invisible as they punch the return key on their laptops, staring grimly into cyberspace.

Splinter cells, revolutionary cadres, political assassination.

A brilliant poet and scholar ("What Heidegger wrote on Nietzsche makes everything attempted since—extended efforts at least—without exception, seem like fluff and blatherskite. The field of Nietzsche scholarship/discipleship is strewn with dandelion clocks like Homer’s Contest") a wise and thoughtful teacher, and a man of deep and abiding kindness and quiet modesty, said the author in his fake obituary.

Hunter College. Young women stretching like panthers all over the place.

Orangutans and kudus. The Hunter College zoo.

Things I cleave to. Caterpillar eyebrows. All fur and ripple and electric rustle. The haze, dust and bloom on things. Young women.

Cold indifference. Face painting. Age. These things do me despite. They make ruin of my charms (carmina, little songs). Disappointment all I endeavor ends.

Lost in reflection, I plunge headlong into smooth tabletop, Lake Formica. The floor disappears, the ceiling opens above my head. I am spilled, poured out like water, surrendered to the earth. I flow into intricacies. Mighty in girth, a tall milk-white cloud towers like an ivory and silver god behind the Seagram’s building. I feel the sky printed on my skin, I cleave to it (surface adhesion). I am tattooed with clouds, moutonné.

Go, little songs (carmina). Let me not rub the bloom off you.

7/6/2014