SECOND OPINIONS: MORNING WITH THE MAZURS
Listening to Virko Baley’s chamber music piece, Orpheus Singing, I felt myself drifting through a twilit landscape in which the song must be imagined rising above smokey marshes. Soon I found myself in a space defined wholely by sound.
The story of Orpheus and Euridyce is one of the most poignant in all mythology. Heartbroken by his wife’s untimely death, Orpheus, the musician-son of Apollo, is determined to retrieve her from Hades. He succeeds in charming all who stand in his way. It’s only through his own momentary lapse of faith that he loses her again. As the only mortal, aside from Hercules, to harrow hell and survive, Orpheus has, from the start, symbolized the power of music and poetry to conquer time and move across hidden dimensions of being. He brings together two mysteries: music and language, from a time when the two were all but one.
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Great elegies contest with death. Perhaps they dare it because they share Auden’s orphic faith that nature worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives. In a sequence of delicate and deeply moving poems, Gail Mazur recreates moments in her life with her late husband, the painter Michael Mazur, whose monoprint “Tulips” adorns the cover of her new book, Forbidden City.
The eponymous title poem opens with the speaker waking late, having dreamed she’d been granted another year with her beloved partner. She quickly realizes her mistake: “Then, half-awake, the half-truth — //this is our last day.” Why a “half-truth?” Is the poet saying this really isn’t “the last day?” That this is the poem’s fiction? Or that it’s not the last day because he will continue living in her memory?
She then recalls the couple’s visit to the Chinese Imperial Palace, the “Forbidden City,” in the center of Beijing. The palace complex contains nearly 1000 buildings, one of which is called the Hall of Fullfilling Original Wishes. The killer moment in the poem occurs when the speaker reports her late husband saying “‘Time is the treasure…/and the past is its hiding place.’” The speaker immediately reverses the formulation: “The past is the treasure, time//is its hiding place….”
After inventorying memories of travel, travail, and mutual friendships, the apparent continuity of objects and possessions rather than beings unsettles: “Our lives passed like a morning mist/or a night flame whose candle’s burned away.” Language remains the writer’s only shield against loss. Whether time or the past are the treasure is less important than the fact that both depend on words to conjure them into being. Yet being itself is strictly a matter of the present tense. The book’s final poem, “Grief,” ends with a quote from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”
When the speaker of the title poem stirs from her wish-fullfilling dream, another reality awaits her: “I wake, I hold your hand, you let me go.” The line evokes the ending of Milton’s celebrated elegy to his late wife: “I woke, she fled/And day brought back my night.”
“Death,” wrote Saul Bellow, “is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” It’s the original borderland, inscribing the frame inside which we’re bound to live. Yet what seems absolute and clearly delimited in the physical realm becomes malleable and porous in the laboratory of the imagination.
The key to the Forbidden City is forged of an alloy of art fused with love. Yet even it may not open all the doors: “Love can do all but raise the dead,” writes Emily Dickinson. Love and art may not give us access to the past in the way we would like, in the way we’ve grown accustomed to experiencing the present, and so we remain haunted by our expectations, attempting to cling to a moment even as it vanishes, wishing we could sing the joy as it flies. We are always departing.
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Hooked by an oboe, I immersed in Baley’s hauntingly delicate yet surprisingly tensile piece. Immersed may not be the right word. The music pierces even as each note opens a path before you, like a flashlight stabbing at the dark. The oboe’s questing, tentative voice seems the perfect analogue for Orpheus’s lyre.
Music, which Rilke called the breathing of statues, begins where language ends. Poetry, however, scores language as though it were music. To recreate the ultimate journey across the border separating life from death requires imaginative boldness. The story of Orpheus and Euridyce honors both art and the power of the artist to stand in opposition both to the natural as well as the supernatural order while simultaneously acknowledging our limitations, if not necessarily our limits.
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Every morning, one of the first sights I see, because it hangs above my study desk, is Michael Mazur’s lithograph illustrating the final canto of Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. A vortex of swirling black and white frames the opening Dante and Virgil discover after scaling Lucifer’s crotch: a blue sky dappled with stars, and in the center, the mountain of Purgatory they have yet to climb.
