Saturday, October 13, 2018

happenings, trivia, misfortunes



Cyprian Norwid sees “sorrow, sorrow, from end to beginning”* in addition to the partitioning of Poland between Russia and Prussia, but the Polish aristocrats themselves precipitated it, he says in at least one poem: it is not all the fault of the Prussians and the Russians, who, in 1863, went into the Pałac Zamoyskich on Ulica Nowy Świat and threw the piano of his dead friend Frédéric Chopin out of a window. Why? “Because there is no place on earth where intellectuals are more dependent and more humiliated than in Poland. All the people who work with their brains are someone's clients, they are teachers of children, hangers-on. ... without well defined positions, and their undertakings are either feeble or not well thought out - abnormal in fact! Since history does not tolerate a vacuum, [Polish historical space] is filled with accidental happenings, trivia, misfortunes - every fifteen years.”** (Marian Sokołowski read that in a letter she received from him on January 27th, 1864, shortly after the piano incident.)

If you were being selfishly reasonable you could point out that no one was using the thing at the time but once it had crashed viciously through the window it provoked into existence “Norwid's masterpiece” *** and“perhaps his finest lyric”**** Fortepian Szopena where it is able to represent both the desecration of intelligence and the spark of future action ("The Ideal – has reached the street –").

Therefore -- you state rudely -- it was more use out of the window than in.

I mean, he was dead. (1810 - 1849)

By transferring the energy of an irregular piano-self across that rectangular window-boundary, we (the universe personified in a person or mob, or, if you pull back further, the Tsar whose army it was) precipitated the further energy of a p – etc.

Thank you to the Tsar.

But no one should ever excuse their own cruel behaviour by arguing that their actions are hypothetically inspiring some poet somewhere, not when you can find the most important thing everywhere, Lal Ded says in I, Lalla: the Poems of Lal Děd, 2011, translated by Ranjit Hoskote, who discusses the scholarly and extra-scholarly struggle that brought Lal Ded to this point of understanding. “No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind,” she may have said, although her corpus expanded after her death and so who knows; she was inspirational like the piano. Whoever thoughtlessly heaved that instrument out of the window (I’m guessing it was thoughtless: a "barren mind" and no fruit), they are about on the level of the dog that gave Ron Padgett an ending for Dog by barking in the street at 6 a.m. -- if any dog did so – proving that it was alive for no reason when his friends Ted and Erwin, mentioned earlier in the poem, were “no longer here”. Some necessary energy has departed with them: no one will ever replace them. Chopin’s playing, says Norwid, was like the apparition of a Antique Virtue in a larch-wood country manor. (Borchardt)



* My Song, by Cyprian Norwid, tr. Danuta Borchardt, from Poems: Cyprian Norwid, 2011
** Quoted in the Volume XIII, Number 3 issue of The Samartian Review, translation credited to the staff of the magazine
*** Adam Cedro in Vol. 30 of Studia Norwindiana, 2012
**** Joshua Wilson in the New Republic, May 29th, 2012

3 comments:

  1. This is an interesting question, no? A soldier destroys a work of art, and later a poet turns that act into another work of art. Does the poet owe anything to the soldier? Does the solider (or the Tsar, as you say) have any claim over the art? It's easy to say no, of course not, but is the poet and his poem then more important somehow than the original violence? I'm not quite sure what I mean by this, but the idea that the past has a claim on the present/future interests me. I'm working on a story about a poet who has begun to question the worth of poetry, and these ideas seem to work with that somehow.

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    Replies
    1. I think if importance depends on context then the poem is more important than the violence to us.

      If the claims over a poem don't end with the poet then you can go on almost infinitely, crediting the the person who gave Norwid his breakfast that morning and put him in the right mood to compose the poem, or, alternatively, the people who support the social structure that ensured he wouldn't have any breakfast, or, if he was feeling especially alive because he had a bad case of nits then what about the person who gave him the nits, do they get some credit; and do we credit the nits? Do you credit the nits as a group or does each nit get thanked separately? I like the idea that it never has to end.

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    2. It's an overwhelming argument against intellectual property rights. Lice will sue for the ownership of "Starry Night." Banksy will be revealed to be everyone and everything. Reactions to that will be mixed. "Starry Night" will countersue the lice.

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