Resonances

The past few weeks have been marked by resonances. Voices from poetry, history or theatre have figured so strongly that they are escaping from my mind, ready to leap onto the written page. I guess I’ll just have to let them loose. Ready or not, here they come…

I

Lines and verses from Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob’s latest album have been twirling their colours through life, enriching whatever frame I’m moving through with their imagery. Whether Calliope treads forth or I’m standing by those cypress trees of long ago, I return to the present moment with a sharper gaze.

I happened to be driving one evening through that magical time where the light here turns lilac or lavender; it’s translucent anyhow no matter the shade. I was slowly crawling down Venice Boulevard, worlds away from gondolas; closer to coca-cola. And yet, just for a second, I was inside that peculiarly LA magic where, no matter the detritus, desperation and decay on display, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. I snapped awake and felt a wry grin move across my face as Bob sang these lines,

Everything’s flowing, all at the same time,
I live on the boulevard of crime

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation, someone said once. The same can be said of this city and its boulevards. It takes a strong rough magic to drive through the Sepulveda underpass on Venice these days and still come out with the dreams in your eyes unshattered.

II

One morning recently we happened upon ourselves, my daughter and I, sitting with the ghost of a long dead Romantic poet, under the falling purple benediction of a blooming jacaranda. As my daughter recited her poems from memory and school took place outdoors, the poet’s voice  whispered on the breeze with those lines which catch at the human heart; speaking as they do of the impossibility of preserving any moment of time.

There were sweet dreams in the night
Of Time long past:
And was it sadness or delight,
Each day a shadow onward cast
Which made us wish it yet might last-
That time long past.
(Time Long Past, Percy Bysshe Shelley)

III

On a long and lazy weekend, I spent an afternoon with the voice of Nadezhda Mandlestam in her monumental work, Hope Abandoned. Nadezhda was the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandlestam. He died in 1938, somewhere in the maze of Soviet work camps and prisons. She writes with such fine detail and precise memory of events that you have to pay attention. All of a sudden the world falls away with the unspeakable power and truth of her insight:

‘But pessimism, even though I have called in sterile, is still better than the monstrous faith, blind and malignant, in various ‘saviours’ of mankind, from whom we are eventually saved only by the mysterious law through which evil tends to destroy itself. This accursed faith in nothingness has a deep hold on immature minds, as one can judge from the portraits hanging in certain hapless Western universities. The miserable wretches cannot wait to let themselves go: murdering a couple of thousand people would give them the feeling of strength so much coveted by the poor in spirit.’

Inevitably, her thoughts lead me down another dark pathway of horror into Theresienstadt and the preparatory terrors that were suffered there by countless innocents. Suddenly I’m watching a movie I’ve seen before sometime by Alfred Radok, A Distant Journey. A family are struggling along that road to a train which is heading to hell; a realm which is more than capable of manifesting in this guile soaked world of ours. Perhaps it never left, just changed faces and location.

IV

We sat one evening together and rewatched Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. It was filmed partially in Mexico City, a place dear to my heart, I recently discovered. So faithful to the text and spirit of the play whilst yet bringing a fresh energy to it; exactly as I like to think Shakespeare himself would have done. There’s nothing mummified about this production but nor is there novelty for no one’s sake but her own. There’s another Shakespeare film like this, raw and full of promise, it’s the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawk and Julia Stiles; came out in 2000. I remember when I was young and watching it. Anything seemed possible.

I’m blown back into the present and I’m lost amidst the swimming fishes who provide the foil for the young lovers’ first meeting. So silvery blue their meeting, so young, fresh and dewy eyed. I smile and watch my daughter, equally lost in the magic.

V

A few evenings later we caught the Monte Carlo Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet on a silent and stripped away stage. All the players issue forth, reimagined as elements of Friar Laurence’ waking nightmare as he walks in the horror of the young lovers’ recent death. Brilliantly done, with an economy of movement at times explosive, at times so quiet you barely felt it; and yet it was there.

VI

I’m sitting in the jasmine scented evening air; the dog sniffs and barks hungrily. My daughter calls to me. Cuddles and a movie in the light of a warm family room will bring togetherness and hope for the future. The water in the fountain flows in time with the scene which enfolds it and I see momentarily the river of things.