Robert Kelly
a dance play:
MONOLOGUES FOR ORPHEUS
Foresong:
FOR THE PERFORMERS
Every time anyone says ‘I’ or
uses any first person singular pronoun, it is Orpheus speaking, and the actor
who is Orpheus must say those lines as far as they seem to carry the impulse of
that first-person saying…
Orpheus, who spoke it is said for
the gods, or for God, curiously disguised the source of what-is-being-said by
pretending that he himself was saying it.
This guise is the source of the
power and confusion of all poetry—it rouses without settling, illuminates
without being clear. At its best, it
brings the hearers to a resting place, a calm desert where they have never been
before. In their ears resound the
whining, boasting, wheedling, pleading, smug, delighted, innocent, corrupt
personality that calls itself “I”. But
already they know better.
So this Orpheus speaks. All round his lines are passages of text that
can be, must be, spoken by other voices. I do not think any of them are
Eurydice’s voice, though a few of them might be spoken by a woman who, in
sorrow or bitterness or rebuke, thinks for a moment of herself as Eurydice.
The rest of the voices are who
you are. The director will decide
how many voices are needed, and will
assign to each voice the passages chosen for it to speak.
It seems to me that among these
texts are voices of scholars, psychiatrists, historians of life and art, young
men of no fixed persuasion, experienced urgent women, each saying what comes to
mind. I leave it to the director to find which actor best
embodies each text, both invoice and visual seeming.
And they must move or stand as
the director tells. What (I ask with
humility) I’d like is for the actors to do what their bodies want to do as
their voices speak the words.
One thing I do know is that
Eurydice herself is always present, always in motion –you decide, actor who
plays her, director who moves her, how and how fast she moves. She has no lines because traditionally and
ignorantly poetry construes the beloved as an object, out of earshot, a fantasy
of the poet’s wishing. This silent
figure recurs in all love poetry, even, it seems to me, in poetry written by
women. The ferne Geliebte, and she must be far off to be so vocally, wordily,
yearningly, gorgeously, loved.
So here I offer a tumult of
voices, some words for actors to speak,
finding their way in space and body to what poetry has aimed at for four
thousand years—the end of saying.
PROLOGUE IN THE THEATER
ORPHEUS was the poet, the
emblem of his art, not the first but for the Greeks the greatest. By the
power of his words in music, or the music in his words, or maybe his words as
music, he was able to make trees dance, they say, and boulders skip around in meadows.
The usual myth (and what other myth is worth the name but the myth
that everybody knows?) tells us that his wife, Eurydice, was bitten by a
snake and died. Orpheus went down to the Underworld to fetch her back,
and by the power of his song charmed (song as charm, magic spell, Latin carmen
= poem), charmed the beasts and bosses of Hell enough that they let Eurydice
return to life, up here, as long as Orpheus did not look at her as she followed
him uphill. Or ever again But he looked. And lost her. The
first opera ever composed (another lost art?) was about Orpheus, and the
greatest 18th century opera Mozart never wrote, was Gluck's Orfeo—
later, in the middle of the play,
you’ll hear a tenor sing the most famous line from it. And Rilke, purest
of poets, composed his final cycle to Orpheus, song singing to song. In
the play,I've tried to understand something about the dynamic of the man
and woman in the story.
[The first public performances
were done in the workshop context of a staged reading on 24th and 25th
February 2012, at Bard College, directed by Marjorie Folkman, who also moved as
Eurydice. The speaking roles were acted
by Thomas Bartscherer (Orpheus), Florian Becker (C), Lynn Behrendt (B), Mikhail
Horowitz (A), and Paul La Farge (D). On
that occasion, The prologue continued, adding what follows:
But first, to lead us in, we are to hear the
music of music, the one that leads, teaches, any other kind. David Adam
Nagy will play an allemande by Bach, human breath strumming the lyre, impossible,
the wood of the bassoon is the tree, dancing. Then Péter Laki will sing
three Hellenistic Songs by Adrienne Elisha, songs to texts from the last centuries of that Greek world
into which Orpheus, like Apollo, had come from the north. And finally we
go to the outskirts of hell, to hear the voices Orpheus sometimes hears, and
how he sometimes answers.]
—
R.K.
A.
TELL US ABOUT the part they leave
out—
what (or who)
is the snake that bit … or was it
killed. . .
or was it carried off Eurydice?
B.
For a poet, so much comes from
insecurity,
poetry is the song of insecurity,
litigious Shakespeare—poets own
everything—
as persons they’re not entitled to
anything, baseborn every one of them,
only by dint of their calling
they feel entitled to all.
C.
For poets, all times are the same
time,
so they are poor students of
causality,
they don’t know what comes after
what
A.
they “count, but not in numbers”
they speak, but too many words, too
many words.
C.
Keep talking…
A.
But still too many.
B.
Try to feel from his writing—what is
Orpheus. Or who?
A.
He had no son—that is of the
essence
of his story—no sons, a hundred
thousand daughters
C.
Orpheus? O[r]phis.
He is himself the snake that bit her foot
B.
He is himself the snake that bit her foot
B.
Jealousy is not the truth of it—
fear and insecurity gnawed at him
he snapped at her, she died.
he snapped at her, she died.
ORPHEUS
And of me, what shall be spoken?
Am I a dead man already?
That patch of sunlight
I keep studying on the grass,
is it under me or over me.
I know certain things—memory’s
make-believe, a crow calling
me to now. If this you hear
you’re living still. A crow.
Information of all kinds
from the realms around me
I have never entered.
I
have never been born—
B.
that is the poet’s ailment,
constantly picking up this leaf,
stone, touching that hand,
yearning for his own incarnation,
and who can give it to them?
ORPHEUS
Give it to me.
The women
are leaving me now
like the gods who shuffle away from
Antony
under the streets of the city
and I have no streets anymore.
They leave me, and that’s why
I stupidly reach out—
because all I know of life is
wanting her,
and now when she, the one,
moves away from me
I lose the clue to going on.
C.
He is not fond of these confessions—
that’s not what writing is for.
A.
He is always talking
as if talk had nothing to do
with all that music
they keep calling it,
‘lyric’ of the lyre, words
spun from tones,
tones primed by words,
C.
no one knows which comes first—
A.
in the museum there’s a marble
statue of him naked
playing a violin,
and the violin has no strings,
his lips are beautiful
no sound comes out—
B.
no song? word or tone?
Or none?
A.
He looks out over the summer lawn
quiet as stone.
B.
As if talk had nothing to do with
poetry
and poetry nothing to do with going
on.
C.
And while he’s pondering and
muttering
(hearing himself think, is what we
call it)
this voice-over murmurs its
commentary,
a nest of rabbis humming over the
book.
A.
Voice-over
they say in movies,
the voice you hear and think you
see.
C.
You cannot see the voice.
B.
You cannot see the voice and live.
A.
And while he stands there and does
what he does out loud
and voices fall from everywhere
around him
B.
Eurydice also is there.
Alive and silent
if silent people can be called alive.
Silent in this place and every
place she is
because he has never learned to
hear her.
But still she moves.
We see her dancing.
We see her move like someone waking
up
someone falling asleep someone
dying
someone waking up again—
A.
but all the while she dances
he thinks she’s dead
she’s behind him, she dances behind
him,
whatever’s behind us we think is
dead.
C.
He thinks the snake bit her and she
died.
He thinks the snake killed her.
A.
Orpheus sometimes thinks he was the
snake, he killed her with neglect, put other women before her, sang their
songs, put her behind him and she died.
It is his fault.
B.
Orpheus other times thinks he was
not at all the snake, the snake was someone else, a sly adulterer who carried
her off to his sleazy realm and made her forget him, made her put him behind
her. It must have been his fault.
C.
And other times Orpheus thinks
Eurydice was the snake herself, her own wandering ways took over, so she
wandered off, slithered away, and was gone, over the hill, beyond the forest,
across the sea, dead to him, dead with distance.
A.
He must have bored her with his
endless verbiage, word play, heart songs, or not held her tight enough, or held
too tight. His fault.
C.
Orpheus thinks all these things,
and can’t decide.
He can’t make up his mind.
B.
A poet can’t make up his mind—
the poem makes up his mind for him.
A.
Some say Eurydice killed herself.
Some say Orpheus killed her.
Some say she never died.
C.
A myth is what happens to the mind
— when it stops thinking.
ORPHEUS
The orderly wrongness
of being me
chided by
birdsong
early, the skreel
of night things
ever after—
the fault is mine
A.
he is the guilty
one,
the pointer out,
explainer,
child babbling in
the back seat
the names of all
the things they pass
B.
how irritating,
maddening really
that is, the
ceaseless chatter
of a mind trying
to confirm
its own existence by naming
all the things it
sees the things it wants
C.
how irritating
the ceaseless
commentary of
poetry.
ORPHEUS
No wonder
everybody loves me
and nobody really
loves what I speak.
B.
broad Eury-
justice -dice
what shall we
make of her,
an honest
broad-faced wench
all too soon
promoted to alterity?
C.
it is so hard to
be somebody’s Other
A.
meantime in silly
urgency
he craves
Isthmia,
snake-hipped, virgin-harlot,
temple prostitute—
B.
But shouldn’t he
be the worshipper?
C.
Endless
confusions of Orpheus—
his mistakes interest
him, he
finds his
starting place
in whatever goes
wrong
A.
he makes us
listen ever after to what baffles him
happy, humming
them under our breath
B.
for it was breath
where it all
began
when it was any
good at all
A.
Some say art
smothers breath,
blinds the eyes,
stuffs the ears.
C.
If he thought it
into place
it stank like the
dead meat
of that turtle
whose shell
he lifted so
painfully off had
made the first
soundbox
for his lyre,
because meat
is what thinks
but breath is
what speaks
B.
Orpheus sneers at
the sophists: these men
(and it is mostly
men, isn’t it,
who do
philosophy, alas)
these men are
silenced by ideas
as adolescent
boys drown
all night in
visionary thinking
from which no
word can ever speak—
A.
What is vision?
seeing the unseen
ORPHEUS
This body will
not dance
they dance around
me
all around me,
all
the ones I
thought
thought I meant
but they return,
they
mean me now
and the dance
wills body—
o all these ones
are not the
one…
[VOICE OFF,
SINGS:]
che farò senza Euridice?
ORPHEUS
She was the only
one
who brushed my
words aside
and smiled and
loved me
despite my music—
for her I was
what so
few poets dare to
be,
a human on earth,
stuck
here, glad to be,
thick with
breakfasts
working for a
living
and grumbling at
the weather,
nobody special,
hence genuine,
I was that one to
her,
without her I am
not that
to myself, and
come
to be like all
the other geniuses,
ridiculous and
noble,
a marble
statue to my own
identity…
A.
Writing is his mode of being.
C.
Slow opening of ancient files
police digging in the cellar
ORPHEUS
all
I am is a bone of what there was
B.
Mythology lets you talk about
yourself
unashamed, shamelessly even,
like Oedipus babbling in the woods—
ORPHEUS
Mythology
lets everybody know
the monster that I am
and what I’ve done
with this body of mine
she gave me
D.
—one last cry, “Mother!”—
I have heard that dying men call
out to their mothers—
but my mother told me the last word
she heard
her mother calling out was her
name, Maggie, Maggie,
and the street was full of
snow. And the doctor
was walking away. Maggie, for Margaret, from a Mediterranean
root meaning ‘pearl.’
B.
Everything comes from the sea—
the water that snakes its way from
the mountain springs
from the monsoon rains from the
clouds’ intimate rubbing on the hills,
snakes its way down and fills the
sea to its brim,
we are the brim,
the rim
we live on
ill-balanced between the elements
ORPHEUS
It’s when I feel you so close in
dream
that waking I most feel I’ve lost
you—
either feeling I could bear but the
both
together slay me. So I tied
a rope around your hips and drew
you
to me
there
was not slack left enough
to tie a knot, so instead you
looped
the rope over your wrists
held out to me; this I knotted loosely
and pulled you after me
from the dream. The stories say
I looked back and lost you –
nonsense: looking never lost the looked at.
What happened is I opened
my eyes on the hillside up from
dream
and lost you in the glare of common
daylight.
And when I close my eyes
I swear you still are there,
right here, I mean, between
all my past and that slim
knifeblade of a future, just
as you are in all my poetry.
D.
Orpheus is consoling himself. He picks up the sheaf of his recent work and
thumbs through it, looking for her. He’s
like an old rabbi busy at his pilpul, trying every dodge to find her,
Her, in every line.
Shakespeare put beautiful poems in
the unlikeliest mouths; character is his excuse for poetry. Orpheus, earlier, dared to
A.
(sings:)
put songs in no one’s mouth
yet we can hear them
sing
and by such empty song
he forced us to pay
mind.
D.
But who said that?
And what mind is it that songs
rouse to attend?
At last at least the current runs
after a day or two of pleasing
lyric sputter.
Now down your harps, ride the
torpedo,
full seed abaft!
ORPHEUS
For the woman
was always behind me.
That is the secret. The word,
almost, that I was always
turned away from her
but she was always (I thought)
in my mind.
But she was nowhere
but where she was,
now I know better.
She was my mind.
D. (aside)
With this kind of funereal
philosophy
he could almost conquer silence—
ORPHEUS
When I turned back
that famous day
to look at her at last
I was looking at my mind.
Nothing happened.
D.
Nothing happens.
As the Lamas say,
when your mind
looks at your mind
the story ends.
B.
Narration is confusion.
Nothing happened.
C.
The myth says this, then that—
but you know what myths are,
the lovely lies
that keep us half-awake.
The myth called it death,
A.
as if losing the story was losing
the woman.
But we know better—
C.
we never know who is speaking—
who knows? who knows better?
and what is known,
is that also dancing,
now here and now lost —found—
in some romantic shade?)
but who is speaking?
ORPHEUS
The woman, even this one,
even the she of all my poetry,
the woman is not life,
she gives it, surely, always,
to everyone who dares to be born,
and sometimes even to his poetry,
and she takes it away, sometimes—
but she is not life.
She is the mind from which life
spills,
the matrix from which life comes
as an almost unnoticed consequence
of her awareness. Of Awareness.
B.
A fall perhaps,
an Eden in the eye,
where awareness seeks
an object to be of,
ORPHEUS
this goes beyond my element
which is to sing
what I don’t know
and lick my half-guesses
loud enough for you to hear
who are not she,
not Eurydice, are you?
C.
Is every loss the same loss?
The shadows
into which she falls
are the same everywhere,
A.
that shadow-color
dark lymph of the world
takes her.
D.
nothing is lost from the world
but she is lost, she
is lost only from you
not from herself
not from everyone.
A.
To be a self is to lose the rest
D.
Be pretentious, little poet,
push your fancy far as you can
be what you pretend to be
A.
then unmake the fancied image
later and go free
B.
you must have a self
before you can abandon the self
C.
there is no self—
only imputation,
A.
indulge the imputation:
be a pirate a little while
a diva, a deva, a boon
companion of foxes and wolves,
even some man’s wife
and then get over it,
B.
the self is a sickness from which
we can recover
C.
he sang, but the self he lost
was not his own
D.
the self is a sickness from which
no man can recover
VOICE OFF, ANNOUNCES:
THE TRAGEDIE OF ORPHEUS
The Argument: Seeking to sing away his Self,
by Distraction
& Mischance he sang away the Other.
D.
What could distract anyone from the
other?
Isn’t the other all there is out
there?
ORPHEUS
Who are these people reading me
with such big eyes?
The oak tree pierces my song
the birds are busy at it
building and breeding, things
B.
things he knows nothing of,
Orpheus has no children,
only songs, only the sounds
of all the birds, all the people
doing what he does not know.
Did the birds read him?
C.
Did they rend him?
Do we tear apart the mind of what
we read,
our fitful eyes and lusts
tear up the quiet suchness of the
text?
A.
We always hear that girls tore him
apart,
bassarids, bacchae, bacchantes,
Aglaonice—
D.
No, he is torn apart by what he
remembers,
all the images that crowd his mind
crowd out his soul,
his mind was in his eyes and his
heart was in his voice,
he watched all of them, all the
women
and his voice called out to each of
them
as if he meant her and only her,
he couldn’t tell the difference,
A.
and each one heard his song as if
it meant only her.
how could it be different,
isn’t that what song is
or does, a singling of out everyone
everyone who hears it
knows it’s just for him
ORPHEUS
this
entryway is meant for you alone
my song’s a door
open only for you
A.
then the women rose
took off their clothes
turned their backs on him
the song froze
in mid-air, some
looked back over
their shoulders to see
whence that silence came
and one alone did praise
him for some new
trick it sounded like
he’d learned then she
alone stepped near
and closed the door.
C.
Was that your Eurydice?
Already he forced himself to forget
studied instead the woodgrain of
the door
behind which she is hidden…
ORPHEUS
They all hide from me
that’s all the world has in it now
women and the grain of wood—
everything else is marginal.
B.
Imaginal, he means.
Can song sing
what no one sees?
Even if in the shuttered
attic of his thinking he saw,
would we believe?
D.
The wood of the door
she slams in his face
reveals the sinuous
continuous writhing of time
through the matter world
sleek as their hips—
whose? but they are gone—
intimate as the thoughts
she denies him now
A.
Now
is all the eternity
he ever has
ORPHEUS
All my poems exist just to find out
what she thinks
A.
Why don’t you ask her what
she thinks?
ORPHEUS
She doesn’t know she’s thinking—
nobody does.
Only the language knows.
B.
And when time withers
and the door crumbles,
splinters and honey-colored
dust on the floor of the mind?
D.
But that is not wood’s way
it goes on standing, word’s way,
signifying, its ancient life
still visible.
A.
All such images, lover, are shallow
consolation.
The whole world can’t console you
for this one slim shadow
who’s slipped away from you now
as shadows blend into shadows
seamlessly indifferent—
so
no one hears you
ORPHEUS
O song,
o sweet interference
with how things are,
I send you to her
to distract her—
D.
Once he started thinking
he stopped listening,
A.
The girl stepped back
into the wood and was gone
B.
The man died into the poet,
the maybe died into the yes.
C.
Yes is dangerous, yes is a vine
grows quick round a young woman’s
feet,
A.
she thinks it is a snake around her
ankle
then she doesn’t know what to
think.
D.
Every affirmation drags her down.
Everything a man says about a woman
loses her.
B.
She dances around him,
her hips cry out: “Your syntax slew me
from what I was to what you saw,”
her hair awhirl between
his eyes and the lamplight cried
“Every image you affirmed
was stolen from my mind,”
you leave me bare,
swept clean by music.
A.
Then her bare feet patted:
empty empty, empty empty.
C.
A girl is need, a man is seed?
D.
In his dream she lay across his
knees
like a koto played beneath his
fingers
turning contour into tone,
pressure,
percussion and no more harp.
Her voice long muffled sang out
too:
C.
The time of the lyric is gone past
you need more fire and less air.
B.
Too many words, still too many words.
A.
Just keep talking, maybe it will make sense.
But was he dreaming all the while?
B.
So much for listening.
You need a harp
to hear with
just as you need
(he needed)
a pen to think.
D.
But thought is its own instrument
she thought,
and
he thought she had learned that news in Hell
where it is too dark to read or
write—
A.
and that is why the body is
B.
always we see her moving,
never still,
she
is the wind
itself through his dying forest,
the drowned pinewoods
alphabetic against the sky,
the waterbrooks trying to bring
his dead soil back to life,
the elements work against
themselves in him—
C.
he thought
such things about himself
when he sees –he sometimes sees—
the shadow of her dancing…
ORPHEUS
Let me tell you everything I know:
tell everything you know
only after you’ve said everything
else—
that is:
tell what you don’t know.
That’s the only thing words are
good for.
Or otherwise how will I, listening,
ever know who I am?
We exist at the intersection
of two ignorances,
at the place called Knowing.
D.
For body is the first language
and at last the only one—
we only need to speak
because we’re separate.
Any word is a scar on the abiding
silence.
A.
No wonder she’s gone—
she sees that he’s in love with
separation,
B.
he thinks she hides in every woman
he might meet
stares brusquely through the forest
of her eyes
to catch a glimpse of his Eurydice
D.
who of course was never his.
Justice—broad or slender—
belongs to no man, least
of all a man with words in his
mouth.
Justice flees when juries talk.
ORPHEUS
My mother—who was my mother?—
taught me: Talking is a sin
and writing worse,
she tried
so tenderly to protect her poor son
from what I would say,
from ever believing what came out
of my mouth.
D.
sometimes I think that with
the bible already written in the
rock
the axes in crystal and the
molecules of actual things
maybe every human word is blasphemy
C.
and who is this anyhow man?
A.
Silence is his breath,
he is the one who listens for us,
who listens out loud
C.
Why do we need to hear what no one
says?
A.
We listen to him listening,
we help his words to find their
silences again.
= = = = = = =
No comments:
Post a Comment