For Father’s Day, a UD favorite. D. Nurkse, much of whose poetry captures the life is but a dream problem… We so often sense that even (especially?) in the most important things we cannot (will not?) lift ourselves out of a perceptual, intellectual, emotional fog…
A lot of modern poetry seems located right there, in fact, in the thick of the fog, with the poetic voice sort of questioning itself about why it remains fogbound. Poetry, as they say, is the tunnel at the end of the light… But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely haze! If the haze is looked at with care. Paradox? Yes. We both protect ourselves from the truth, from the worst, by aestheticizing it (art heals, softens, shades), and at the same time, with the same aestheticizing gesture, expose ourselves to the truth, the worst.
‘Almost all art,’ [Ted] Hughes writes to American artist Leonard Baskin , ‘is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session.’ The artist is the person who because he is so much in need of anaesthetics – and is therefore tempted to trade in them – must also, ‘at the same time’ be able to resist them.
In “Introit & Fugue,” Nurkse enters (introit means entrance) into the ‘fugue state’ which is the defensive semi-awareness of the wound, and then lingers, looks, describes, the inside of the tunnel…
After death, my father
practices meticulously
until the Bach is seamless,
spun glass in a dream,
you can no longer tell
where the modulations are,
or the pedal shifts
or the split fingerings . . .
if he rests
it’s to wind the metronome
or sip his cup of ice . . .
but who is the other old man
in the identical flannel gown,
head cocked, listening
ever more critically,
deeper in the empty room?
That interrogative that ends the thing, that question as to the identity of another old man in a room that’s actually empty, is quite typical of Nurkse, who among many foggy poets is for UD the most interestingly foggy. (I suppose for some readers Prufrock is the Frogmore of Fog, and UD certainly admires Prufrock, but there’s a lot to say about fog.) I wonder whether the other old man is the poet himself, the poet reckoning with himself both as his father’s son (indeed he has grown “identical” to him) and as an old man, as the thing his father became. The poet realizes, in this tableau, just how close he himself is to death (deeper in the empty room) even as he clings to life – life understood as the retention of our restless critical capacity, our lack of peaceful “seamlessness.” On this side, we still struggle; we are not at one with ourselves (split fingerings); in death, the poet’s father attains the delicate perfection of “spun glass,” the capacity to spin about with, and to draw coherence and continuity from, the madly note-studded Bach. On this side, we’re still in the light; on his side, the poet’s father is in the tunnel; and in a fugue state the poet follows him there, enters the empty room of the grave, where his father’s lifetime struggle with Bach (UD probably likes this poem because her own father struggled all his life with Bach) infinitely plays itself out.
So, this shows you what a really good poem can do. It can enter that weird glancing realm of knowing without realizing, seeing while refusing to see, cobbling dreams in order to prompt a scene you won’t script when you’re conscious.
We’re not allowed to forget that the poet’s father is dead. That spun glass becomes a creepy cup of ice in the second stanza… His father is on ice, no softening the matter here… But he’s after all engaged in a kind of counterpoint with his son – the fugue form featuring, usually, two musical voices in harmonic relationship with one another. And so this poem is the wound and the bow, the wound of age, loss, and mortality as well as the soothing lyric itself – the lyric not as vulgar “anaesthetic,” which the great poet resists, but as the honest evocation, the laying out for what it’s worth, of the agonizing, clarifying, transcending, dream tableau.
June 16th, 2014 at 10:09PM
Thanks for bringing this poem to our attention. As a Bach scholar, I’m interested in a couple things in the poem that probably aren’t very important but perhaps worth noting. First, an introit is of course more specifically the music sung as the priest and choir enter the church to celebrate mass. Today the word tends to be associated with Catholic services, but there were introits in Lutheran churches in Bach’s day as well (sung as polyphonic motets). I find Nurske’s use of the word in his title a bit odd; it’s obviously a play on “prelude and fugue,” but one that seems to depend on the assumption (perhaps more prevalent in Europe than today in the US) that Bach’s music is inherently somehow religious. Yet what’s being remembered is apparently not an organ piece played in church but a prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, played on the piano at home. So Nurske’s Bach is the Bach of 20th-century European (especially German) tradition, a composer whose music is always religious in some sense–or at least the memory of it is tinged with some religious element.
Second is the odd use (to a musician) of the word “modulations.” Modulations of course are changes of key, but the only thing I can make of the passage is that we’re asked to imagine that in the memory of the father’s playing the melodic lines are all blurred, so that we don’t really hear distinct notes or chords at all (as when you just hold down the damper pedal on a piano instead of “shifting” it–not the way a musician would describe changing the pedal, but I think this must be what he means). In fact “modulation” in Bach’s day still meant something along the lines of “creating a good melody,” which perhaps is what a non-musician today might still suppose it means.
I realize these are details. But as it’s June 16, I’m reminded of commentators who used to describe the “fugue” in the Sirens chapter of Ulysses seemingly without having any clear idea of what the word means to a musician. Is this still done? There are, or were–I haven’t kept up with Joyce criticism–a number of other musical terms as well, like “counterpoint,” that at one time seem to have gained shadow meanings among literary critics or scholars. I wonder if something similar happens when Nurske and maybe other poets touch on musical matters. As far as I can recall, Joyce himself never did this, although I’ve always wondered about the fugue idea (if it really came from him). Tenors do tend to pay attention just to their own part…
Just some thoughts inspired by your blog–sorry for the length. Best wishes–