Victor Nizovtsev- Harlequin on a Swing |
V. Nizovtsev - Harlequin with Lock and Key |
V.Nizovtsev - Candlelight |
V. Nizovtsev - Mermaid Curves |
Victor Nizovtsev - Memory p |
“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.” Don DeLillo
Victor Nizovtsev- Harlequin on a Swing |
V. Nizovtsev - Harlequin with Lock and Key |
V.Nizovtsev - Candlelight |
V. Nizovtsev - Mermaid Curves |
Victor Nizovtsev - Memory p |
Painting by Victor Nizovtsev |
WASTING
The flowing of our veins
was clotted maybe
or is it that your smile
did not satiate me
so now my heathen steps
are bearing me away.
The cigarette could have turned
into ashes
and your lips must have drifted
into smoke puffs…
Maybe a leaf has fallen
and turned into the ground
that I am treading on
without a sound…
So all that we are now
is just a gust of wind
muffled into the corners
of I “can” and not “weep”.
Perhaps summer is gone
and we are left with autumn
or I may be quite sleepless
Please forgive me, mistress.
Poems from the volume "Mirror Sucide" (2021, Cartea de Dupa)
Victor Nizovtsev - Alrauna |
RISIPIRE
Poate că venele noastre
Nu s-au legat destul,
Poate că zâmbetul tău
Nu m-a lăsat sătul
Și pașii mei păgâni
Mă poartă departe.
Poate ca țigara
s-a transformat în scrum
și buzele tale
sunt acum doar un fum
ce pluteste departe…
Poate că frunza a căzut
Și-acum e pământ
Călcat de tapa mea
Dezlegată de cânt…
Poate că noi suntem acum
Doar o adiere de vânt
sufocată-n unghere,
în “pot” și nu “plâng”.
Poate că vara a trecut
Și de-acum e doar toamnă
sau n-am dormit destul
te rog, iartă-mă, doamnă.
Poeme din volumul Sinucidere in oglinda (2021, Cartea de Dupa)
Victor Nizovtsev - Fall Bouquet |
Motto: Whatever it was has happened.
The
battle, the sunny day, the moonlit
slipping into
lust, the farewell kiss. The poem
washes ashore
like flotsam. (Atwood 2020:3)
The volume under discussion poses the following challenge: whether it can be connected to the Covid-19 pandemic, given that it was published slightly before its full onset. I would argue it can and in fact that it should be, due to the undeniable reality of poetic intuition that is able to foresee what is coming upon us. We must never forget that the poet is a visionary, a maker and seer of things (from the Greek term poiesis, meaning “production” or “creation”). This is valid in Margaret Atwood’s case anyway, since she is a literary genius: Dearly presents us with the “bone face” of “the cold grey moon” - a yet-invisible, soon to be revealed, terrifying truth, which in our case may be construed as the spreading of the ominous virus. The title itself is problematic due to ellipsis: is the one word coming from “dearly beloved /missed” or does it refer to things that cost us “dearly”? Maybe all that into one and even more! From the grammarly viewpoint, the ellipsis suggests a state of dependence upon something else (since an adverb or an adjective is always depending upon its verb or noun). This subaltern ‘something’ can however be subversive since it also determines the thing on which it depends. So who is the ‘dearly’ and who is the ‘beloved’ in this story that Atwood spells through her pandemic verses? Hopefully, the close readings attempted below will elucidate this mystery of condensed narrative that exploits subliminally all the possibilities of fiction while resorting to overpowering lyricism which makes poetry a close relative of music.
As Rae Langton argues in her essay on Love and Solipsism, the Socratic imperative of knowing oneself was further enhanced by Kant’s putting it in relationship to a (dearly) beloved “other” (a true friend or lover). Thus, love would be a way out of the solipsistic tendency of the ego but it depends on the person if they really want to improve their knowledge of themselves with the help of this benevolent other or not. For instance, in Proust’s Looking for Time Lost, the departure of Albertine only serves to trigger a chemical reaction in the brain of the main character – a reaction which brings with it the epiphany of love: he misses her instantly, therefore he knows that is capable of love. But that is all, an instant illumination followed by inaction, he will not chase after her because for Proust’s alter-ego, writing is a much more alluring path to pursue self-knowledge than sexual attraction. I believe that my investigation below is in keeping with the Socratic, as well as Kantian approaches to self-knowledge, yet one may be wondering as one reads Atwood’s verse: is humanity capable of evading the prison of the self and opening up to the other (s)? I would argue that the diversity of instantiations of the concept of love illustrated in the selection of poems presented below may support the above point – and even those poems in which the feeling of love does not represent the main theme are pervaded by such a deep awareness of (human) nature that there is no doubt about the fulfillment of the Socratic/Kantian imperative at least as regards the author herself, whose own words confirm it: “We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”[1]
Ghost Cat is
a poem about identification with a beloved pet which is part of one’s familiar
universe and the inadvertent carrier of one’s anxiety about the specter of
dementia that runs in the family, which leads to fear of being abandoned by
your loved ones in times of need and estrangement from humanity:
Then up the
stairs she’d come, moth-footed,
owl-eyed,
wailing
like a tiny,
fuzzy steam train: Ar-woo! Ar-woo!
So witless and
erased. O, who?
Clawing at the
bedroom door
shut tight
against her. Let me in,
Enclose me, tell me who I was.
[Atwood 2020:4]
Blizzard is a poem about the love for one’s old, sick mother; it doesn’t mention feelings, except those that are obvious from the speaker’s position at the bedside of her parent (“I put my hand on her forehead/stroke her wispy hair” – page 8) and in the final double interrogation, resonant with ambiguity (“Why can’t I let go of her?/ Why can’t I let her go?” - idem)
Coconut, on the other hand, is a poem about the love of
taste, in this specific case – coconut tasted for the very first time:
First taste of
sheer ambrosia!
Though mixed
with ash and the shards of destruction
as Heaven always
is, if you read the texts closely.
[Atwood 2020: 9]
Souvenirs is above love as a form of
piecing back together, as in a dream, the imaged of a dear one. The process
consists of remembering a person by combining fancy and memory with
subconscious fears and desires. Ironically, these personal “memories” are
presented as souvenirs that the one in your dreams presents you with when you
dream of her:
This
is what I’ve brought back for you
From
the dreamlife, from the alien moon shore,
from
the place with no clocks.
It
has no color, but it has powers,
Though
I don’t know what they are
nor
how it unlocks.
Here,
it’s yours now.
Remember
me.
[Atwood
2020: 11]
In this case, the poetic persona
is an active one that travels through dreamland as an explorer would in outer
space and brings boons that surpass the waking wisdom. One is reminded here by
the recent fantasy series on Netflix, The
Sandman, in which the main hero is the Master of Dreams and a God that can
coexist both in the dream realm and in the waking world. And then there is the
connection one can make between watching online streaming videos rather than
going out to a cinema for the movies, so that virtual reality becomes the daily
nourishment for our fantasy.
In The Tin Woman Gets a Massage, Atwood confesses to avoiding any
feeling in order not to get hurt. She, symbolically, lacks “a heart” just like
the Tin Man lacked a brain. But, as we know only too well, a feature that one
hopes to inhibit or thinks that is missing may in fact be denied or
unacknowledged:
Me, it’s the
heart:
that’s the part
lacking.
I used to want
one:
A dainty cushion
of red silk
dangling from a
blood ribbon,
fit for sticking
pins in.
But I’ve changed
my mind.
Hearts hurt.
[Atwood 2020:
12]
Obviously, the persona in the
poem used to have a heart! How else would she know they hurt if not from
personal experience? A seeming continuation of this idea is to be found in the
poem entitled If there were no emptiness,
in which the author’s persona praises
the importance of distance and vacancy as prerequisites for the co-existence of
entities:
It there were no
emptiness there would be no life.
Think about it.
All those
electrons, particles, and whatnot
crammed in next
to each other like junk in an attic,
like trash in a
compactor
smashed together
in a flat block
so there’s
nothing but plasma:
no you no me.
[Atwood 2020:
13]
Another image evoked in the poem
is that of an empty motel room that nobody used for seventy years. Intuitively,
the poetic imagination seems to be anticipating the vacuity created by the
Covid-19 epidemic: deserted malls and parks, empty halls and streets, closed
shops and stores etc. These vacuous spaces only engender an impatient craving
for openness and proximity to the other(s), a desire for happening and plot:
That room has
been static for me for so long:
an
emptiness a void a silence
containing an
unheard story
ready for me to
unlock.
[idem: 14]
Human sexual activity is not
explicitly present in the lines of these poems, except for a few hints.
Instead, there is a rather consistent presentation of the animal world (mainly
insects) teeming with erotic energy and from here follows the logical
comparison with the human world which can be either explicit or implicit. Our
attention is drawn by two successive poems entitled Cicadas and Double Entry Slug
Sex. The former highlights the building tension caused by the seclusion of
at least one of the partners and then the feeling of ephemerality and closeness
to death which intensifies desire and renders the passion paroxistic:
This is it, time
is short, death is near, but first
first, first,
first
in the hot sun,
searing, all day long,
in a month that
has no name:
this annoying
noise of love. This maddening racket.
This - admit it
- song.
[Atwood 2020:
22]
The
second poem is more ironic than melodramatic in describing the particular
mating habits of the snails, but its ending carries a similar existential
despair and anxiety:
By daylight
something’s got to give.
Or someone. Some
one
has got to give.
A given.
That’s how we
carry on.
[Atwood 2020:
24]
In
Everyone Else’s Sex Life, the lyrical
discourse transports us from stark disillusionment to a recreation of magic –
that is, going against the grain, from the sordid realism of sexual promiscuity
to the romantic enchantment that bears the name of Love. However, its final description in the guise of a circus is
meant to serve as cautionary image, reminding one of the twists and turns in
the Dr. Parnassus[2] movie:
So tempting,
that faux-marble arch,
both fun-fair
and classical –
so Greek, so
Barnum,
such a beacon,
with a sign in
gas-blue neon:
Love! This way! In!
[Atwood 2020:
26]
The same bitter aftertaste is to
be found in the following poem, entitled Betrayal.
Here, the disenchantment is equally abrupt in striking the lyrical persona who
is imagined opening the door on a pair of sinful lovers (her partner and his
mistress) and being shocked not so much by the confirmation of her suspicions
as by an invalidation of idealized Love:
Yet,
it was betrayal,
but
not of you.
Only
of some idea you’d had
of
them, soft-lit and mystic,
with
snowfall sifting down
and
a mauve December sunset –
not
this gauche flash,
this
flesh akimbo (…)
[Atwood
2020: 27]
I would like to add a few words
only about the original rhyming in this poem. There are only two instances of
follow-up rhymes which effectively serve to counterpoint the main ideas: in the
first stanza “bed” rhymes with “said” (“When you stumble across your lover and
your friend/ naked in or on your bed/ there are things that might be said.”)
and in the last one, “glare” rhymes with “stare” (“caught in the glare of your
stare”). Caught in between these glimpses of a shameful act, the lyrical
persona is the righteous voyeur for whom the visualization of such intimacy is
akin to physical molestation. However, the simple fact of witnessing this
disgraceful union makes the third party integral to the act which they will be
inescapably performing as a trio in her (guilty?) mind from now on:
Goodbye
is not one of them.
You’ll
never close that clumsily opened door,
They’ll
be stuck in that room forever.
[Atwood
2020: 27]
A
pattern can be said to emerge from poems such as the above or the one entitled Princess Clothing. The author of the
verses takes an almost sadomasochistic pleasure in tormenting her own lyrical
persona in the sense of revealing to (what can be construed as) an innocent
alter ego the fact that, no matter how pure of heart or of high social/moral
ranking one may be, corruption and downfall are eventually unavoidable; hers is
the natural wisdom of the cycle of seasons or the wheel of fortune, if you
like, but the reader cannot escape the feeling that there is something
malicious in the pure relish of lines such as these:
Silk, however,
is best for
shrouds.
That’s where it
comes from, silk:
those seven
veils the silkworm keeps spinning,
hoping they will
be butterflies.
Then they get
boiled, and then unscrolled.
It’s what you
hope too, right?
That beyond
death, there’s flight?
After the
shrouding, up you’ll rise,
Delicate wings
and all. Oh, honey,
It won’t be like
that.
Not quite.
[Atwood 2020:
21]
The Dear Ones
is about the
intensity of loss and longing after the dearly departed. The author alludes to
a legend about a bunch of children that were lured underground by the playing
of a magic flute. This came as a punishment for their parents who had refused
to give a piper his due. The legend says
that they went underground and exited in a totally different place or time. The
poem imagines, in a similar fashion, the dear ones departing from us and
returning only when it is too late, when all who loved them are gone
themselves. The poem reveals how not only the living suffer from the feeling of
loss and despair but also the dead. Death is like an irresistible magic call or
a cruel game, the ones who must die obey the rules and disappear, while the
remaining ones start to resemble ghosts, inhabited as it were by an absence of
song:
Where? Where?
After a while
You sound like a
bird.
You stop but the
sorrow goes on calling.
It leaves you and flies out
Over the cold
night fields,
searching and
searching,
over the river,
over the emptied
air.
[Atwood 2020: 41]
I want to conclude with a rather destabilizing
image from the poem Zombie, which
appears towards the end of the volume. In this poem, a strange similarity
emerges between the act of poetry-making (conjuring up memories) and the
spreading of a deadly virus, both presented as consequences of a faulty dealing
with the past: <“Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts” like a
virus, like an infection.>, says Atwood quoting Rilke. Zombie is a poem about the risks of dealing with unresolved issues
that haunt and infect us when we try to resurrect them. And love itself is part
of the past that comes back to us through the words of the poem:
Stay dead! Stay dead! you conjure,
you who wanted
the past back.
Nothing doing.
The creature
ambles through
the dim forest,
a red weeping
monosyllable,
a smeared word
tasting of sorrow.
(…)
The hand on your
shoulder. The almost hand:
Poetry, coming
to claim you.
[Atwood 2020: 57]
Conclusions
Similarly
to this poetic haunting, the pandemic experience has taken us through an
undesirable journey of self knowledge, placing upon our shoulders, from the
mirror-side, an ice-cold finger which reminds us of the proximity of death or
an imminent separation from humanity. Margaret Atwood’s poems were mostly
written before the onset of the pandemics but they are imbued with an obvious
sense of emergency and glimpses at future prospects that echo many of the
states and feelings that most members of the audience have experienced during
the Covid-19 crisis: anxiety, seclusion, desolation, despair (on the dark side)
and exhilaration, romance, togetherness, even hope (on the bright side). These
are poems that teach invaluable lessons about humanity and warn us regarding
the implications of being all too human: that means a state of exposure and
vulnerability to life’s many pitfalls. From her vantage position of wisdom and
authority, Atwood proposes a lucid, mildly ironic and frequently grotesque
vision that drags humanity bare-naked into the limelight. This sudden awakening
which her verse performs on the reader’s conscience has a double effect: one is
entertaining an adamic notion of the beauty and joy of creation and the other,
experiencing a chilling confrontation with the specters of death and suffering.
The readers of Dearly are therefore
privileged, two-in-one, consumers of a complete poetic experience. And with
experience comes resignation, which we must all have shared in the last two
years.
Bibliography
Atwood, M. (2021). Dearly. VINTAGE, London.
---.https://lovequotes.symphonyoflove.net/margaret-atwood-love-quotes-and-love-sayings.html
Langton, R. https://lovequotes.symphonyoflove.net/margaret-atwood-love-quotes-and-love-sayings.html
Wolf, S. and Grau
C.(Eds.). (2014). Understanding Love:
Philosophy, Film, and Fiction. Oxford U.P.
[1] Quote from The Grave of the Famous Poet,
Dancing Girls and Other Stories.
[2] The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), guest-starring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp and Jude Law, among others. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054606/
knotted kerchief
I
speak lies in the parlor
pressure
bares the mind
I
shake my arms
then
my feet
as
I unknot
the
kerchief
I
tie ribbons
in
my hair
mercy
flows through the
mellow
pains
a
lullaby
inside
a mutilated
female
body
the knife through the heart
I
still have some
crying
to do
the
knife in my heart
has
fallen ill
I
keep burying ropes
keep
digging out
the
hanged
underneath
my eyelid
darkness
enters
carrying
a cane
madwooman with a beret
the
three-star hotel
has
no exits
I
wake up
to
test my courage
in
the common-sensical way
an
idealist is selling my
poems
I
ingest the amphetamine
leftovers
from when I suffered
of
melancholy
I
am a madwoman
with
a beret
no
one shall be dying today
different lives
I
scatter bread
through
different lives
I
keep muffling the noises
In
too big a house
I
spread out the paint
I
surrender with flowers
behind
my ears
domestic traffic
I
forgot to add sugar
to
coffee
I
am flicking through a Japanese magazine
the
letters emerge
from
an imaginary square
bonds
do not endure
the
space becomes narrow
for
decorating
I
keep up domestic traffic
around
my kitchen
hanging
a garland
breaking
a glass
I
am changing
the
order
two
steps away from here
they
are selling candy by the kilo
hide-and seek with snakes
I
reach out my hand for the planes
I
put back the apple
I
am putting on my new dress
the
horizon is teeming
with
stretcher-bearers
as
if reminiscing
of
phnom pehn
I
am playing hide-and seek
with
snakes
I
am the bravest woman
of
all
I
climb on the stretcher
all
by myself
I
take an apple bite
water is woman
out
of the bones of the earth
there
fall out splinters
squeezed
out cold
the
snails are hibernating
rains
come and wash
the
closed mirrors
with
sweetened bandages
I
dress up the serpent’s bite
water
is woman
I’m
trying to pluck out
a
splinter from my finger
lithium
I
keep hearing things
finding
lost items in my mind
at
the gym I simplify ideas
following
Descartes’
algebraic
formula
I
swallow lithium,
whose
drops make me hug
each
and every one
a
clairvoyant strips down my
dead
so
happy am I
and
so sad
neck-tie knot
I
am folding the cuff where’s an end
to
caresses
blindness
keeps details apart
there’s
a Riesling bottle on the shelf
for
singular nights
I
fasten up too tight
the
knot on your tie
rambling
I
am the other one
I
think you know
what
I mean
you
remember me
when
I make you laugh
it
is enough for us to
go
rambling about
I
care not if
the
ending begins
we
are floating
the
sky is falling
the
sun is rising
upon
my knee
the bee in the kerchief
a
late departure
fulfills
the prophecy
the
birds alone keep feeding me
I
receive honey
in
a ritual for the living
one
Monday
I
cure the bee in the kerchief
the
day sinks below
the
beams of the roof
I
unravel the hairs
of
my silken tapestry
lemon trees and sangria
biting
on the absence
I
fall to my knees
I
gather the ocean
inside
bottles
at
the terrace with lemon trees and sangria
I
read about forgetting things
warming
up rocks
washing
hands
I
am scared of tall
mirrors
***
basma cu noduri
la
interogatoriu spun minciuni
presiunea
golește mințile
dau
din mâini
apoi
din picioare
dezleg
basmaua
cu
noduri
îmi
răsucesc arnici
în
păr
prin
junghiuri moi
curge
mila
cântec
de leagăn
într-un
trup mutilat
de
femeie
cuțitul din inimă
mai
am ceva
de
plans
mi
s-a îmbolnăvit cuțitul
din
inimă
peste
tot îngrop frânghii
peste
tot dezgrop
spânzurați
sub
pleoapa mea
întunericul
intră
în
baston
nebună cu bască
hotelul
cu trei stele
nu
are ieșiri
mă
trezesc
dau
probe practice
de
curaj
un
idealist îmi vinde
poeziile
îmi
iau amfetamina
rămasă
de când sufeream
de
melancolie
sunt
o nebuna
cu
bască
nu
va muri nimeni
azi
vieți diferite
risipesc
pâine
prin
vieți diferite
acopăr
zgomote
într-o
casă prea mare
întind
vopseaua
mă
predau cu flori
la
ureche
trafic domestic
am
uitat să pun zahăr
în
cafea
răsfoiesc
o revistă japoneză
literele
ies
din
pătratul imaginar
legăturile
nu durează
spațiul
devine strâmt
pentru
amenajări
în
bucătărie întrețin
un
trafic domestic
agăț
o ghirlandă
sparg
un pahar
schimb
ordinea
la
doi pasi se vând
bomboane
vărsate
de-a v-ați-ascunselea cu șerpi
întind
mâna după avioane
pun
mărul la loc
îmbrac
rochia nouă
orizontul
se umple
de
brancardieri
ca
într-o amintire
despre
phnom pehn
mă
joc de-a v-ați -ascunselea
cu
șerpi
sunt
cea mai
curajoasă
femeie
urc
singură
pe
targă
mușc
din măr
apa este femeie
din
oasele pământului
sar
așchii
prin
presare la rece
melcii
hibernează
vin
ploile care spală
ferestre
închise
cu
pansamente dulci
șterg
mușcătura de șarpe
apa este femeie
mă
chinui să scot
o
țeapă din deget
litiu
aud
lucruri care nu sunt
în
gând găsesc ce pierd
la
sala de forță simplific idei
după
calculul algebric
al
lui Descartes
înghit
litiu
picăturile
mă fac să-i îmbrățișez
pe
toți
o
clarvăzătoare îmi dezbracă
morții
ce
fericită sunt
și
cât de tristă
nodul de la cravată
îndoi
manșeta unde se termină
mângâierile
orbirea
separă detalii
păstrez
o sticlă de Riesling
pentru
nopți la singular
îți
strâng prea tare nodul
de
la cravată
razna
sunt
celalată
cred
că știi
despre
ce vorbesc
mă
ții minte
când
te fac să râzi
ne
ajunge
să
o luăm razna
nu-mi
pasă dacă
începe
sfârșitul
plutim
cerul
cade
soarele
răsare
pe
genunchiul meu
albina din năframă
o
plecare târzie
împlinește
profeția
numai
păsările mă hrănesc
primesc
miere
dintr-un
ritual
pentru
cei vii
într-o
luni
vindec
albina din năframă
ziua
scade
sub
grinzile casei
îmi
descurc părul
în
țesătoria mea
de
brocart
lâmăi
și sangria
mușc
din absență
cad
în genunchi
adun
oceanul
în
sticle
la
terasa cu lâmâi și sangria
citesc
despre uitări
încălzesc
pietre
spăl
mâini
mă
sperie oglinzile
înalte