LENINGRAD JOURNAL
Leaving creates an undertow
resplendent with abyss.
The Bash_ thrill of setting forth:
possible illumination, possible demise.
Caryl will stay home.
As I fly off, the ants of the abyss
will centripetally draws my tears into
a tiny wreath which, at 36,000 feet,
I will place on her head.
Dear things
because of dearest you.
Each coupling enNoahs a wake
in which the dreamer and the dead are dipped
flamehood. For each, a single face
more potent than light.
Caryl, swirl of leaves settling on
prow of the ark I can be.
*
Wedges of ice-wigged khaki firs.
Villages enclayed with snow.
Jung’s gibbon to be reconstructed in the square—
the garroted center to be
reconstructed from a circumference
where ego is satellite to a body growing downward into ice.
I too am frozen,
a gnat on the edge of the grindstone of desire.
Dinner: December 9, 1989. Meatballs, pot-stickers, sweetened curdy cheese, Georgian brandy.
Smoke-filled bus ride to the Repin House, now a museum.
Given foot slats to tie on before entering.
Sense of Repin’s house: an attempt to hold a vision in place—vegetarian dinners—no servants—"do it yourself" protocol at dinner table. On each Wednesday a flag was raised: visitors were welcome. Repin called wine "sun energy,"
Round dining room table with Chinese lazy susan. Drawers for guests to put dirty dishes into. If you failed to follow dining protocol, the "general" would order you to climb a small stairway up into the corner of the room and make a witty speech.
Back at our living quarters, "Repino." Big boring official welcome. Speeches. Red chairs and curtain turning the sun into a glassy glare behind the speakers’ heads.
Sun over
ice over
unregenerate gulf.
Most Russians seem to smoke incessantly.
Bureaucratic stiffness. No "perestroika" in action yet. Churls run things. Artists struggle on a periphery. 80% of their energy goes into survival.
We Americans took a walk in solid zero cold. Tried to figure how to alter the 5 day program.
Film: Fountain by Yuzy Mamin.
Sterotypical satire on housing.
Entropy defeats hysteria—
or: Soviet life,
a carnival of hysteria and entropy.
*
8 PM, December 10. This trip is a mistake. At least the so-called "Seminar" is. Perhaps the last 5 days with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko will be more engaging. No way to talk with the Russians. The "Seminar" consists of formal, poorly-translated special presentations. Cross-purposes galore. Unless real Russian interest in my work is demonstrated, in the future stay home.
Dinner: cheese-egg curd, cold perogi (I gave mine to Arkadii), small fish fried with carrot strips, mashed potatoes. Then to the bar where a bottle of brandy was placed on each table.
Russian language sounds: consonant corduroy and slush.
*
6 AM December 11
Jackie Och’s noble film, Agent Orange.
Your photo over my head
by what would be the bedstead—
your intense all-piercing gaze.
I live by it, under it, ashamed and moral.
I’ve entered, via a baffle gate,
the mortal difficulties of a man.
By bus into Leningrad to a tourist hotel to change money. Heavy, salty, fleshy-tasting mineral water. Before the hotel: bus tour of Leningrad. Italinate building colors (pink, rose, light blue, green, yellowish gold). Immensely spacious city, enrivered. 41 islands. In the beginning (1703), there were over 100 (the city being built on coastal swamps). Rarely any lightness, frill, arabesque. Ships in ice. Nuclear ice-cutter. Occasionally an art-deco-like store (the one we visited, beautiful! with people buying sweets, canned goods, no charm to the food).
Then walk 6 hours. To Pan American Airlines to see if my suitcase has arrived. No luck. Then to a kind of bar/café. No tea. Fresh very sour cranberries in goblets stuccoed with sugar. Sweet Turkish coffee. Well-dressed young people ("black market" involved, our poor student guide, Vasily, guessed).
I turned into a scream and locked on the sound.
In hollow majesty: the frozen canals of Leningrad.
Russian person dwarfed by vast avenues, giganticized in tiny rooms.
On the street: exploding, fur-capped zigzag. Queued clumps along a wall for gray bricks of ice cream (handed out of a crate like military supplies).
I tread behind Vasily’s army-overcoated back—
sensation of following an endless domino train.
We are up to our neck in backs,
and very old…
will we reach a door
where Nausicaä will be rubbing the grayness out of newborn babies?
A door behind which is a green meadow, friendly dogs?
Or is each door the side of a large garbage container on which
the poet Dragomoshchenko, a 15 pound raven, is beating his wings,
king of frozen green orange rinds?
Russian Communism forces
the individual to reinvent capitalism daily.
The work of Communism:
to scotimize.
The soul of Russia is ice,
Germany fire,
America money.
A 12 foot bronze Vladimir Mayakofsky (in rivet-studded vest), proclaiming a metro stop.
"I want to show you something very, very special"
Vasily’s mother said, leading me into a 5 year old apartment complex,
already a crumbling labyrinth.
People, tiny ships, oceanic immensity.
"Hey Jude" with mushy strings.
A pepper so void of pungency it brought tears to my eyes.
In public: no laughter, no noise.
Back to Repino for dinner: kasha and stewed beef. Double sauna 100 feet from the lodge (afterwards, tea with Abigail Childs, the two of us wrapped up in huge towels). Finnish (dry), Russian (wet). Ex-sailor-cook runs it—very obliging—I thought I was to pay him, but he refused to take any payment. Walked me back to the lodge back door and said good night, after brushing my back and stomach with odiferous branches.
Child’s video Mayhem of some interest. Saw several others by other women. All of some interest: portmanteau piggyback dismantling of the archetypal text in narrative media material. Goofy 1940s skin flick "resolved" in Mayhem.
Now bed. Midnight.
*
[Go back to "A Cross Section of the Incarnation" as possible title poem for book; check worksheets. Perhaps add an "Argument" before the poem, as Blake did. Something like: the discovery of the generate power of semen was the beginning of the discovery of the monotheistic god. Suddenly, in the parthenogenetic dark of woman, a white star glowed, turning the womb into a stage, conducted by God’s wand…]
"Eliot’s Drawers" THE WASTELAND
THEA TSE LAND
collage/cut up of poem revealing the subtext,
i.e., destroy it.
Tom’s Drawers
April and Cruelest are breeding,
mixing waste, race, and mind.
April’s furrow is called Rat’s Alley.
Cruelest’s harrow, the Dead Man Bone, or
Boner, if you prefer to be vulgar,
Loner, if you think of the world as a womb.
"I, April, in the cloak of Vivian,
rattle my epigram again, I, in my bottle,
forever awaiting carbuncular Cruelest, or
Tom, if you prefer to confess,
TSE, if your criterion is indifference.
Supine on the floor of Possum’s canoe
bleeding bleeding bleeding—
Was she Graves’ great white bitch,
and did Tom bleed her, as one milks a ewe?
Behind her did heretic Eve
entwine grail castle?
Cruelest still creeps April’s vegetation,
Cruelest still fishes haha hehheh hoho in her dull canal,
for the sink below mind has yet to be surveyed,
its phallic plumbing, packed with wands and bones,
broken plungers, has yet to be flushed.
So I have hung Tom’s drawers from the spike of the poem
in honor of his human scale
--not that all men must be virile—
but that it is time to notice
what is behind the objective correlative,
in poetry to lift the Tiresias helmet mask from Vivian
and to hand her what her soul in eternity requires:
the dull roots of modernism on the confessional pyre
Hermitage Noon—4:20 PM
Rembrandts (26 or 27, some falling out of their frames)
Velázquez!
da Vinci
one of the Zubarán Crucifixions
We started out in the late 19th collection,
then taken to "the gold room"
Scythian mythology (4-600 BC)
vs.
the Tsar’s jewels like stallion testicles.
If you peer into the diamond spermwork, you can see peasant arms disappearing.
"We met in a town about 4 hours from Leningrad—
everyone there is either an alcoholic, in prison, or insane."
Candles wrapped like flowers in cellophane against the wind,
hundreds clustered about an angel with a cross
for Sakharov
"he had a message to deliver
but since he was surrounded by goons
he couldn’t get it through…
I sat by him… his hands trembled,
his face was blotched."
Dinner at Writers Club restaurant:
fish plate salmon roe
meat (?) and wild mushrooms
mineral water
brandy.
The opera Khoranshchina
Romantic Russian 19th century view of the 17th century—
like our "wild west"
melodramatic, turgid, some sets striking.
Sense of massive, clumsy power overgilding. Doing everything
to excess, or badly. Curious filigree—lightness—tiny women,
frail delicate people every so often.
Feels like a medieval world
draped Revolution,
then almost immediately sealed over.
When a Russian stands up for himself:
crazy major chord: an army of accordions
masticating "Giant Steps."
*
Repino, 13 December
Almost dawn, and it will stay this way
all morning long. A solitary figure
trudging through snowy woods recalls Stevens’
"dark shape moving in a shapeless incessance,"
near never-light, the condition north of Leningrad…
Mind, windhover, would brood itself,
draw off its impulse accumulatives…
a specific marrow inside of what can be imagined—
I look up-- tall branchless birch at break sway.
There is a false sense of poetry in saying
the "truth" is in the break, as if
in the white splintered stump
the birch’s meaning is discovered.
Yet one does want one’s heart to emerge
followed by all the ark organs, led by heart,
to create the vessel of the poem…
this too is momentary. Cauldron, keep fuming,
scent this troubling period. Aging, low testosterone.
How ashamed I am to not fulfill you so that parental death,
Sam and Irene, in one year, does not clog
your own heart’s vibrancy.
The sky tightens—the snowfall ceases—
birches, ghostly priors, are manganese in black bark welts.
Being stands forth, most dreaded absence.
Am I not now, at 54, an active hospice, filled to capacity?
Minutes, lace on pins. At no moment will I be free, transparent.
At no moment will life difficulties lift.
Something in childhood said they might.
It is mother again, the cradle archetype entering midnight’s room.
A good, one might say, eternity pulsing
below the awareness of mortality.
A loose mucous stains my sense of powerful self.
I’m a male in my cage in outer dark,
rattling the heart bars, testing the "why" a woman
complexly curls about.
Diane Hall and Doug Hall slides.
Visits to 4 Leningrad artist studios:
#1: pathetic "how to draw" painter
#2: artist not home
#3: Arkadii’s son (20, with some talent)
#4: the painter "Africa," who had no paintings
in his studio!
time to go home Dinner was to be served.
It was not.
*
14 December, Thursday
Appears that my suitcase is irretrievably lost. I am entitled to $250 "inconvenience money on the 19th. Ariadne, wish me luck!
Victoria Vartan, Russian-Armenian widow tells me over porridge and coffee I make for both of us: she sold 1 million copies of her last book. The government took all but 5500 rubles [Interruption: 30 seconds after calling out to Ariadne, a call from Pan Am: my suitcase is in Kennedy! Never left—will be flown in this evening!]
When I returned from the phone, Victoria presented me with a colorful soup spoon (she also wants my help in finding an apartment exchange in Washington DC or NYC, so she can complete a novel there; but she has no dollars, so unless someone offers her complete expenses there is no way to pull it off). A small brunette, black-eyed woman in her mid-fifties. Her husband died of cancer a year ago. She offered to loan me some of his shirts.
Excellent film, Day of Eclipse (reminded me of a Russian version of The Passenger) by Andrei Sokurov, this afternoon. I was the only American who stayed through its 2 _ hours.
*
15 December
This morning I read "Placements I" and "The Death of Bill Evans" at The Writers Union. Small ornate table. A dozen deep ornate chairs. We rode there in zero weather in our air-conditioned bus. Got my suitcase, minus one wheel—but I almost did not get it.
After lunch at The Writers Union we were told a better bus would pick us up and pass by Pan Am on the way back to Repino. We waited. Then we were told: bus is here, but no driver. Then: bus is here, driver is inside The Writers Union. More waiting. After 20 minutes I pestered Arkadii: if the driver is here, why can’t we find him?
That is a good question, and it is soon discovered that the driver is somewhere in The Writers Union café. So I then said: why don’t you go get him? Others were enlisted in our cause. Then we were informed: driver has been standing on the far side of the bus all this time. So we all got onto the old bus. Driver got in too. Nothing happened. Driver got out. WHY? We were then told: Arkadii is not a member of The Writers Union, and the Director said that since Arkadii also has another publisher (?), he, the Director, is not concerned about us.
I watch time melt. Maybe you could take me to Pan Am in a taxi, I ask our guide, Tatania. She finds a car (in front of the bus) with a man sitting in it. He agrees (she pays him) and we arrive at 4:30 PM (all of this having taken 2 hours). Now, with baggage, we wait (outside, as Pan Am closes early) 45 minutes for the "new bus.," with our group, to come and pick us up. Finally the bus comes, but it is the old one we had gotten back into before, with the driver who would not take us. Because Arkadii criticized rhymed verse in a discussion in Russian after my reading, I am told, we were not told that the driver could be hired! Hired? Yes, they found out, after a one hour wait, for 15 rubles ( = $2), he would drive us back to Repino (one hour). So, we’re off. This time there is no air-conditioning but the heater and the windshield deicer do not work. He stops every few minutes and with a salty rag tries to clear the huge windshield.
I gave some presents away. Ate a typical dinner. Now it is 8:30 AM. Absolutely dark out. No, not quite—traces of snow can be seen on trunks and branches.
"I want to know where my first loved one is buried"—Arkadii’s "dad," year after year, filling out government forms.
"One of the advantages in having used the Cinema Club Lodge at Repino," Arkadii also said, "is to have provided left-over food for the employees to take home."
*
17 December. Sunday.
Dinner Saturday night at Arkadii’s. Rice and squid.
Met Dimitri Spivak, who writes books on altered consciousness, and Mikhail Khazin, who has translated Rothenberg, Creeley, and Hejinian. I proposed to try to raise $50 a month, for a year, for four Russian translators to work fulltime on the American poetry of their choice. Also met the poet Parschchikov’s ex-wife, Olga, who proposed several essays on Russian art for Sulfur.
We have now moved from Repino to an outlying district of Leningrad. I am in a tiny apartment of the Kan family. Endless seeming proliferation of rectangular 5 to 9 story buildings. No interior décor. Arkadii lives 5 minutes from the Kans. Supposedly very dangerous to walk this neighborhood at night. I walk home around midnight. No problems.
This afternoon I am picked up by Olga—who talks without pause and whose English is about 40% comprehensible. We visit the Leningrad painter Timor Novikov. Walk through the apartment to a small room where 4 men are watching TV. Novikov is not friendly. Reminds me of "cool" jazz musician stance of the 1950s. He had told Olga he had some paintings to show us. Once we arrive, he says he has no paintings in the apartment. Instead, we are handed his publicity pack and a stack of snapshots of paintings. We stayed half an hour and left.
Bus to Dimitri Spivak’s lovely old apartment. He and his wife live with his parents; father a retired army psychiatrist, mother an ex-ballet dancer. Warm sophisticated people. The apartment is large, well-furnished, comfortable. They put out a simple but tasty dinner: crab salad, warm quiche, white wine, tea. Then Dimitri’s father invites me to the circus.
A fast half-hour walk through the park and wide desolate avenues. His friend manages the circus and gets us front row seats. One ring, with flag-draped entrance. 7:30 to 10 PM, one intermission. More like old-fashioned vaudeville than our 3 ring circuses. Lots of clown skits. Suddenly I was picked out of the audience by the young woman ring-master and asked to spin a large ball on upraised forefinger, which I was unable to do. I suspect my invitation was secretly arranged by Mr. Spivak. Lots of animal acts. Dogs, pelicans, horses, elephants, 2 monkeys, 1 cat.
Joke: in Capitalist hell, they pound a nail into your butt every day. In Communist Hell? Well, there the Devil is drunk most of the time (the newly-arrived brightens at this news to then be told: except near the end of each month when quotas must be met—then you get 5 nails in your butt every day).
*
Monday, 18 December
No public aesthetic here. No walls with posters, or simply a white Spanish wall, with some flowers, or craft. It seems to be planned, as if beauty is evil, or capitalistic. I will never forget those people shivering in the cold, standing in line, waiting for bricks of ice-cream. In Novikov’s room (where we were told he paints), the most prominent thing was the TV. Nothing to look toward, or up to? Through? At the circus: the grim expression on the faces of the women selling buttons and programs. Again and again, the unending correspondence between wide avenue, pushed-back architecture—everything falling back and into stolidity—and the lack of color, of contour, immediate presence. One is a dwarf outside, a giant inside. Does this tell us something about Russian psychological make-up?
The Spivaks own a 1765 grandfather clock.
It rang while I was in the study,
non-vibrational, friendly, hollow
purring gears.
I ran my fingers down its side, sort of petting it.
Out of the roasted goose cavity
the eyes of those with frost for eyebrows stare.
Large Santa Claus figures in the streets, like homecoming parade constructions. Father Frost, the New Year ceremony, the only ones, they say, that survived Stalinism.
*
20 December
10: 15 AM
Ride through nearly-dark Leningrad one hour on the way to the airport. Headlight dots, lion pupils, ambering through dense non-light. Thoughts of Jack Spicer, of Humbaba, the god whose face is composed of entrails, enemy of Gilgamesh, a labyrinth figure of at least Neolithic antiquity. So I composed the following:
The man whose face is composed of entrails
is honest about the labyrinth—
its spill and its anti-spill are hydrant in his gaze
--if it is a gaze (the pinhole eyes of Jack Spicer,
dawn headlights in Leningrad ambering through).
Humbaba wears his dilemma as his puss,
he has a puss, not just a face, but the pus
under, the pile-driven confusion under mask.
No emergence can occur other than through his pores.
All seek Humbaba in any met face—
all seek a labyrinth man to lead through
what for the baby croc is more and more mother,
recombining shells.
Humbaba wears a fortress
in his brow, he is a weight-lifter
whose power is concentrated facial timber
(Should we surround Schwarzenneggar with praise?
Or with dynamite?)
Humbaba has charisma, charisma is a labyrinthine
block.
Your need for affirmation pulls you in.
Humbaba is the resistance to getting out.
Humbaba lies in wait as the encirclement’s core.
Humbaba cannot be taken by storm.
Humbaba is the middle wall.
Russian pop rock: an undulating, heavy, dirty velvet curtain.
Yesterday, Dimitri Spivak arranged a meeting with me with ethnologists at the Kunstkamera. I was taken to meet the Russian specialist in Upper Paleolithic image-making. He delayed his class for 15 minutes to talk with me, very enthusiastically, at breakneck speed, explaining his theories (via Vasily’s poor English—Spivak had to leave after introducing us—the one time I really needed a bilingual interpreter!). Then he gave me a signed copy of his book, saying, I think, that he recognized me when I walked into his office as one of those who love the long story of mankind. He and the Spivaks were jovial sparks in the unending night of this place.
Then walked with Vasily for a couple of hours. Ate lunch in a mournful hall that used to be a bank. Consume; plate of potatoes; part of a pepper. Coffee-flavored water. Bill for the two of us: $1.50.
Then out into the slush looking for gifts. Walked an hour to a place closed for inventory. Then to another place half-open, with a rope closing off the section with nice gifts. In a third place I found a little handmade box for Caryl, dolls for nieces, and 4 funny pink cherub candles.
Then by metro to Mikhail’s where I was to have my last supper in Leningrad. He is one of the four translators I have promised to try to raise support money for. He and his wife and 4 month old baby live in his deceased father’s flat. It is bearable. Sweet, friendly people. She speaks French and at considerable cost and effort had made a tasty meal: pickled tomatoes, eggs, cheese curd, sauerkraut, chopped apples, followed by stewed beef and boiled potatoes. I brought a bottle of Chianti. Mikhail had stood in line, outdoors, for several hours in order to purchase a small bottle of vodka. After dinner a friend of theirs showed up, with Zeena, Arkadii’s wife. He is a small, intense man, with sparkling eyes and a bushy beard from Siberia. He and his family—including two young children—live in a communal apartment with "a demented homosexual." Nearly everyone here has a story that breaks your heart.
My feet feel pounded. No memory of dreams.
[1989, 2005]