Leon Retief. Twee Kanadese digters: Dave Margoshes & Jan Zwicky
TWEE KANADESE DIGTERS
Hendrik Botha se inskrywing oor dokter-digters en sy opmerkings oor mediese poësie in die besonder het my herinner aan die onderstaande gedig deur Dave Margoshes. Die intense situasies waarin dokters in sommige dissiplines hulself van tyd tot tyd bevind, sowel as die interaksies met pasiënte en hul families – soms amusant, soms gespanne, soms aangrypend – moet beslis ryk stof vir skrywers en digters bied. Margoshes laat die digkuns dalk makliker lyk as wat dit is – almal van ons, nie net dokters en digters nie, het ondervindings en gedagtes in ons koppe en harte wat kan oorsprong gee aan romans, gedigte of fabels maar om dit op papier neer te skryf is natuurlik iets anders.
BECOMING A WRITER
What could be easier than learning to write?
Novels, poems, fables with and without morals,
they’re all within you, in the heart, the head,
the bowel, the tip of a pen a diviner’s rod.
Reach inside and there they are, the people
one knows, their scandalous comments,
the silly things they do, the unforgettable feeling
of a wet eyelash on your burning cheek.
This moment, that, an eruption of violence,
a glancing away, the grandest of entrances,
the telling gesture, the banal and the beautiful,
all conspire with feeling and passion to transport,
to deliver, to inspire. Story emerges
from this cocoon, a crystalline moment, epiphanies
flashing like lightbulbs above the heads
of cartoon characters. All this within you
where you least expect it, not so much in the head
as under the arms, glistening with sweat, stinking
with the knowledge of the body, the writer
neither practitioner nor artisan but miner, digging
within himself for riches unimagined, for salt.
(c) Dave Margoshes
Dit herinner my ook aan Octavio Paz: “The gush. A mouthful of health. A girl lying on her past. Wine, fire, the guitar, tablecloth. A red plush wall in a village square. Cheers, glittering cavalry that enter the city, the people in flight: hymns! Eruption of white, green, fiery. The easiest thing, that which writes itself: poetry!”
Jan Zwicky
Jan Zwicky het die volgende geskryf: “the nature poet is not simply one whose subject matter lies out of doors. The nature poet is, first and foremost, someone who does not doubt that the world is real – or, more precisely, someone who would resist the suggestion that the world is a human construct, a thing that depends on humans speaking or knowing to exist.”
PRACTISING BACH
For performance with Bach’s E Minor Partita for Solo Violin, BWV 1006
Prelude
There is, said Pythagoras, a sound
the planet makes, a kind of music
just outside our hearing, the proportion
and the resonance of things – not
the clang of theory or the wuthering
of human speech, not even
the bright song of sex or hunger, but
the unrung ringing that
supports them all.
The wife, no warning, dead
when you come home. Ducats
in the fishheads that you salvage
from the rubbish heap. Is the cosmos
laughing at us? No. It’s saying
improvise. Everywhere you look
there’s beauty, and it’s rimed
with death. If you find injustice
you’ll find humans, and this means
that if you listen, you’ll find love.
The substance of the world is light,
is water: here, clear
even when it’s dying; even when the dying
seems unbearable, it runs.
Loure
Why is Bach’s music more like speech than any other? Because of
its wisdom, I think. Which means its tempering of lyric passion by
domesticity, its grounding of the flash of lyric insight in domestic
earth, the turf of dailiness.
Let us think of music as a geometry of the emotions. Bach’s
practice, then, resembles that of the Egyptians: earth’s measure as a
way of charting the bottomlands of the Nile, the floodwaters of the
heart, as a way of charting life. Opera, Greek tragedy, Romantic poetry
tell us that sex and death are what we have to focus on if we want to
understand any of the rest. Bach’s music, by contrast, speaks directly
to, and of, life itself – the resonant ground of sex and death.
And it does this not without ornamentation, but without fuss:
the golden ratio in which the whelk shell lying on the beach, the leaf whorl
opening to sun, the presence of the divine in the chipped dish drying
in the rack, that miracle: good days, bad days, a sick kid, a shaft of
sunlight om the organ bench. Talk to me, I’m listening.
Gavotte
E major: June wind
in the buttercups, wild
and bright and tough.
Like luck – a truth
that’s on the surface of a thing,
not because it’s shallow, but because
it’s open: overtoned.
Because it rings.
Fate, too
Is character. But it’s
the shape – the cadence
and the counterpoint. Luck
lives in the moment, and it
looks at you: the clear eye,
gold, when being sings.
Menuet I & II
There’s nothing special in it. All you have to do
is hit the right key at the right time. Time:
that stream in which we do and do not,
live, just practice diligently, it will all go well. You have
five fingers on each hand, just as healthy as my own.
Unison, the octave; the fifth, the fourth, the third.
Of the strings? The viola, if I have a choice.
At the keyboard, don’t forget to use your thumb.
God’s glory and the recreation of the mind.
What I really need to know:
Does the organ have good lungs?
The partita of the world, the dance of being: everything
has to be possible.
Bourée
Partita, partie – a whole of many parts. Pythagoras, who is said to have studied with the Egyptians, is also said to have taught that enlightenment meant solving the problem of the One and the Many, of coming to grasp the divine unity of the world through its bits and pieces, as these come to us in language.
This may also be thought of as the problem of metaphor: that metaphor’s truth, its charge of meaning, depends on assertion of identity and difference, on erotic coherence and referential strife, on meaning as resonance and meaning revealed through analysis.
Lyric poets are always trying to approach the issue by forcing speech to aspire to the condition of music. Bach comes at it from the other end: he infuses music with a sense of the terrible concreteness, the particularity, of the world. And enlightenment? – Acceptance of, delight in, the mystery of incarnation.
Gigue
There is a sound
that is a whole of many parts,
a sorrowless transparency, like luck,
that opens in the centre of a thing.
An eye, a river, fishheads, death,
gold in your pocket, and a half-wit
son: the substance of the world
is light and blindness and the measure
of our wisdom is our love.
Our diligence: ten fingers and
a healthy set of lungs. Practice
ceaselessly: there is
one art: wind
in the open spaces
grieving, laughing
with us, saying
improvise.
(c) Jan Zwicky
BAIE besonderse blog, Leon!
In antwoord op daardie pragtige aanhaling van Zwicky oor die natuurdigter, veral daardie deel as “someone who would resist the suggestion that the world is a human construct, a thing that depends on humans speaking or knowing to exist” – o, die geil humanisme gaan ons nog onder kry! – die volgende aanhaling uit Vivien Law se The History of Linguistics in Europe: From Plato to 1600 (2003, p.166) wat ek ook lees in die lig van die asof voorgeskrewe beweging wat Derrida probeer wys het (en wat my dus laat glimlag, d.i. nie laat “doubt that the world is real” nie):
“The Physics was the principle work in which Aristotle discussed motion, although he returns to the subject over and over again throughout his scientific writings. Early in the Physics Aristotle reminds his readers that art imitates nature. That innocuous little statement – a cliché to us – evoked powerful resonances in medieval grammarians. Right through the Middle Ages, grammarians were desperately anxious to rescue language from its apparent arbitrariness (and this was the driving force behind Speculative grammar, as we shall see). To be told that art – which they took to mean all the Liberal Arts, including grammar – imitates nature implied that language was in some sense natural and non-arbitrary. In what respect? Reading on, they found a clue: ‘Nature is the principle of motion, stability and change.’ From the middle of the twelfth century on, one scholar after another joined in the quest to identify the principles of motion, stability and change at work in language. Different scholars looked for it in different aspects of language – the masters of Paris in syntax, the masters of Oxford in speech sounds.”
Bach se musiek, Nietzsche se The Birth of Tragedy, from the Spirit of Music, Freud se Pompeijiese psigoanalise, die Middeleeuse Meister Eckhart se nosie van die Godheid as die “dieper grond”, ‘n “divine wasteland”, waaruit God-die-drie-eenheid vloei, ensovoorts, ensovoorts – “the resonant ground of sex and death”.
“wind
in the open spaces
grieving, laughing
with us, saying
improvise.”
Leon, ek wil dan ook net graag die volgende byvoeg: Ek weet min van Bach se musiek, noem my maar ‘n barbaar, maar wat ek wel weet van Bach is dit: In Suid-Korea het my mond oopgehang toe ‘n middelskool seuntjie die mees ongelooflike lofsang aan Bach gesing het in sy bydrae vir die jaarlikse Engelse “speech contest”. Dit was vir my ‘n ongelooflike ervaring. Hy het so pragtig opreg en begeesterd gepraat, ek het geweet HY KEN sy Bach! En dit was by ‘n klein skooltjie op die platteland (‘n uur uit Seoul) …
Maria,
#BachMustFall, en dis skynbaar hoog tyd, sien uittreksel hieronder uit ‘n onlangse plaasllike intreerede: die doodsheid, onkunde en anti-intellektualisme wat die westerse musiekkurrikulum, soos aangebied in die tipiese Suid-Afrikaanse konservatorium, omgewe, gaan eersdaags vervang word deur intellektuele vitaliteit en onder andere nuwe lokaal geproduseerde musiekkennis. Dit sal gebeur in die openinge, die bresse geslaan deur die tans lopende kulturele revolusie. Die plaaslike westerse musiek-côterie as enklave van bevoorregting en die agterlike omhelsing van verre noordelike musieksentra deur die lede daarvan gaan van buite-af oopgebreek word deur kritiese, musikaal-ingeligte, diep lokaal-gekonnekteerde, supra-westerse musiekbegeesterdes. ‘n Vars musikale toekoms wink verleidelik en die stroombed daarvoor word met daadkrag en verbeelding hier voorberei – en wel buite die konservatorium. Hoe sing Bob Marley? This song of freedom is all I ever had, redemption song. Mens verwag dat Slovo Migada, die sanger wat as een van vyf skuldigbevinde daders betrokke was by die Shackville skilderyverbranding, hier ontmoedig sal kan word in sy ambisie om Italiaanse opera en Ave Maria te sing. (Sien youtube) In ‘n onderhoud met Migada wat ek op eNCA gesien het, verklaar hy ter verdediging van die westerse musiek wat hy sing dat mens die meester se huis met die meester se implemente moet kan afbreek. Klink my hulle sal hom in ‘n Stellenbosche musiek-bootcamp moet kry om gerekonstrueer te word. Ek hoop ek leef lank genoeg om hierdie musikale hergeboorte aan die SA universiteite nog mee te mag maak. Achille Mbembe vra sig in een van sy stukke in die M&G af waarom die kunste soos verwag (en soos voorspel) nie meteen oopgeblom het ná die verstikkende Apartheidsjare nie. Miskien moes die artistieke oplewing eers half-klandestien in ‘n staat van kripsis bly vir twintig jaar lank voordat dit sigself kon begin aankondig met knetterende preludes van westerse monument-, biblioteek- en musiekverbranding. Mens vra jou af of die afskaffing van skoolmusiek deur die Departement van Basiese Onderwys dalk een van die eerste dinge sal wees wat reggestel sal word deur die leiers van die kulturele revolusie, die nuwe weergawe van die volkslied wat orals gesing word deur die Fallists wil inderdaad dui op ‘n eerste stap in hierdie rigting. Heady times. Woza Moya.
http://www.sun.ac.za/english/Inaugurallectures/Inaugural%20lectures/InauguralLectureProfStephanusMuller.pdf
“Like many late-20th-century and early-21st-century
political compromises that followed the demise of
apartheid, the idea that at least one music department
in South Africa should remain where Western art music
dominates the agenda through its canons, conventions
and curricula to the exclusion of all other musics
seems increasingly superfluous. The undeniably close
relationship between the study and practice of Western
art music in South Africa and colonial and apartheid
approaches to culture is not, as is often mistakenly
assumed, located in the material manifestations of its
forms only (its instruments, its works, its conventions,
its spaces, its performance practices – for all of which an
argument of ‘universality’ is commonly offered in defence)
but resides more significantly in the anti-intellectualism
of its South African versions. This has manifested
variously in its indifference to the local, its overwhelming
orientation towards the past, its deference towards
geographically distant cultural centres, its isolation from
art, its alienation from critical thinking and its resultant
curious enchantment with what is derivative. Wherever
music exists in the grip of these combined forces, it
is dead. The demand for radical reform that we have
heard articulated on South African campuses since 2015
under different banners of protest, will eventually move
from statues and works of art to music. The question
is not whether this will happen but when. Burning art
and removing statues show an exteriority of force with
no regard for the system’s capacity to afford it. The
fundamental incapacity of institutions to come to terms
with the densely populated exterior of their disciplinary
proclivities far exceed the necessary disputation about
the relatively simple matters of performance content or
even curricula. A future beckons in which enclaves of
privilege constructed on an embrace of ignorance will
become opened from the outside.
Openings are restitutive.
Openings reverse decline.
Openings embrace protest.
Openings lacerate.
Openings butcher.”
Hier is die skakel na die onderhoud met Magida (jammer tikfout in die naam in vorige kommentaar.) Hierdie is werklik besondere materiaal
http://www.enca.com/south-africa/from-opera-to-activism-with-no-regrets
En hier is die artikel van Mbembe waarna ek hierbo verwys met sy opmerkings (uit 2012) oor kultuur. Miskien profeties?
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-06-15-rule-of-property-versus-rule-of-the-poor
Capital accumulation
The capacity of the South African state to mediate between the rights of the propertyless and the requirements of capital accumulation will be severely tested in the next decade. If nothing is done and corruption, abandonment and predation prevail, it will become increasingly apparent to many that capitalism is not naturally compatible with democracy.
Also lacking in the policy documents is a proper analysis of the crisis of culture affecting South Africa. The ANC has not distanced itself from a purely instrumentalist view of the arts and culture, one that equates culture with the past, customs, heritage and tourism.
There was a time when South African arts were powerful. In the works of arts, human life and experience were not just narrated, they were in themselves events of life.
Two decades into a democratic dispensation, we have not seen the expected explosion of aesthetic boundaries. South African art still uses quoting, reappropriation and recombination. But it is struggling to be once again a witness to the regenerative forces of life. Just like politics itself, it seems to have lost its power to give form to life, and has become subservient to repetition.
A “second transition” will not happen as long as the world of life barely forms the work of art and the idea of the political. It will not happen as long as we have not truly moved our imagination beyond a past world and into a world of the present and the future. Nor will it happen as long as we keep investing in anachronisms and keep thinking and acting as if not much has happened — the repetition of something that had power once, but no longer has.
Marlene, ek antwoord soos volg (deur my klip/geometrie cum [onmoontlike] geo-logie à la Derrida in sy skrywe oor Husserl se “The origin of geometry” perspektief):
Ek is, via klippe, letterlik en figuurlik, d.w.s. in die algemeen. ’n Interpretasie van ubuntu volgens my – Plato, in Gorgias:
Socrates: If I actually had a soul made of gold, Callicles, don’t you think I’d be pleased to find one of those stones on which they test gold? And if this stone to which I intended to take my soul were the best stone and it agreed that my soul had been well cared for, don’t you think I could know well at that point that I’m in good shape and need no further test?
Callicles: What’s the point of your question, Socrates?
Socrates: I’ll tell you. I believe that by running into you, I’ve run into just such a piece of luck.
Callicles: Why do you say that?
Socrates: I know well that if you concur with what my soul believes, then that is the very truth. I realize that the person who intends to put his soul to an adequate test to see whether it lives rightly or not must have three qualities, all of which you have: knowledge, good will, and frankness. I run into many people who aren’t able to test me because they’r not wise like you. Others are wise, but they’re not willing to tell me the truth, because they don’t care for me the way you do. […]
“Standpunte is nie die probleem nie. Klippe is.” –
Kommentaar op Gerhard van Huyssteen se “Respekteer studente se standpunte” (
http://www.netwerk24.com/Stemme/Menings/respekteer-studente-se-standpunte-20161028).
Ek dink baie keer dis dalk ‘n geval van ‘n hele generasie wat wakker skrik rakende eeue en eeue se gelees-en-skryf in die noordelike halfronde wat daar al gebeur het – ‘n sekere meer algemene apartheid (wat niemand se skuld is nie, dit het net so gekom/gebeur)? – en waarvan hulle nie ‘n deel was nie, d.w.s. ‘n sekere ongeskikte ontnugtering, ‘n “verruklike verwarring” (Ratele, in There was a goat [Krog et al.]). Hoe hou mens huis met so ‘n situasie? Word jy ‘n skrywer “digging / within [your]self for riches unimagined, for salt”?
Want uiteindelik bly die vraag (vgl. Bezuidenhout se “In Wellington brand ‘n klavier – ‘n verleentheidsgedig”) staan:
Waaraan, wonder ek, meet ʼn mens
ʼn klip? Waar omtrent begin
ʼn klip, en waar eindig
ʼn klip, soos die klip waarteen ek leun?
Uit: Stockenström se “Die klip” in Vir die bysiende leser
Tristia
die digters van ’n bedreigde taal
klou maatvas aan die tradisie – probeer
hul vereerde voorgangers lewend hou
terwyl alles verval, geruïneer
word: universiteite, biblioteke,
teaters, argiewe en uitgewers
dit is nie ’n tyd vir eksperimenteer
nie – daarom is hul radelose verse
dikwels palinodes en parodieë
daarom is oorspronklikheid ’n valse
maatstaf om hulle aan te meet:
hulle stry teen die laaste groot vergeet
Daniel Hugo
Of mens begin sommer skryf in Engels.
White material
(Remembering the film by Claire Denis and thinking
of John Clare)
I go for my evening walk and I see
they’re erecting a fence around
Middelvlei, gum poles, treated, two
metres high, every ten yards an anchor
of tempered steel, the entire perimeter
electrified by a dozen taught, grey wires.
They’ve taken out already the tumbling greenery
along the edges where one could
stroll through the worlds of men
and animals, an open domain of owls
and quail. Where must the dandy
lizard listen to the spheres now? How
the wren wright her nest of wild ears?
For the love of the pale kicking heels
of the hare who always veered
into this thicket, please, stay the assault –
generations have had their history
in these half ripped out hedges, on summer
afternoons in blue school shirts
kids sat in their shade eating pilfered
wine grapes, nobody minded.
When I get to the pathway above the dam,
the dogs bark madly in the farm-yard.
In the glow of the led-lit cubicle a guard
sits stiffly, an open target with a walky-talky
crackling in his lap. The scene suggests
that one should give the homestead
a mile wide berth. They might be tempted
to fire at a mumbling shadow, for who expects
an old woman on these paths after dark?
She might be taken for a thief. For they carry
white material – a wine press, metal
vats, houses, implements,
stocks of cement, petrol and sought
after sheets of corrugated iron.
Things, I am told, get stolen
at a frightening rate and the owners
fear something might happen
like happened to Costa, just over
the hill, who one night questioned
a sound outside and got the bullet
on his doorstep in front of his child.
Or in the neighbouring valley to Jochen
Rädel whose scull was cracked with a pick
axe when he went to inspect his half built
house. His wife did not speak an entire
year and left one day without
a suitcase, for Germany, somewhere
in Nieder Sachsen, I hear.
So this is the neck of the country
from which I used to glean the stuff –
moonlight, stones, feathers, dust – for my tiny,
percussive, palatal nocturnes, now, here
I feel these songs dehiscing through
the rhythm of murders, rumours, labels,
betrayals of trust. All kinds of countrymen
had laid in their sickles on the verge
of my tongue, scoffing at my standard sweet
nothings – tenderness, play, the shock
of the small when accosted. So defences
go up, retraction sets in, also my own.
My old friend Humble, the activist
who tinkers at civic rights in the bordering
informal settlement insists that some
wine farmers are right wing hysterics,
but he’s a short-tempered lefty these days
as his Beautiful Soul wears thinner than
sin in the cut-throat company of
Credit, Need and Bare Necessity,
all three grinning, and cruelly
indifferent to pain, their own
and everyone else’s.
These things I consider (oh stars)
under the glittering half-moon of this familiar
haunt, where I pause to finger under frazzled
blue-gums the husk of a psalm. I can barely
remember its riff of heady syncopations
I once delighted in. Of late grown
wary I now dim the syllables
before I scatter them – here, there, often
anonymous, as ashes of English, who cares
anyway about my mother tongue?
Looking back across the water
from the side of the dam (oh wild geese
calling, oh little black coot), I see the search
lights sweeping my trail, so I had been detected,
after all. Back at my front door, ten minutes
later, I take out the mail and right the flimsy notice board, pressing its pegs in deeper.
Pam Golding, it says, sole agent,
house of a poet for sale.