Twist and Shout EP shares its release date with AK's birthday.
On the eve of July 12 I re-read AK 47 of 2016 and find the following. At the bottom of the text there's a postscript added on the night of 14/15 of July.
Bottom:
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
Midsummer Night's Dream (IY.1)
14/15 июля 2016
Now two years later I can add something to this postscript.
1. Laura;
2. Virgin Mary;
3. The Ballad;
4. Midsummer Night's Dream;
5. Apollo and Daphne;
6. Hamlet II.2;
7. AK - Apollo;
8. Palladium;
9. Orange Tree;
10. John and Yoko as RB and EBB;
11. Death in Childbirth.
Laura
So, on the 14/15 of July 2017 I listen to the All You Need Is Love (the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love) while simultaneously looking at the Annunciation scene by Simone Martini because he painted it in Avignon. The town where Petrarch lived at the papal court and where he saw his Laura, and also the town after visiting which on the French national holiday 20 years previously, a crucifix fell on my eye at night.
In bed at home I celebrate Petrarch and Laura in Avignon through the Martini Annunciation to the soundtrack of the Beatles Summer of Love anthem and have an epiphany which I later re-enact in the Uffizi Gallery on March 27, 2018 listening to the song in front of Martini's original, the date being the birthday of Laura Fairlie, the damsel in distress of the Woman in White novel by Wilkie Collins, the first Individual Reading of the 2nd year students of the English division of the Interpreters' Department and it is due to Laura Fairlie that since 2016 I maintain that the Three Graces reign over us: Beatrice over NN, Simonetta over the Department, Laura over the 2nd Year E (ап).
Laura Fairlie, the Fair Laura of the Woman in White, is the incarnation of Pertarch's Laura from Avignon - the addressee of over 300 sonnets, the most complete canon of love poetry in the European tradition. The Woman in White of the ID (ПФ) is Miss Stephens: the tutor dressed in black from head to foot. Alice Cooper on the outside, Venus on a half-shell on the inside. Cordelia who most of the time walks the stage in the disguise of the Fool. Madonna Misericordelia. "Can't you see I'm woman in white?" Alya-Beaver says in 2001 in the 202E sketch at the 2nd Year Recitation Competition. Dressed all in black from crown to sole. The "house" bursts into laughter. The joke has worked. Miss Stephens had authored the joke without realizing what she was saying.
She was saying that the Laura of the ID is she and the love poetry that had been written in her honour was no longer the sonnets on the XIY century but glam-metal songs of the late XX century. And they were written by the ID Petrarch who shared with the singer of Laura the root Stone in his name.
Я славил этим Вас, моя сеньора,
И жаль, что прежде не был я в плену.
I'm suppressed by my love
'Tis so funny I'm ready to laugh.
My independence goes to hell
There's no pride left there's nothing to sell.
I'm defeated but I thank you for that.
Вам славы нет, хотя Вы победили,
Но слава мне, пускай я побеждён!
Virgin Mary
The date of the postscript 14/15.07. is the date when a lily bloomed in my un-enclosed garden in front of my window. A year later, in 2017. Lily is the symbol of the Annunciation. The scene of the Annunciation is re-enacted in the last-but one Canto of the Divine Comedy which falls upon the night of 14/15 of July if you start reading The Dante on the right date and read a Canto per night.
So the reason why I am looking at the Martini Annunciation on the night of 14/15 of July 2017 is because in Paradiso Canto 32 there is the following tercet: Кто этот ангел, взором погруженный
В глаза царицы, что слетел сюда,
Любовью как огнем воспламененный?
This is where All You Need Is Love comes in as a perfect soundtrack to the Archangel Gabriel's Annunciation to the Virgin Mary especially as related by Martini against the gold background of his altarpiece.
And the following morning I look out of the window on my waking up and behold a lily of the Archangel Gabriel on my communal patch of greenery. A miracle. Because it is the first time ever, because the lawn is a horribly long-suffering one, a truly un-enclosed garden where everyone can trod and spit and drop litter and for years I go and pick it all up maintaining a dainty look of a lady who won't soil her hands by a scrubbing-maid's work - a real handmaiden of God. Shem and a lowly maiden sham.
So the flower bloomed where it was most unexpected. It wasn't a miracle in the sense that there was nothing miraculous in its appearance there, after all the flower-loving neighbour had indeed planted it there. But it was a miracle for me none the less, because I didn't know what exactly he had planted. It happened to be a lily. And it happened to bloom for the first time ever - in the morning of the night of 14/15 of July, when I woke up after the Canto 32 Annunciation tercet.
That was especially poignant in combination with other facts. That the postcards with the Annunciation scene by Beato Angelico had been displayed on my altar-bookshelf for years, leading the eye to the Bald Madonna and St Stephen diptych on the left which first stood in separation and as of this April stands also in the together form, and still further to the La Pieta Madonna on the extreme left.
"And Our Lady Herself said to the Archangel Gabriel: Be it done unto me according to Thy Word" - that was the phrase Joyce saluted me with on his birthday in 2016, the year of my 40th birthday when I am preparing to act out James Joyce's 40th birthday and receive during the dinner with guests in the restaurant a copy of my book - like he received his Ulysses on his 40th birthday.
And before that there was an epiphany in the early 2016, the year of my 40th birthday, anticipated by me in awe as THE year of my life, and the epiphany came in the form of Queen Elizabeth from the film who said: I have become a virgin. And said it after being ceremoniously dressed into the queen and when she is about to assume for the first time the mystique of regal authority to transcend her womanhood and to become the embodiment of power. She didn't say like Lady Macbeth: "Unsex me spirits!" after all Lady Macbeth was an accomplice if not an inspiration for regicide, the worst type of crime in the code of honour of her time, but Elizabeth simply said oxymoronically: I have become a virgin. The divine mother of her nation. And I recognized myself the moment I saw her in regalia and understood that the time for me has come - I have overcome the breach of oath that I have assumed the name of Miss Stephens so as to heal. I will retrieve innocence was the last thing I wrote when I came to enclose myself at the ID. Without realizing what I was saying, I summed up the aim of my work at the ID henceforth. I had thought it was a life sentence. It appeared to have taken 18 years. 10 years inside and 8 outside of the ID. And then the word was said. I have become a virgin. To ascertain me of the truth of my insight my eye went sightless. The explanation was to be found also in Dante.
Взор у тебя не умер, а мутится. (Purg.XXYI).
Where does my soul aspire? To become Polina the Pallas, Полина-Паллада, the Goddess of Divine Reason. It is to see the Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur that I am so anxious to go to London at an exhibition Botticelli Re-Imagined which I either provoked or at least predicted when my Three Graces and myself gave the first Report-Concert Miss Stephens - The Theophany of the Interpreters' Department. And it is to SEE her or even to stand there with unseeing eyes that's the stake of that trip to London. To hear the answer. The silver answer rang: There's only one miracle in the world - birth by a virgin. The Botticelli's exhibition, which started in Berlin and then was brought to London, opened nine month after our Report-Concert. And to be quite correct, though lilies are present in the Martini Annunciation, as they ought to be for iconographic reasons, what Archangel Gabriel is offering to Virgin Mary in this particular altarpiece and only in this one - is an olive branch. And olive is a symbol of Pallas Athens.
So, the night of 14/15 of July.
Dante.
Petrarch.
James Joyce.
John Lennon.
They all get together to announce something to me.
All you need is love.
There's only one miracle in the world - birth by a virgin.
The Virgin Pallas.
The Ballad
Suddenly I discover this year that two years ago in writing about AK's 47th birthday on July 12th, I come back in the night of 14/15th and add a postscript with Bottom's monologue from MSND. In it, he promises to write a ballet, that is a ballad, and sing it "at her death".
Now, if we take the night of the 14th of July 2017 as the night of the Annunciation to Virgin Mary of the NN and the ID then the nine month from that date brings us (by a commodius vicus of recirculation) to the 14th of April 2018. On this day I am standing in my John Lennon self-portraits tie in the foyer of Amsterdam Hilton at the poster of John and Yoko at the Bed-In For Peace event which they staged during their honeymoon in that same Hilton. The song John wrote about their Gibraltar wedding, honeymoon in Paris and an anti-war demonstration in bed, they called The Ballad of John and Yoko. In my week in Amsterdam this year I chose to come to Hilton to play The Ballad there, specifically on April 14th because that was the date when John and Paul, the other two Beatles being out of London, recorded it from start to finish for a rush release the next month. April 14, 1969. Next year is the 50th anniversary of The Ballad of John and Yoko.
The Ballad, yes, I see now, as Bottom said. But why at her death? Whose death?
And here we must go back to Eve and Adam's.
Midsummer Night's Dream
Why Midsummer Night's Dream at all? In the midsummer 2016 I re-read this particular play to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The year of 2016 is of ultimate importance. PS 40, Shakespeare 400. The year is full of Shakespeare. Stratford-upon-Avon, Knole Park, the Macbeth T-shirt from the Globe, the To Be, or Not to Be T-shirt from Elsinore, even my friend Irina brings me something to wear with Shakespeare allusion on it - a black midi-skirt with a grey hem where the black prince holds a scull amidst as much text of the Hamlet soliloquy on it as the hem will hold - unhemmed as it is uneven. In combination with Hem's portrait on the phone cover she presents me with on Hemingway's birthday the year before - Irina has Hemmed me all round.
And last but not least - the greatest endeavour of the year the Miss Stephens own Glam-Hamlet, a 40-minute theatrical performance for two actors - the He and the She of it - to commemorate Shakespeare on his jubilee.
Not surprising in this context that in the middle of summer 2016 I re-read Midsummer Night's Dream. (That many other plays were read and re-read that year goes without saying. I do not talk of writers without actually reading them. And re-reading them, too).
Midsummer Night's Dream is beautiful by itself but it is also heavily integrated into the 2nd Year ID story. Through the film Dead Poets' Society. To begin with, it was the first film I took my groups to see and I made a point of all my groups seeing it. With the subsequent discussion based on the assignments given beforehand.
Imagine my morose delight when on my 30th birthday, I open the door of the classroom for the English lesson with my 203 (actually my group number was always the palindrome 202 but that year it was the only time it was not) and see the whole group wearing men's shirts and ties though all of them are girls and before I have the time to register the thought in my head they one by one get onto their desk with the words "Oh Captain, My Captain!". In other words to congratulate the tutor on her 30th birthday group 203E act out for her the scene of the tutor's being fired. At that moment with all the signs of the coming doom to the ID it is still barely thinkable that the Senior Teacher of the English Chair who is the only specialist in charge of her subdivision and who singlehandedly carries out an enormous workload can be disposed of. But - Have this officer executed at once: this sort of behaviour is demoralizing for the ordinary soldiers and citizens who are trying to live normal simple unexceptional lives. Things are difficult as it is without these emotional people who are rocking the boat.
The words about rocking the boat were actually said about me at the General Meeting during my "trial" though what I quote above is from the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
In any case in May 2006 it is still unthinkable to anybody that Miss Stephens can lose her job. Two years later she will. And I became the clairvoyant exception when 203 climbed their desks in the little classroom and captain-my-captained me in their Dead Poets' Society salute.
In the film, the tutor Mr Keating is getting fired after being made scapegoat for the death of one of the students of Welton who, unable to fight off his father's despotism, commits suicide in his Puck's wreathe after his performance as Puck in the amateur theatricals production of Midsummer Night's Dream.
When I see my students doing to me what the Welton boys did to Mr Keating I stand there and wonder: "Do they know what they are doing? it is dismissal for me but it is also betrayal for them". But - on'est pas serieux, quand on a dix-sept ans. Though they are 19 not 17 at the moment.
Only 17 years old in his third year of studies was the prodigy student we had who is now arguably the leading synchronic interpreter in this town and who was the first to draw the parallel between Miss Stephens and Mr Keating. He actually said so when he came up to me: "Miss Stephens, are you Mr Keating?" You could have knocked me down with a feather, as the phrase from Home Reading goes. I had a sensation of a ball of fire rolling through me. First, I realized that though already in the third year of my teaching career at the ID I still continue to look upon myself as a student rather than the tutor because when I show the film to my students I still associate myself with the boys rather than with their English language master. Time to grow up, Miss Stephens, I hear in Val's question. In the next split second I become ashamed that they might think I show them the film for them to draw this favourable comparison: after all who is the most unorthodox and non-conformist tutor at the ID? So I get shocked at the thought they think I imitate Mr Keating. And immediately after that - wait a second! Why imitate - emulate! If it comes to that, I'd rather be compared to Mr Keating than to any other tutor in the film. Because it is a distinction and an honour to be a tutor like him. And if my students see the parallels then they find me worthy of comparison! And from incredulity through embarrassment I come to the realization of a great compliment which is being paid to me though with a wry smile on the young student's face which makes it sound more like a provocation than a compliment or an invitation to a discussion - and all this dashes madly across my mind within a split second so I get the sensation of a ball of fire rolling through me - and the self-revelation overwhelms me so that I don't remember what I reply, I can only suppose that being true to my Nil admirari motto I probably simulate a most regal nod and say: "Thank you" because it is the best way to turn a prick into a praise, and regally glide by, laden with self-knowledge and a glimpse of how my students see me.
Remembering the episode in 2006 after the "Captain My Captain!" scene I realize that as far back as the year 2000 my doom was sealed. You will eventually get fired, that's what the still under-age prodigy was inadvertently trying to warn me about. But no amount of warning can stop you when you love your fate.
Apollo and Daphne
So MSND became an important part of my ID mythology through the film DPS. Naturally, in the doubly auspicious year of 2016 I was delighted to re-read the play and to memorize the Puck's monologue in the epilogue. What attracted my particular attention was the words that Helena says in (II.1) to her hard-hearted Demetrius:
Run when you will, the story shall be changed
Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase.
The line makes me startle because early in 2016 when back from London and the Botticelli Re-Imagined exhibition which I was able to see because my eyesight, dimmed after the revelation too deep to fathom, was at least partially returned to me after a sequence of actions prompted to me in a dream, one of which was to go back to an old school-time notebook and to re-read what is written there which on my return from London I do and discover to my astonishment a direct reference to the Apollo and Daphne story.
The old-time notebook is a chapter from a novel my friend who played Buck to my Stephen when we were at school and didn't yet know who Buck and Stephen were only everybody called her Buck and me - Stephen, because our names allowed such shortenings, from a novel my friend and I dabbled with between the 5th and the 10th forms at school, which was called the Incredible Adventures of the Zhuk Army. In it, we're the two ordinary Soviet schoolgirls by daytime who outside of school-hours are two amazing young ladies: the scholars of the classics, the dancers, the fighters and the adventuresses with a book under one corner of the pillow and a colt under another. And the last chapter of the novel which kept entertaining us through 5 years of classroom boredom was written as a cross between high culture and pop-culture: the combination of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita novel and the American blockbuster movies. Both were just discovered by Russians in the early 90s: Bulgakov's novel of the 30s became printable only after Perestroyka and still had the aura of forbiddenness about it, and the Stallone-Schwarzennegger and the rest of them kind of film only just came into the Russian late-night television viewing and represented the hot subject for the schoolchildren's discussions during the breaks.
So I unearth the 25 year old piece of school-time fantasia and discover two amazing facts. First, without yet knowing it, even at the age of 15 I had already attempted to do what it would take me another 3 years even to formulate. That the novel I wish to write is a novel made up of quotations only. In the last chapter of our opus we copy pages and pages of the actual dialogue from Bulgakov and the recreated from memory pages of movie-heroes dialogue. Only we put them into situations which fit the line of the story's exciting narration with combat scenes and mystic rituals and time-travel and high-class etiquette and glamorous living and witty one-liners. Or so we imagine it to be. In the 10th form of a Soviet school. And on the verge of getting 40 I congratulate myself for not having changed a bit since I was 15 - only more new quotes had been accumulated. Tons of them.
And another thing that amazed me was the reference to Apollo and Daphne. In the story there was a room of marble statues in the palace which served as the Headquarters of the Army I was Commander-in-Chief of and the room was actually my aide's boudoir and the statue of the Greek god Apollo had a tiny button hidden on it which operated the secret lift which it became necessary for one of the heroines to make use of. The disappearance of the prisoner alarmed the perpetrators and so Cat Behemoth and Koroviev were sent by their master Wolland to find her. Then comes the exchange from Bulgakov verbatim with the exception of a passage inserted into his prose from nowhere. On seeing the statue of Apollo Cat Behemoth suddenly starts narrating the episode of Apollo's misadventures with Daphne to be rudely interrupted by his accomplice who brings him down-to-earth by pointing out that it is urgent they produce result or the master who is none other than the devil himself would be very much displeased with them.
The inserted piece falls neatly into the general style of talk the two Bulgakov's characters display when they engage in verbal repartee. I wouldn't even have suspected any deviation from the writer's novel if prior to re-reading the Incredible Adventures I hadn't re-read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. For which reason is hard to fathom. Something pushed me to it. Probably the New Year present of a fir-tree toy in the form of a black poodle - the only piece of jewellery on the otherwise completely naked Margarita in the scene of the Ball at Wolland's. As I said, I had accumulated more quotes and allusions since then, I thought at the time of receiving the present that I ought to re-read Goete's Faust which I did and then proceeded with Master and Margarita.
As a result I immediately recognized the non-Bulgakov's insertion into an otherwise quite a Bulgakov's scene and set myself thinking: Why Apollo and Daphne?
Hamlet II.2
Since the origins of the creative inspiration of 25 years before had by that time disappeared into oblivion and no reasonable explanation could I come up with, I decided the explanation must be unreasonable. Especially, when you re-read 25 years later what you'd written about yourself and realize that it was practically a prophesy. So the chance reference to something quite unimportant to the story becomes not just a slip of the tongue but a meaningful piece: a self-revelation. But before that another discovery - from a much later time.
In 2016 it's the Shakespeare year for me. In the National Gallery in London I pose for a photo in front of the Pollaiuolo picture of Apollo and Daphne with a screenshot from the film Hamlet in my hands.
The greatest screen version of Hamlet in the world is the Soviet film of 1964 made by the great director Grigory Kozintsev in the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth with the greatest film-actor of the XX century Innokenty Smoktunovsky in the title role. Since Hamlet's soliloquy was in the curriculum of my 2nd year students to memorize for the expressive reading classes, I made a point of taking my groups to see the film on the big screen. Like DPS this film was in my obligatory cannon: the other films I tried to vary from year to year so as not to get myself bored. So Hamlet with Smoktunovsky was a film I watched regularly, in April every year - April being Shakespeare's birth month and the final expressive assignment after doing Moore, and Byron, and Wordsworth, and Blake, was Hamlet's Soliloquy, the pinnacle of English poetry, which fell on the last week of April - in other words coincided with April 23.
The regular watching of the film yielded an unexpected discovery. In the famous scene of the conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Russian Hamlet sits with his back to the tapestry with Pollaiuolo's Apollo and Daphne on it. My competence in the world of classical painting one day matched my competence in classical literature.
The recognition, delightful by itself, couldn't just sink into trivia because, like I said before, the film is a masterpiece. The more I watched it the more I grew overawed by what is being done there. So the appearance of a pictorial reference in a scene of utmost importance couldn't have been chance. It must have been meaningful. The chain of thought I applied to it was very simple and bore good fruit.
The scene in question is Hamlet II.2 when the eponymous character says his famous soliloquy about man being a quintessence of dust. In other words in this monologue Shakespeare expresses the crisis of the Renaissance ideals. The highest peak of human thought placed man in the centre of all creation and endowed him with unsurpassed virtues. The optimism was short-lived and by the time Shakespeare creates his Hamlet the reality of personal and social relationships in Europe had successfully denounced the humanist philosophy. The crisis of humanism and the Renaissance ideals of human virtue is actually the main idea of Shakespeare's greatest play. Why is Hamlet-the winner unimaginable? Because Hamlet-the winner is Hamlet-the king, the lawful king of Denmark. But who is he to rule over? The rozencrantzes and the guildensterns? The osricks?
So in II.2 Smoktunovsky is reproducing the Shakespeare bitter words about mankind all in defamatory paraphrase of the actual words of the humanist philosophers who wrote to praise not to denigrate mankind when they had just discovered: Man, how proud it sounds! - and what the eye of the viewer subconsciously registers is the representation behind Hamlet's back of Apollo chasing Daphne.
Daphne revolted by Apollo's suits turns into a tree. A laurel tree. Ovid's Metamorphoses tell us how and why. Broken-hearted Apollo cuts a branch of laurel and makes himself a wreathe. In this guise he becomes known as Apollo Musaget, the leader of the Muses, the nine goddesses of the poetry and the arts. Since then all poets' - dead or alive - ultimate wish is to be crowned with laurel and the best of them has been for centuries never depicted otherwise. And who were the best? Dante and Petrarch.
Petrarch and laurel is an untying pair because as we already know Petrarch sonnets were dedicated to a woman called Laura and since her identity and even her existence began with the passage of time to be looked upon as doubtful, the scholars of Petrarch go as far as to say that Laura is an imagined woman - a personification of Petrarch's aspiration to fame and a poet's fame is in the laurel, of which her name is a code-word.
Whatever it was, Dante and Petrarch, and before them the Provençal troubadours, seem to have invented love poetry and with it seem to have invented Love.
In other words, Kozintsev makes his Hamlet denounce the humanist philosophy with his back to the picture which screams Petrarch! And Petrarch was one of the fathers of the Renaissance ideal. Thus it is a hint for the erudite viewer as to what is Hamlet's background, the hint at the kind of education the prince had received and the hint of the ideals he has now turned his back upon because what he has in front of his eyes is the traitor-friends Ross and Guil.
The funny thing is, an erudite viewer does not need to be reminded of such things and a non-erudite viewer won't get the hint anyway because he knows neither the connection between Apollo and Daphne and Petrarch nor who they are separately. Still how much greater the screen-shot becomes with this particular picture in it! And how much fun it gives one English language tutor from NN to catch it!
Because the reference to Petrarch in the context of the crisis of the humanist values reminds us that it took 300 years since Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the crisis was most poignantly formulated, to re-assert the truth that both Hamlet and the viewer secretly know and cherish in their heart of hearts notwithstanding the bitter realities of time - his or ours - and we know this: "Man, how proud it sounds!"
It took Maxim Gorky, the greatest writer of the first half of the XX century in his most famous play The Lower Depth (from Russian literally On the Bottom) in 1902 to pick up Petrarch's humanist line and to reassert in Gorky's own romantic-realist style, that man is the beauty of the world.
What was I doing in Florence in March 2018 when I am listening to The Beatles All You Need Is Love in front of Martini's Annunciation? It is not the celebration of Laura Fairlie's birthday that I am celebrating. The birthday on March 27 of the beautiful Laura from Woman in White, the heroine whose name nods in the direction of Petrarch and Avignon where Simone Martini allegedly painted the portrait of Petrarch's Laura, the heroine who is the Muse of the 2nd Year English students of the NN ID, the city formerly known as Gorky because the greatest revolutionary writer of the XX century was born here, - her birthday is a beautiful coincidence which allows me to enjoy my Uffizi epiphany on a higher level. But coincidences are hardly without meaning. Because what I am doing in Florence on the last week of March this year is celebrating Maxim Gorky's 150th anniversary on March 28. With the monologue Man, how proud it sounds! in front of the greatest work of human genius in the plastic arts - the marble statue of David by Michelangelo about which we can say quite seriously, without Hamlet's smirk that man is really a piece of work - in form so express and admirable!
And my first day in Florence on March 25th is the Annunciation day. And it is on this day I come to the English Cemetery in Florence and pose for a picture in front of the tomb of EBB with the picture-postcard of John and Yoko in bed in Amsterdam.
AK - Apollo
My AK47 text of 2016, the year of my 40th birthday, celebrates the David of Gorky's native town as the embodiment of god Apollo.
In the text, I quote two sonnets - one from Camoens, the other from Petrarch which happened to introduce and support the theme.
The matter is that on that year from June 10 onwards I read Camoens, a sonnet a day. June 10 is Camoens Day, the national holiday in his native Portugal. Having read and enjoyed his Lusiades some years previously I decided it was high time to read his sonnets especially in view of it being my EBB's year. The distinguished English poetess was practically on her deathbed when she met a handsome young poet Robert Browning who fell madly in love with her via her poetry and married him at the age of 40 under romantic circumstances.
Her name, Elizabeth, supports my theme of My Dream is Called Elizabeth started by Lizzy Bennett from Pride and Prejudice the summer before and supported by Queen Elizabeth in January of 2016. Romantic love as motivation for social change. Romantic love sacrificed for the nation. Romantic love as inspiration for the Sonnets from the Portuguese.
If EBB meant her sonnets to RB as a reply to Camoens sonnets by his beloved then I thought it was high time I read Camoens first.
EBB's most famous is Sonnet 43. Sonnet 43 by Shakespeare was a gift I received on my 40th birthday when my favourite student became so overwhelmed by the performance of Glam-Hamlet that my boy-student and I treated my guests to, that to calm herself down she went to my room to stay alone for a while and there her hand fell on the tiny book of Shakespeare's sonnets in Marshak's translation which I was re-reading then together with the original, doubtlessly, one per day, and she happened to open it on Sonnet 43, so when she came out of the room with her tears dried she said to me: "I think there's a message here for you, it's all about unseeing eyes". At that moment she was the only one who knew about my sightless eye.
So, Sonnet 43 became a meaningful expression that summer, and when July 12th came and I opened Camoens on the page which was due that day, having started on June 10, and then opened Petrarch at Sonnet 43 I was delighted to discover that both of them begin with Latona's son - Apollo.
Camoens:
Латоны вещий сын, чьим светом мгла...
Petrarch:
Латоны сын с небесного балкона...
Once again.
July 12th is the birthday of a man from the city of Gorky who comes closest in his looks to the statue of Michelangelo's David in front of whom this year I celebrate Gorky's 150th anniversary with the monologue Man, how proud it sounds! AK is the ideal of male beauty. I didn't say that. A skag-boy from Scherbinky says that. Even if they can see it then it can't be my sun-struck blindedness when for unseeing eyes thy shade shines so.
Both Camoens and Petrarch support the theme. AK is Apollo.
AK and MP. Аполлон и Дионис. Каждый. Оба.
This is the topic I had started some time before.
It is not for nothing that the writer our city was named after where the three of us were born wore the walrus moustaches. It was Gorky's tribute to Friedrich Nietzsche.
I Am The Walrus, sings Lennon in one of the greatest songs in the Beatles canon. So my student who reproduces the Gorky quintessential monologue from On the Bottom in front of Michelangelo's David is wearing a sweatshirt with a great walrus on the front. And in our version of the monologue it goes: "It's neither me nor you nor them, it's me, you, they, John Lennon, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky - in one! Man - it is enormous! It sounds proud!"
Joyce features there because he somehow knows that behind the name of out city lurks the philosopher with the walrus moustaches. He calls Nizhny Novgorod neatschknee Novgolosh.
So Nietzsche had been on my mind for some time with his Birth of Tragedy as a combination of Apollonian and Dionyssian themes which for me became incarnate in the two men I met when I was young, AK and MP, who became responsible for my coming to work at the NN ID, the greatest place on earth for me because erudition, foreign languages and their application for translating and interpreting are, in my opinion, the most intellectual kinds of pursuit, and I value things intellectual in everything I want to do and be, and though I lost the NN ID, for subjective and for objective reasons, subjectively because I was fired in 2008 and objectively because the ID is no longer what it used to be, but rather the complete opposite of itself, it had lost its face, as it had been prophesied 21 years ago even before I came to work there, even though the intellectual Troy has fallen "indeedust", the realization that I am the Homer of my piece of the universe still keeps me going.
I am with the guys whose greatest aspiration was to get a laurel crown. And all of them looked upon Homer as their role model and all of them wanted to write an epic. Dante wrote his Comedy, Camoens his Lusiades, Petrarch also made a go at an epic with Africa but remained in the eternity with what he thought was his private business - the Sonnets to Laura.
As the Homer of the NN ID I have a noble goal to live for and up to and the hope that even if I fail with the Magnum Opus I may still immortalize my name with something written on the margin.
So in 2016 both Camoens and Petrarch support my claim for AK to be the NN god of Apollo.
Two years later I discover that Dante had been telling me precisely that all along.
That year, 2016, I had a short cycle of Dante. It happened so that I was re-reading the final Cantos of Paradiso much earlier than usual - between May 31 and June 10. The reason for it is not important here but there was a reason. And the result was that my short cycle of Dante came to an end exactly when it was time to start the long cycle of Luis de Camoens. So it felt as if Dante tenderly handed me over to Camoens and bequeathed it to him to watch over me that summer and fall.
It was nice to have somebody by your side on June 10 because it was the day when my Shakespeare-Cervantes poster I had especially prepared for their double anniversary was stolen from my yard where I was so proud to display it. The poster was a very lamentable loss but at the same time it felt as if it was ultimately for the good that it was stolen, it was a kind of acceptance by whom and of what I am unable to coherently explain but it was a bittersweet loss, productive of further revelations.
So Dante and Camoens were helping me in my 40th year and because I was reading Camoens on July the 12th and was already happy with the Apollo sonnet there, it didn't dawn on me to refer to the Canto in Dante which corresponds to July 12.
The following year other allusions and discoveries distracted me and so it was only now that I brought to my own attention both things my text AK47 and Canto XXIX of Paradiso. The result was most auspicious.
The first tercet of Dante on the eve of AK's birth makes a reference to Apollo!
Когда чету, рожденную Латоной...
All the three of the greatest love poets - Dante, Camoens and Petrarch - celebrate AK as Apollo.
In the same terminology even.
As Latona's son.
The toothless bum of a woman, Anna by name, I happened to talk to once when their house was demolished.
Like Orange Tree Pub in London.
But Dante goes even further.
He celebrates both Latona's children - the twins Apollo and Artemis.
As the meaning of the opening tercets is astrological then the Latona's twins are the Sun and the Moon.
The Moon, wandering companionless among the stars who have a different birth, is one of the images of Miss Stephens at the ID.
A beautiful triad:
AK - Apollo, the Sun.
PS - his sister, the Moon.
MP - the Petrarch of the Moon, the balladeer.
Who thinks the Moon wants to marry the Sun. But they are brother and sister, so what really stands between Orion and Diana is not a man she is in love with but her chastity.
The astronomical reference made by Dante in the opening tercets of Canto XXIX place the Sun in the Aries zodiac sign and the Moon in the Libra, the opposite points of the horizon equidistant from the zenith. In the next moment the Sun will go down and the Moon will rise.
The Sun goes down, I will take in the meaning of temporarily, only to come back again at dawn in the meantime to give way to the Goddess of the Night to work her beautiful magic - the cold chaste moon the Queen of heaven's bright isles who makes all beautiful on which she smiles.
What the Moon smiles upon in the Libra zodiac sign is October 13, the Beatles at the London Palladium 55 years ago this year, the beginning of the miracle of the XX century called Beatlemania which takes place under the auspices of Pallas Athens who in the mythology of the ID is none other than Queen Mab, the Moon, the Fairy Queen, Miss Stephens, Полина-Паллада, in other words - myself.
Palladium
On June 29, 1996 at the Moonstone first concert in Sputnik, a Soviet cinema house in Gorky Street at the corner of the Culibin Park, I am photographed in the greatest treasure I have at that time - the Beatles T-shirt. 20 years later comes the realization of what kind of the Beatles T-shirt I happen to be wearing. The T-shirt says: The Beatles. London Palladium. 1963. In other words it is October 13, 1963 - The Beatles first truly great moment. The first in a career consisting of nothing but great moments: going from strength to strength and urging the word: Follow me!
At the premiere of the short-lived NN Beatles from the ID, the 19-year-old Goddess of Reason and the reason for the NN Beatles to be, Polina-Pallas appears in the Palladium T-shirt.
The Palladium is London's most famous Variety theatre. Its interior is carefully preserved and remains virtually unchanged since the time it was built at 7-8 Argyll Street, Soho in 1910.
The Beatles performed there three times. The first, the one which brought them wide-spread attention in Britain, was their appearance on the top-rated entertainment programme of Britain at the time, a television show Val Parnell's Sunday Night At The London Palladium, transmitted live from the theatre on 13 October 1963. An appearance on SNALP - especially as bill-toppers, as were The Beatles this night, - was a major event and for many artists the pinnacle of a career. "See you at the Palladium, son! See your name in light!" was how Ringo's neighbours in Liverpool wished him and the band success, even if, today, one almost wonders what the fuss was all about.
For a common man in Britain in the early 60s, to appear on the Palladium meant "to have made it".
The London Palladium, so-called "home of the stars", had never before witnessed the screaming fans who made themselves very audible not only inside but outside the theatre too.
Fans in the audience screamed so much that John yelled for them to "Shut up!" The adults among the audience applauded.
Outside the London Palladium fans blocked Argyll Street and spilled over into Great Marlborough Street, stopping traffic and delighting photographers with ready-made front-page picture-stories for the next morning.
It was this manifestation of Beatles fans' adulation that led the following day's newspapers to coin the term "Beatlemania". The event was also covered by late news on ITV.
Finally, the press seemed to have caught on and the Beatles within a year had emerged from the dimly lit basement club The Cavern in dingy post-war Liverpool to national fame. First it was Liverpool then England then the world.
It was on 13 October 1963 inside and outside the London Palladium that it first became clear that The Beatles were becoming a phenomenon.
1963 is 55 years ago this year.
October is Libra, the John Lennon zodiac sign in which Dante says on the eve of AK's birthday the Moon will rise, the Moon is the girl in whose honour the NN Beatles The Moonstone were named, Polina-Pallada, who came to the Moonstone's first concert in Sputnik on June 29, 1996 dressed in a The Beatles at the London Palladium T-shirt.
Liz and Dick
Last year, 2017, spitzing the ieren while it's hot and "making your want fit to your capacity", in other words while being in London on October 13, without waiting for the 55th anniversary, I go to Argyll Street and pose for a picture in front of the London Palladium in my Palladium T-shirt. The white lights on the black background say:
Friday 13 October
London
PalladiuM
The next 13th of the month falling on a Friday is today when I am putting this all together.
Pardon, by closer examination, today is the second Friday 13 after October 13, and in between there was only one other - April 13, 2018. On that day while in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam at a temporary exhibition called High Society I suddenly find myself face to face with the full-length male portrait from Kenwood House, London, which I had made a point of visiting in the fateful 2016. The subject of the portrait whom I thought I would never see again is Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset. My "Glam Sackville for a lover". One of the most accomplished gamblers and wastrels of the XYII century. The Elizabethan-time AK.
On July 12, AK's birthday, Dante invokes the shadow of the sovereign Arrigo who, ere Dante himself enters the otherworldly dwellings, will be seated among the blessed souls in the highest heaven of Paradise where the emperor's crown is lying now because he came too early to help Italy. Henry YII of Luxembourg, whom Dante calls Arrigo, died an untimely death in 1313. On Friday June 13, 2017, I stand in front of Arrigo's tomb in Pisa. Doubly dear for me because he was the ruler in whom Dante vested his last hopes of a happy outcome for Italy and for himself and because it is on July 12, AK's birthday, that the Canto about Arrigo is read.
On Friday July 13, with Arrigo still ringing in my ears, I write about the Palladium and realize that October 13 last year when I stood in front of the theatre was also a Friday and between these two there was also Friday April 13, when I saw the Elizabethan-time AK again.
Both myself and AK went to school 13. He seven forms before me.
Queen Elizabeth, the Vestal of the West, is who I emulate when I say I am the Vestal of the Western. Una ragione per vivere e una per morire of the glam-metal band The Moonstone, whose debut in Sputnik coincided with the premiere of Shakespeare's last play at the Globe Theatre in London 383 years previously which burnt the Globe down with the shot of a dummy-cannon meant to announce the birth of the royal infant, the future Queen Elizabeth, for whom it is in this particular play that Shakespeare coins the phrase the Vestal of the West.
The play was called Henry YIII.
Arrigo was Henry YII.
The Virgin Queen in NN was deflowered by the Moonstone frontman whom she called tsarikъ, the flower in Armenian (Henry Flower - Blooms moniker for himself in Joyce's Ulysses) on September 7, 1997, the Virgin Queen's birthday and who left NN for Paris (like Joyce did from Dublin, like every flow-er would) after giving the 7th and the last concert in Sputnik on Friday September 13, Dante's death day.
The Orange Tree
Leaping about the rubble of the demolition site where a pub called Orange Tree stood in my unreally high-heeled bottilions I realize that as Jesus had his nails, I have my high heels.
Nailstudded clogs.
There is no longer any rubble there when I come to the spot nearly 55 years later. The spot is that of The Beatles "Jump shot" made on April 19, 1963, which later became the cover of the Beatles first EP called Twist and Shout. The EP was issued on July 12, 1963 - 55 years ago today and on AK's birthday. April 19, when it was actually captured, is the date in 1995 when I talked to AK for the first and the last time. So far.
The demolition site at Euston Rd by Gower Street where the Orange Tree pub stood, in the NN geography is the site of AK's wooden house demolished in front of my eyes between May 30 and June 4, 2008 - the former and the latter the release dates in the UK and the US respectively of The Beatles 1969 single The Ballad of John and Yoko. In AK's birth year.
Still wearing my Palladium T-shirt on October 13, 2017, a year short of the anniversary, but I must strike while it's hot, I go on foot on my unimaginably high heels to pay tribute to the Orange Tree demolition site where now a giant mirrored building stands at 250 Euston Rd, and sit on the dwarf wall resting my nail-suffering feet, like I saw AK sit on the dwarf wall of the XXI century food-store, first on his 30th birthday and then 7 years later on mine, and listen to the Twist and Shout EP and think how on the 55th anniversary of its release I will put on my unimaginably high summer heels and go to the XXI century to buy an orange and that little orange globe in hand I will go down the little street to my Secret Garden - the rubble patch overgrown with brush, the abandoned demolition site of 10 years before - and will listen to the four songs of the EP - Twist and Shout, A Taste of Honey, Do You Want To Know a Secret and There's a Place - not in my earphones like I'm doing in the busy London thoroughfare but out loud - for the (orange) trees to hear.
The orange fruit symbolises both fertility and virginity. Because the fruits and the flowers can appear in the tree simultaneously. Thus, the orange became associated with immaculate conception and with Virgin Mary who wore at the same time the white colour of her chastity and the fruit of her virginity.
И за цветком поспеет добрый плод
Dante says in Paradiso XXYII whose date is July 9.
An extract from Canto XXYI I commit to memory throughout July 8, 2008 on a plane from Sydney.
Between the two consecutive numbers of 26 and 27 is the distance of ten years and of the two Canticas of the Divine Comedy: Canto XXYII is from Paradiso and canto XXYI is from Inferno. In my personal inferno I spend a month in Sydney after the demolition of AK's house which organized my Dantean fall-rise geography from home to work at the ID. On May 30, 2008 the world is all before me because my paradise is lost. Now I am an exile, forever writing about my ID, like Joyce about his Dublin.
He made the 10 years of the king of Ithaca adventures in Homer's Odyssey the mythological background for the daylong perambulations of his Dublin Ulysses, the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom - nothing could be more far-fetched. But the critics swallowed it because he said so. If I make James Joyce's Ulysses the background to the story of the Stephen-Molly-Poldy of the NN ID - what can stop me? Especially, if my name translates into English as Polly Stephens and sums up as Molly-Poldy-Stephen, the three characters of Joyce's Ulysses.
The untimely death of my Arrigo, the demolition of AK's house in 2008 puts me Faccia a Faccia with the inevitability of writing. Dante started Paradiso after he realized that all is lost for him. There's no coming back to Florence in the flesh, there's only one way of coming back to Florence - like a poet.
Вернусь, поэт, и осенюсь венцом.
To alleviate myself from under the down, I use the daylong flight from Down Under to memorise the last adventure of Ulysses and his crew as narrated by him to Dante in Inferno XXYI.
Ten years later on July 8, 2018 I remember the fact and make a point of reproducing from memory Ulysses' tale in Russian and then in English and then in Italian which I had subsequently learnt by heart too.
Because I do it, the following day while re-reading the appropriate Canto of the day which happens to be Canto XXYII - as if the count never broke and there was nothing in between, so I pick up 10 years later where I left off 10 years before - I find there a direct reference to the same story as Ulysses tells in Inferno XXYI:
Я видел там, за Гадесом, шальной
Улиссов путь...
In all my years of reading and re-reading Paradiso it had never caught my eye. And now after invoking Dante's Ulysses the previous day I take the hint and go on reading with concentrated attention and come to the closing lines which say:
Так хлынет светом горняя страна,
Что вихрь, уже давно предвозвещённый,
Носы туда, где кормы, повернет,
Помча суда дорогой неуклонной;
И за цветком поспеет добрый плод.
The reference to poops and prows is another allusion to Ulysses' misadventure at sea in which he and his crew die in a storm in sight of the Purgatory mountain, but this time the long-promised whirlwind will turn the bark 180 degrees to sail in the right direction this time and - after the flower will come the good fruit.
The good orange fruit, the symbol of her fertility and chastity because as I hear the voice say to me in a dream in answer to a direct question, the first time something like that ever happened to me: Where is my miracle? - There is only one miracle in the world: birth by a virgin. Девственница родила.
July 14/15
On the night of 14/15 of July 1997, the last summer of my virginity, a crucifix fell on my face in Provence at night.
The young people with whom I happened to be there took me to Aches-le-Pains to see the fireworks and before we returned to the villa where I was to sleep that night we drove to the all-night town party at Avignon where I danced a little, alone on the dance-floor with only one very beautiful woman there, which I was told later was an Algerian prostitute, so it was a disgrace for me to expose myself so, and I was amazed at the restrained and inhibition of the French youths who do not dance even on their greatest national holiday - where there is a dance-floor and the music and the lights and all this - and their girls do not wear mini-skirts even in the temperatures above 30. I was surprised then, now I know that it is the islamisation of Europe. The rape of Europa, is what Dante also writes about in Paradiso XXYII immediately after Ulysses' witless flight.
But at that moment I take it as the prudishness of the company of 20 year old Frenchmen I am with and decide not to dance anymore so as not to embarrass my hosts in front of all the Avignon. Do I know then that when I am dancing in the amusement street outside the papal castle that Petrarch's shade is watching over me? I only know then about the Avignon captivity, that I am sure of, because I remember trying to enlighten my local Provançal French youths about it, but I am not sure I think Petrarch then and I definitely do not think Simone Martini back then because my competence in the pictorial arts at that moment does not allow me to do so. I am a very unique combination for an ordinary girl: I wear mini because I know I have shapely legs and I am not embarrassed to dance in public and at the same time these light feet of mine support a shape crowned with a very erudite head. A dancing scholar - I am the Nietzsche's ideal of an Ubergirl. And my ostentatio uberum with the shaved skull instead of a bare breast makes me a kind of Madonna Misericordia of my native town and its ID.
So on the Bastille day 1997, Viva la Revolucion! Revolution is a woman with a bare breast and I was compared at the ID to the Delacroix heroine, on the strength of being my own man when everybody else is afraid to dance, so on Bastille day I dance in front of the castle in Avignon where at the papal court during the Avignon captivity of the Pope lived the older-generation humanist, the singer of Laura and the man who invented Love because he invented romantic poetry - Petrarch, the poet and translator, the precursor of those boys our ID would be producing 600 years later, one of whom who shares the root Stone in his name with Petrarch, will sing me as his Laura, his dolce nemica but will call his glam-metal band not by the name of Willkie Collins first Individual Reading in the II Year Woman in White where the heroine's name is Laura and she is badly in trouble and needs help and protection but will call it by the name of the other most famous work by the father of English detective novel - The Moonstone, a novel with the theme of sexual defloration in the crime.
After that I am brought to sleep on the villa which my host is care-taking while the owners are away on holiday and his girlfriend is babysitting somewhere in Spain and there I go to bed in a vast child's bedroom in a giant bed half covered with child's toys, and I pass out from the excitement of the long day and from the stress of shirking off the unwanted attentions of my host which I don't fully register because I am such a straight girl I can't imagine a guy who is giving shelter to a guest can possibly demand any favours from the guest especially if he is putting me up at the request of his father who is the French professor who works with my father here in France and in the professorial circles it is not customary to expect favours in bed from a guest, or so I think - and so I pass out in a stranger's bedroom, a child's bedroom, after a long hot day and a slightly embarrassing misunderstanding about the switch of the floor-lamp, and then I am finally left alone I pass out and sleep so tightly that I barely wake up when I feel that something sharp is pricking my cheek and I barely come to realize that I am lying flat on me back, the position I never sleep in, and something cold and heavy is lying on my forehead and across my left eye and its sharp end is pricking my skin under the eye, and I am so dead I am not even curious to find out what it is, I simply grab it with my hand and remove it from my face and put it on the bed-stand and immediately pass out again and only in the morning when I wake up half-dead with a heavy head and my eyelids falling onto my eyes I see that lying on the bed-stand next to the bed is a small but heavy "child's" crucifix that hung on a nail above the head of the bed.
It means nothing to me at the time, I don't know what to think of it now either, only that because of it I remembered the date - the night of 14/15 July.
20 years later on that night in bed at home I listen to All You Need Is Love for its 50th anniversary while holding in front of my eyes the Annunciation by Simone Martini who was a friend of Petrarch's at Avignon and had allegedly painted the portrait of Laura, and then I read my "lesson" from Dante - Paradiso XXXII, the last but one Canto of the Divine Comedy and there is recreated the scene of the Annunciation between Archangel Gabriel and Virgin Mary and with this image in my head I go to sleep on the night of 14/15 of July 2017 only to wake up the next morning to the news that in front of my window the Lily of the Annunciation has bloomed.