Why this recycling? I will be away for a couple of days at a conference. Too bad that I am leaving the Valley when it is going to be awesomely sunny, warm, spring days. And the clouds and rain will be back when I return! Oh well, a man has got to do what a man has got to do ;)
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On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme
from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?
He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!
He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.
I have often mentioned in this blog about how the high school curriculum in the old country didn't give me a real taste for poetry. Of course, when the English teacher slapped me around for no fault of mine, the last thing I wanted to do was to pay attention even to the little bit of poetry that we had. And thus a prosaic life it has been.
I could read poems on my own, yes. After all, we live in the modern world where practically every poem that is worth reading is only a mouse-click away.
But, there are two hassles with this approach. One, I have come to believe that poems are for the ear than for the eye. I recall attending Frank Bidart's poetry reading a few years ago and sitting there transfixed listening him. The same poem on paper was not even half impressive.
Second, poets write one thing and mean something else that I am supposed to decipher. Poems, that way, are like women where we men are left smashing our heads into concrete walls yelling, "why couldn't you have said that in the first place?" ;)
Take the much quoted T.S. Eliot line, "April is the cruellest month." In order to understand this line, I will then have to read the whole damn long coded stuff the guy wrote decades ago. At least if a poet read that out, I can pay attention and enjoy the rhyme and the reason. On my own, everything is without rhyme or reason!
And when I tried reading that once, it was a Ulysses experience--as in I barely got started and I shut it off and went to play a round of bridge! But, as I scanned through, I came across the Sanskrit word of shanti. I wonder what the whole damn thing is about. I will never know; I blame it all on the big fat slapper.
Whether or not April is the cruellest month, it is coming to an end in this part of the world. In the old country, it has already ended and the real cruelty will begin, with the heat and dust of the Indian summer. So, as a bridge between the old and the new country, with the segue provided by shanti via Eliot, perhaps I can close out this poetry month with a couplet from the old country.
The rhythmic and mellifluous chant of this couplet is a sheer joy to listen to in a real world setting:
puranam adah, purnam idam, purnat purnam udacyate
purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavasisyate.
which translates to:
That is infinite, this is infinite;
From That infinite this infinite comes.
From That infinite, this infinite removed or added;
Infinite remains infinite
Of course, the infinite that is referred to here is way more than mathematical concept, and if often interpreted through hours and hour of lectures that are devoted to each and every word in the couplet. But, hey, it is poetry where words mean way more than what we think they are!
On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme
from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?
He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!
He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.
