Friday, February 26, 2010

Analect 2.666x



26 February 2010. Two crows heading east , set against bank of dark cloud. Row of melaleuca, mimosa just behind. Profusion of tiny yellow flowers...

The cares of a family man. Kafka's wry tone. Or is that that indeed the word? A tone, nonetheless, as in all that he wrote--something implied, more whiff than designation. And yet so seamingly solid. So that one almost gives up wondering... But never quite...

Figures on the bank of a river--a group of women with baskets and satchels, a waiting boat, dark water. Hills lightly drawn on the far shore.

Volga. Something sensed more than defined...

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Analect 2.665x



25 February 2010. Round and nubby cloud shapes packed close in northern sky, one open lane of blue...

A boat on the Volga, on a moody black-and-white day, indeterminate past. A verb of motion, khodit' for example--the general sense of action rather than an act of going per se. In the perfective--a movement in one direction. Uglich to Saratov--like the river itself...

Lesley Chamberlain's book, from years ago. Volga, Volga, named for the film from Stalin's time, a location revisited after the Soviet fall. Names of ancient towns as well. Odd Russian byways on an unending stream...

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Analect 2.664x (Плес)



24 February 2010. Rain in the night, gusts...

The town of Plyos, with it's golden light, set wide on the Volga. River boats moored to muddy bank, a single side-wheel steamer in the distance. Heavy dark hulls for the grain trade, low in the water even without cargo. A Sunday morning, perhaps--Voskresenie--na tretij den' posle raspyatiya... No one present, only the quiet river, the simple church on hill further downstream, a few clouds...

Isaac Levitan...

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Analect 2.653x (золотая урда)



23 February 2010. Gray skies, unending...

The city of Pskov, dark medieval towers over gray river, set against a gray sky, all without color in this northern light. Ripples breach the river's face, a wide arc, tiny flags from each spire--the compass points of seige and defense. Livonian knights, in 1242-- "on the frozen straits," where a legendary Novgorodian Prince, Alexander by name, led the Russian defense...

For a moment, today--a girl plays the gusli, her narrow fingers sounding each string. An Asian face beneath Russian adornment--the folk cap, a deep red with tiny-flowered band, delicate metal cone over the heart. As with the towers themselves--a mixture of peoples and ways...

Golden Horde...

Monday, February 22, 2010

Analect 2.662x (не умеющего жить)



22 February 2010. Peeking sun from behind a few gray clouds, tiny golden needle of  high-lining jet...

"And she separated herself from the young man, who did not know how to live...," a Tolstoyan observation, indeed. Anna Pavlovna speaking, in the context of her first uncertain conversation with the young Pierre Bezukhov, recently arrived "from abroad," in frock coat and trousers of the most recent fashion, but with spectacles, and his expression of shy intelligence...

One can see the whole truth, but only at an infinite distance...

Friday, February 19, 2010

Analect 2.661x



19 February 2010. Cold and damp... Into the bone...

Three figures, drawn with perhaps too much care--a mood of restraint unbefitting the age. (Early Soviet.) And a mother carrying a child, her back turned. The source? That kind of day, the edges worn from last night's fray--a conversation with a dozen youngsters--and a television, bumpy and wild... Modern times.

As with my younger double, this morning, seated alongside, employed in the scanning of grandmothers and rabbis--a pile of photos, mostly old, a few in color--the world of Polaroid--faded 70s tones... The ripply edge...

Snapshots and scallops--can an image be treif? When what appears before the lens would have us all believe...

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Analects 2.660x



18 February 2010. Foggy streets, light drizzle... Pine trees half-disappearing in the mist...

A river story-- Grigory Alexandrov's Volga Volga, with Lyubov Orlova, and the band of amateur musicians en route to Moscow to make their mark. Russkiye narodniye pesnyi--songs of the people, here with a Chaplinesque twist (it was on a rowing expedition on San Francisco Bay that Chaplin suggested the title to Alexandrov)...and the film (1938) soon proved to be Stalin's favorite...

And a song from a much older source:

Вниз по Волге-реке,
С Нижня-Новгорода,
Снаряжен стружок,
Как стрела, летит...


* * *

(Down the Volga
From Nizhny Novgorod
A strong river boat
Like an arrow flies...)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Analect 2.659x



17 February 2010. Fog at dawn, muting all the corners... Yellow pool lights, shadowed swimmers' bodies...

A Russian song, "Down the Volga...," as on the ancient Monitor recordings, voices of Sergei Lemeshev, Ivan Skobtsov and Artur Eisen, "All the babushkas would weep..." And Lyudmila Zykina, available only on Soviet-era Melodia-- her squarish face, close-fitting white knit dress, the wide cheekbones, and decisively feminine pompadour...

A hint of Patsy Cline...

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Analect 2.658x



12 February 2010. Gray rain, fine mist...

Charter member of the Russian Far East Surfing Society-- dodging ice flows in the Bering Sea... A large black seal swims up alongside, giving me one of those looks, "And what are you doing?" I might have asked the same, these distinguished creature of a watery world...

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Analect 2.657x



11 February 2010. Neighbor's light across dark yard, 4 am. All asleep...or not entirely so...

Sergei Krotkoff, playing for Marusia Georgevskaya. A Treasury of Russian Gypsy Songs, recorded by Monitor Records in 1961. Shall we call it a kind of hopefulness? The seamless presentation of an entire world, coherence and clarity of vinyl disk. Starts here, ends there... The last few swirls, an exit flourish...

A dormitory room at Reed--or maybe the stairwell--about that same time. Guitar. Upstairs, another world, also of Monitor Recordings--John Cushing, listening endlessly to Leadbelly, and Joel Cope, ordering the entire take-out Chinese meal... All of us, denizens together in a kind of madness, searching for the discipline of the poems of Homer (Wars of Troy notwithstanding)... Or Margaret Deansley, A History of the Medieval Church. Worn gray paper dust jacket over deep blue cloth, from Oxford--sense of measure, always...under English skies...

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Analect 2.656x (утро туманное)



10 February 2010. Gray morning--utro tumannoe, as in the song...

Russkoe ozero... a Russian lake, with layer of mist. Row of middle-ground trees against dawn sky, hint of rose above--as with reeds along the shore, their color edging beyond green...

A girl with covered face, curly hair (kudryavaya) and impossibly long nails. The world of polyesters set against that of human feeling. As in a story, on a page in a book--something about first meetings, quiet voices, faces from long ago...

The fields in sadness, covered in snow...

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Analect 2.656x (масленица)



9 February 2010. Misty light over early pool. Glow of yellow timer light, its pronounced opposition to indeterminancy...

From Izaly, yesterday--the announcement of maslenitsa--pagan roots, a celebration of the sun at winter's peak--butter, eggs, milk--flat cakes and farmer's cheese...

A straw figure burned in effigy...

Visits and stories...

Monday, February 08, 2010

Analect 2.654х



8 February 2010. Proschai, proschai, podruga dorogaya...

A gypsy song, in the Russian style. "Farewell, farewell, my dear friend, God knows, will I see you ever again..." A sequence of farеwells, each one heartfelt--each one with lifted voice...

Hotel Europejski, Warszawa... 1968. Elegant, with old plumbing. A round enamel soap dish tucked in at angle to wall, square white tiles, shower fixture--flexible metal and white, wrapped around faucet head. White mat over white tile edge. Przedwojenny...from before the War...

A band of gypsies, two women approach, hands extended. Their narrow wrists, narrow fingers on narrow dark arms, full dresses, in the old manner, skirts with folds, and old faces as well--not in age, but in the possibility of a past...

Rings and bracelets, a disguise--narrow eyes...

Carmen Ledesma, dancing in Nimes. Por seguirías? Steve's photo, sent just yesterday--her full posture, thrust forward, ample arms, eyes on some ancient thing...

Friday, February 05, 2010

Analect 2.653x



5 February 2010. Golden light in blue-green pool--morning's sun after evening rain.

A Russian man with Russian face, Victor Toporov, b. 1946, his full gray beard with moments of black, lank hair, heavy brows--like two winter runways in Chelyabinsk--a fortress town just east of the Urals, snow, snow, and more... The Trans-Siberian route--a mountain of gold and mass graves. "Tankograd" in Stalin's time--the arms works shifted east--S.M. Kirov Factory no. 185. This kind of detail, as if a glass, held close, could again reveal the trail of wolf, or fox, or winter crow...

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Analect 2.652x



4 February 2010. Dark clouds to the west, impending storm... Emory's face on pool deck, heavy gray wool watch cap, emphatic swoon to his voice, "It'll be pouring by five..."

Vera Zasulich(1849-1919), youngest daughter in a family of impoverished minor nobility, from Mikhailov Gzhatsk , Smolenskaya Guberniya. (Dad's voice here.) She became a clerk--then a teacher, bringing reading and writing to the Petersburg factory workers. Influence of Nechaev, then Bakunin. Narodnaya Volya--the People's Will. Her partner, Lev Deitch, writes of "...the extraordinary sincerity and unaffectedness of her relations with others."

Trepov affair--a Russian colonel who ordered the flogging of political prisoner Mikhail Bogolyubov for refusing to doff his cap. Cause celebre among the early revolutionists and Russian intellectuals. It was Vera's decision to take Trepov's life--a deed she brought to bear with the assistance of a well-constructed British Bulldog Revolver. Aquitted nonetheless by a sympathetic jury in a trial whose focus was in fact Trepov himself, she later opposed the campaign of terror that led eventually to the assasination of Alexander II.

Following the trial, she took exile in Switzerland. Described by her friend, Leon Trotsky, in his book on Lenin: " Zasulich was a curious person and a curiously attractive one. She wrote very slowly and suffered actual tortures of creation.... 'Vera Ivanovna does not write, she puts mosaics together, Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) said to me at that time,' and in fact she put down each sentence separately, walked up and down the room slowly, shuffled about in her slippers, smoked constantly handmade cigarettes and threw the stubbs and half-smoked cigarettes in every direction on all the window seats and tables, and scattered ashes over her jacket, hands, manuscripts, tea in the glass, and incidentally her visitor. She remained to the end an old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death."

Narodnaya Volya--the People's Will.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Analect 2.651x



3 February 2010. Quiet street, low sky, shallow bowl of peanuts balanced on hot coffee glass. Preparations...

As with Nestor Makhno, in a desultory moment, the year being 1919. Neglamurnyj--that's what the Russian says. But who's looking for glamour in this legendary, charismatic Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerilla leader... Mounted on horseback, inventor of the tachanka (lightening fast horse-drawn machine-gun carriage)...and known as Batko ("father") to his 15,000 devoted followers...

Makhno's anarchist forces--the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine--allied with the Bolsheviks at the outset, and anti-nationalist to the core, but finally in favor of no state whatsoever, resulting in his defeat and exile... Romania, Poland, Danzig, Berlin and ultimately Paris, "...where he worked as a carpenter, a stage-hand at the Paris Opera, at film studios, and at the Renault factory."

"Free communities as the highest form of social justice..." 

Hopes and depredations...

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Analect 2.650x



2 February 2010. Hint of sun through white curtains at dawn...

While the two dudes converse--that's Stalin and Voroshilov, of course, their military collars and heavy hand... One white pinky extending downwards, the other, relaxed, in an embrace of fate... Not without planning, however. The pyatiletka, Five-Year plan, sounding almost tender in the Russian--a sly diminutive, as with a rabbit, or a child...

The solo bird on half-misplaced ring, a shepherd with staff. To guide the sheep, to find them even. Open fields...

Monday, February 01, 2010

Analect 2.649x



1 February 2010. Grey clouds and blue, a subtle tumble...

Корреспондент газеты <Крассной Кавалерист> Лютов... At your service, sir. No, not the right way to put it. More, "Ready...!" As in the man with a plan. Image of Jack Lelane, his shoulders shrouded in bay mist, a dark cold-water swimmer's cap pulled low, towing two, three, four or more life boats across the rough channel... Alcatraz...

My father, Byelorussia in 1921. Bullets whirling. The Chinese Bolshevik fighter alongside, kneeling with rifle raised, urging him to do the same. Later, standing before a committee of commisars, each one known, "Osher, how can you leave us, what we are building here..."

Choices, articulate and unknown. As in the shape of a sparrow, or the flaired stroke of a white-bristle filbert... Bonnard--each touch his own...