1
Someone asked me where the poem “came from”— and this is an attempt to answer that question. It is also an acknowledgement that answering such a question cannot be definitive, for the nature of poems, of the material of a poem, eludes its creator in conversation.
After all, the color of fire has never been properly established. What does fire say? How do we hear a thing whose breath is smoke?
2
The poem in question was published in a 2019 issue of Prairie Schooner. I reproduce it below, as it first appeared— though later versions are slightly different.
3
Someone told me that the will-o'-the-wisp — that flame-like phosphorescence which flits over marshy ground due to the spontaneous combustion of gasses from decaying vegetable matter — is a wandering fire. And each wandering fire is actually the spirit of a stillborn child who wanders between heaven and the inferno.
4
There was music and literature in it. Also: money, or the art of 'making money' alongside modernity's questions of self-fashioning. The gun of those absent kreutzers in Leo Tolstoy's 1891 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata. The question of art as it intersects with life, marriage, virtue, and family.
In 1923, on the edge of October and into November, Leos Janácek composed a string quartet based on the Kreutzer Sonata. This quartet wasn't his first tribute to Tolstoy's scandalous novella: Janácek had written a Kreutzer-inspired Piano Trio in three movements in 1908-9, honoring Tolstoy's eightieth birthday that year, and this piano trio had been performed in Brno the following April, at a chamber concert. The Kreutzer piano trio appeared in local piano repertoires until 1922, when Janácek disemboweled it by pulling the material into his first string quartet, and destroying the piano version.
Some musicologists refer to Janácek’s 1908 Piano Trio as “now lost.” But this underestimates the composer a bit. I think some things must be destroyed. And they are. This, too, is part of art.
5
Janácek's First Quartet situates itself firmly within the scandal of chamber music, as carried by the quartet form into bourgeois homes of the late nineteenth century. Each of the four movements touches itself somehow, or exists in that intimate self-consciousness birthed by proximity.
00:00 - I. Adagio - Con moto
The opening adagio in E minor moves as if carried along a river, silvered with the short violin motif that resembles what Janácek called "the sigh of the Volga" in another piece. The cello enters and expands the melody, picking up the viola's ostinato triplets and smashing against the broken chords of the Vivo only to finish, bewildered, quivering, with an echo of that opening sigh motif.
04:47 - II. Con moto
The second movement is a scherzo in A flat minor, a form laden with associations of elegant dances in salons, overseen by the presidium of coquettes and gentleman bachelors. The aroma of inherited wealth rustles through the heavy curtain fabric as the viola picks up the polka-like melody. Dances like the polka cue us to a particular kind of social performance that celebrates constraint and inhibition, the kissing cousin of aestheticized elegance. A mouthful in that moistness—
Suddenly, the viola introduces a new motif marked sul ponticello (indicating to be "played near the bridge”). This anguished, slightly horrified motif works against the convention of the polka. There are the markings as understood by the performer of this viola motif. And there are the markings as understood by the reader of bridges, and the resonances of the Bridge of Sighs that appear elsewhere, in a different piece, tuned to a different time.
[Viola, what have you done?]
6
Her name was Kamila Stösslová. She was happily married to a well-to-do doctor, secure in her life and finances, surrounded by household staff and care, a mother with time on her hands to live and read and exist, in addition to the labor of parenting. Both Leos and Kamila were married. It began and then ended.
It began and ended and went on forever.
7
08:58 - III. Con moto - Vivo - Andante
The third movement is marked “lightly, timidly”. Here, the duet between violin and cello evokes the theme in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy introduces into his novella when it is performed at a concert given by Pozdnishev's wife and her admirer. The sul ponticello expands to cover new figurations as Janácek builds from his signature staggered parts, combining ostinatos and rhythmic diminutions of themes, landing in this multi-layered texture of sound. A musician pointed out to me that double and triple time alternate in this third movement, as do the passage markings which switch between sul ponticello and naturale. Finally, the Vivo sinks into the suspended calm of the Andante, where the mood seems closer to whispering and worry.
12:51 - IV. Con moto - (Adagio) - Più mosso
As if keyed to chorus, the first movement returns in the final movement; the chorale is woven through with a sad, aching melody marked 'jako v sizách' (as if in tears). The lamenting viola returns; the second violin drags us over shattered chords; various themes and their variations wind again into a multi-layered texture of widening intervals with a chromatic melodic line. Flickers and flashes: allusions to the opening theme vanish in the descending octave leaps, which Janacek marked 'zoufale' (in desperation), repeatedly. In desperation. Both themes reappear; the motifs and figurations intermingle until the opening theme of the quartet returns, played fortissimo and 'feroce' (ferociously). The final bars abandon the lament for a marking that reads 'slavnostne, jako varhany' (in a festive manner, like the organ), forcing the tempestuous flow into a climax that evokes the river at the piece’s opening.
8
After watching his sonata rehearsed by the Bohemian Quartet, Janacek wrote to Kamila, raving. If you had only imagined the piece and then heard it come together. If you saw her black hair moving through the bars of a rhyme. If you fell in love with what she inspired and felt your innermost being embodied in it.
"I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata", Janácek wrote to Kamila. But where Tolstoy abandoned his heroine to vice and moralistic punishment, Janácek’s Quartet lamented her powerlessness, and revealed the limited options granted to women.
Surely Janácek's own wife, Zdenka, read Tolstoy's novella. Surely she recognized herself as the woman Tolstoy would have preferred, the angel on the pedestal. Surely it stung to discover that her husband was re-composing a happily-married woman straight into his own arms and fantasies?
According to archives and scholars, Zdenka did in fact express her rue to Zina Veselá, the wife of the reporter Adolf Veselý. And, many years later, Zina told an interviewer that she looked at the composer and his wife and "thought: poor devils, both of them." At a performance of Káta Kabanová, Janácek told Zina that he'd wanted a persecuted woman to be the subject for Káta. As Zina told the interviewer:
'He did not have to look far, I thought . . . I have been pondering why that marriage of his was so unhappy. I think that it was simply out of boredom. Zdenka was a virtuous wife, always the same voice, the same walk; she was insipid, always the same. His heart was aflame with his belated success, and he also longed for success in his personal life.'
9
Although Janácek's seventieth birthday was celebrated with a production of his Taras Bulba in Brno, what he wanted most in 1924 was to lay his eyes upon Kamila. His wish was granted at the end of June, when he first visited the Stössels' home in Pisck, and spent three, shadowless days there, surrounded by laughter and merry-making. Kamila winding through his letters—her 'raven black hair undone', her bare feet moving across the floors of the house, her spontaneous affections and charm, that sense of continuous vitality.
10
— To whom is the poem faithful?
— To itself.
— Who does it serve?
— That flush of emotion that birthed it.
— Who does it betray?
— The world.
11
"Loving, believing in someone or something does not mean accepting dogmas and doctrines as true . . ."
Giorgio Agamben's words punctuate the images as I flip through an album of old photos. Loving, believing is, for Agamben, "rather, like remaining faithful to the emotion that one felt as a child looking up at the starry sky." The sky offers our loves as constellations, the melodies of relationships that shape us, the motifs that become figurations.
"I have tried not to forget them, tried to keep the word I tacitly gave," Agamben writes. But ultimately, it is not the sky that sustains him. His hopes and beliefs are placed elsewhere. If queried about this ‘elsewere,’ Agamben says, "I could only confess in a lowered voice: not in the sky above— but in the grass," in the soil that gives and sustains life:
In the grass— in all its forms, the tufts of slender blades, the soft clover, the lupin, the borage, the snowdrops, the dandelions, the lobelia and the calamint, but also the couch grass and nettles in all their subspecies, and the noble acanthus, which covers part of the garden where I walk every day. The grass, the grass is God. In the grass—in God—are all those whom I have loved. For the grass and in the grass and like the grass I have lived and will live.
A mountain in the mouth: this langue hidden within this language.