Edwin Denby

In the early seventies, Trungpa Rinpoche was newly arrived in the US and was anxious to explore as many cultural scenes as he could. One evening, accompanied by Vivian Kurz, he went to a party of poets and theater people. Robert Wilson, Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Meredith Monk were among the many guests, but when Rinpoche arrived, he immediately took an interest in Edwin Denby.

Denby was, at that time was in his 70’s, a distinguished poet and America’s foremost ballet critic. He was a tidy, fastidious man, and a little bemused to find himself being grilled by a vigorously intense hard-drinking Tibetan. The conversation went on for a half hour before they were swept apart.

Late in the evening, Rinpoche had drunk a good deal and his companions were ready to leave. But he insisted on seeing Denby before he left. Denby was slightly appalled to find this sweating Tibetan man now embracing him and kissing him on the mouth.

“You are a true living Boddhisattve.” Rinpoche told him over and over.

In remembering this story, I have often been moved that Trungpa Rinpoche not only paid such attention to Denby, but also felt it so important to speak to him in this way. The Buddhist term Boddhisattva, one who has vowed to put others before himself and postpone liberation from cyclical existence until all other sentient beings have attained liberation, would have meant little or nothing to Denby. And yet Rinpoche found it urgent for him to know himself in this particular way.

Because of this story and because I am not particularly taken by western classical ballet so would like to understand what eludes me here, I’ve often read, and re-read Denby’s essays on ballet. His writing is astonishing for it’s simplicity, open-heartedness, overall enthusiasm and genuine love, all of which inform a scrupulously detailed way of looking at dance and dancers and inform a lovely clarity of articulation.

For instance this, chosen almost at random:

“When you watch a girl moving about a room you sometimes guess what the quality of movement ‘means’. It I not that she expresses herself by making hand gestures, she does it by the rhythm of her actions. We often understand animals that way and they us. And in love we all know how dramatic such a moment of understanding is. It seems to tell more than any words and say it more irrevocably. And this is the natural phenomenon on which the art of ballet is built as a convincing human expression.” (Dance Writing, Ballet Theatre’s Season May 1945 Edwin Denby, Knopf1986 p.

Conscientiousness

I

"The waiter plays with his condition
in order to attain it." -J.P.Sartre

Without Place or Name
The Body is an object on loan.

Location then
Emergent in the forms of its movement:

Green ocean combed with flecks of white foam,
A sparkling line left on the shore
Where pinpoint holes from buried clams
Pop in the sand on waves’ retreat.

Seen then from the boardwalk
As the parched scent rises
Shimmering off the salt-baked planks
Isolated.

And the cool insouciant wave borne
Breeze tousles a lock of hair
Here.

A sparkle of air
That requires elegance,
White slacks, white shoes,
A straw hat
For its fulfillment.

So that you would appear.
You
Imagined further.

II

"Mind is absorbed into the desired object as oil is absorbed into cloth." -Geshe Gyatso on Shantideva

Expanded
The skin of the bathers,
Shrimp pink and tender,
Encounters on its tightened surfaces
The cold sea.
Hairs in their puckered follicles
Stand on end.
The message of contraction,
Received with oooo and ssss.

The teased bathers leap
Surrender
Take the plunge.

The float, sated and sustained
In rise and gentle fall
Aaaaah. Say

Is this returned
Or yearning?

From here,
Seen across the glassy curve,
The green arched back of the ingoing wave,
The brittle shore is so unimaginative,
So stolid and sad,
Its denizens so angular and conscious.

As for a time
Of wave-borne ease
The bathers yet
Do not renounce a common fate.

Given
Love then innate in circumstance.

You.

III

"In the unhappy realms of sickness, bondage and the shedding of blood..." - Shantideva

Gifts given
Are so difficult to receive
Wrapped in implication
Portents, messages.

From a distant radio
The splendid open voice
Of the great tenor
Long dead, glides on
Gilding the evening’s air
Encore.

Inscribing pleasure’s promise
On the inner ear

And vanishment.

A flickering compromise
With what cannot be appeased
By the solo pure exhale.

IV

"As though hypnotized by a spell, I shall reduce this mind to nothing. Even I do not know what is causing me confusion. What is there dwelling inside me?" - Shantideva

Reliant
On the green and cool emergent,
The pliant,
The delightful
Givens in immediacy

Which seen
In the angled light of sunset

Crystallize
As a martyrology
Of those who must labor, walk and eat
In the sorrow of necessity,
Burned by the secret of absolution
Pouring from the heart
Of a reddening copper sun.

A pure yearning
Requiring the body to be destroyed
In the untouchable donation
Of a wounded mind
Whose love, though unabsolved
Attains a piercing moment
Of luminous splendor
In returning to silence.

V

"Then if my body blazes for a long time..." – Shantideva

But the Grasping Masters,
Rulers over earth and sea,
Eye, ear tongue and touch
Contrive to unify
In legal speech
A Roman Emperor’s feast:
A menu of minute discernments,
Base omnivorous intrigues
From an addicted lust,
Not to quality event or sense,
But to location sole,
Ultimate, continuous, complete.

And the globe so articulated
Under momentary single rule
Is glamorized in the lurid assertion
Of meaning fated realized.

Of this,
Even
The ruin, the bleached wall
Stands with muted gleam
On the headland of the shore;

Does not witness rise and fall,
Remains a partial lustrous monument;
Remains
The implicate fragment.

O unappeased of incomplete continuing.


(For SN)




***

Claudia Muzio- Ombra di nube- Refice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVcIBzMgTaQ

RIVER

(This is part of a letter I wrote to Peter Lieberson when we were considering re-writing our opera, Ashoka's Dream.)


Perhaps we could shape the piece as something seen as one travels along a great river; river here as inseparable life and death. One River, and different beings, or each being in its different states, sees it momentarily, differently.

This river, like the instinct to sing itself, flows with the songs and stories of all those who live by it: their loves, their battles, their leisure, their work, their gods, their desires, their losses, their endurance, their loneliness. The river is a song of transformations and endless re-forming (centered in the story of Ashoka the first true king to embrace all such things.)

What makes me think like this just now is a verse by the most renowned Indian poet, Kalidasa in which he describes an audience listening to a recital of the Ramayana:


And the people sat and listened.
Enraptured, they listened.
Tears ran down their faces like pearls,
Like dew dripping from the forest leaves
In the stillness of a windless dawn.


Of course, such circumstances were not this time available to us. But perhaps, perhaps for now, we could make Ashoka as an echo from the future when it will come to have reverberated in its full expanse.


He walked out from his palace.
He left his splendid home.
He walked deep into the forest shadows.
He walked through reeds and swamps.
He came to the great river,
Radiant, enticing, imperious, vast.

And he looked silently
Upon the Ganges flowing through the three times:
Clear, with cool waves loved by sages,
Giving life and dharma to teachers and the places where they teach.

Song rose in his heart from a distant mountain spring.
He joined his hands in prayer.
He sang, and his song was like a life giving river
He sang, and the sky shone with his melodious voice.

“O you who are love,
In your clear waters apsaras play.
O Ganges of the gods, asuras and ghandarvas
Meandering through the endless sky,

O river of celestial lotuses,
Sacred river, roaring, quivering, smiling
With sparkling teeth of white foam,
Flowing unimpeded,
Curling like a young girl’s wind-blown hair;

O river of swirling whirlpools and peaceful ponds,
Crying river, roiled and unsettling;
Holy river where goddesses bathe
Amid white lotus clouds
And the plangent calls of swans and cranes;

You are garlanded with dark trees,
Brocaded with green lily pads,
Aflame with red water lilies,
Jeweled with gold and silver dancing light,
Powdered with pink pollen dust,
Blushing like a longing lover,
Suddenly you draw near, you touch, your whirl away,
You strike the dry land
And ten thousand pearls spray in the air
Rising, rising up in iridescent clouds.

In every spinning droplet,
The moments of our history,
The moments of time, our life and death,
Shine in the sky,
O pearl pure Ganges.

O pearl pure Ganges,
O river of milk,
O life of all,
O river of blood,
O love,
O ever-flowing one,
You carry off all sin,
All sorrow, all regret.”


( adapted, p.36 condensed Ramayana- P.Lal; Tarang Paperbacks, 1989)

*

And then one might see this from the Kathakali
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMquphTYM3w