David
Hart: Work,
the work
(Flarestack Publishing, 41 Buckley's
Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham B48 7NG; chapbook, 2005, 16pp,
isbn 1900397838.
£5.)
If you're
not in the habit of reading chapbooks, this one is worth making
an exception for. In Work, the work, David
Hart has created a coherent snapshot of Beethoven's inner turmoil
at the time of composing his final piano sonata, No. 32, op
111. The poem has grown from the music and operates as its emotional,
verbal paradigm or equivalence.
The title
functions on, at least, three levels: that of placing the works side
by side, following the notion of work (the sonata) and work (the
poem); that of the composer's affirmation against despair, i.e. that
which gives meaning; and, though weakened by the comma, in a parallel
sense of working with the work (the sonata), which is, indeed, what
gives the poem its final form.
Although
music shapes the form, the style is that of a self-absorbed journal
or the consciousness stream flowing through the composer's mind during
performance or, as is may be suggested by the opening, the jumbled
thoughts of a man freshly awake but prior to arising from bed. Is
this Hart's attempt to suggest what would replace sound in the deaf
composer's mind? Interesting thesis, though this is not a poem about
musical ideas, technique or innovation but about a man's inner struggle
with the imbalance of what he perceives as his destiny. The language
often duplicates the emotional incoherence that can be discovered
at the end of the Heiligenstadt Testament (the letter to his brother
in which Beethoven affirmed his art as a buffer against death and
suicide and in which he resolved to struggle on against what he regarded
as a cruel Fate) and he is often depicted as having the emotional
stability of an adolescent; maturity is in the music.
The poem
begins:
IF I
could fall out of bed –
If I could fall –
If I could contrive a fall–
If I could fall out, crawl to the table, out the pen to work
A muddling
of cadence and reality, a sick man summoning the will power
to arise and work, or the composer meditating merciful release
in a ‘dying
fall'? Repetition of the 'I' underlines the self-focussing nature
of what we are about to experience, but the word 'fall', repeated
an equal number of times, recalls to mind something quite different – a
Lucifer in defiance of the "Unconditional Designer" who "knows
my graft and turns away"; a Prometheus who filches his creative
fire from above and returns with it to earth:
Can
a man raid heaven,
raid
Heaven and bring back notes
meant for word-graft-song from the beginning?
The 'fall'
out of bed and the 'fall' into work can't be ignored. From the outset
we're aware of a man both blessed and cursed with a 'heavenly' gift
with its 'hellish' consequences, emotionally and physically.
Beethoven
is presented as an accident and victim of a Fate which, latterly,
imprisoned him in "The Voice Out Of Silence", and which
we are made aware of from the beginning:
My
brother
who
had no brothers lived six days,
did not know me, was not me, might have been me, was not
to
be taught by Rovanti, Koch, Pfeifer and Neefe,
to hear the work of Hiller, Benda, Grétry and Paisello,
did not live to know his own name, my name.
The ironic
consequences are not lost amid the stream – if Beethoven's
brother had survived he would not have been him, but then neither
would Beethoven have been an identical self. References to
the dead brother invite us to go beyond a comparison of self
with other and invite us to weigh this individual life against
nothingness, non-being. We can construct what it might mean
to have had a Beethoven exist, but what might it mean if he hadn't?
The poem
holds up for us the idea of an individual who is blemished, inadequate,
brilliant. He is the joke and scourge of maids:
I
attempted my best
maid-politic
behaviour and endeavoured to keep her,
hoping she would cook well and not shit-snigger me.
She saw me washing naked almost and she smirked.
He is
the pathetic human being who seeks his soul mate and fails:
Instead
of a kiss
released
me with her lace and tippet smile and half a crate
of Riesling. If in this fleshy world
she would have
leaned into me the way I have seen women
do,
what revelation then in my dissonance! What apprenticeship!
I position myself eyes closed as if she is
leaning
into me, a touch
of a lean of a tilt
I
am the plaything
of the One Who Gives And Who Takes Away to whom I am
of necessity obedient wholly in debt.
He is
the dishevelled tramp, socially uncouth, a figure of broader
social ridicule, "mocked everyday by puppets who think they know better",
but he is also the composer:
I
have sweated
in pain my own
desire
for
holiness
with intent
on fire-wings
discovered
echo
from
my heart –
Hart's
admiration for the sonata never temps him to dabble in übermensch
or Romantic hero myths. Suffering in the poem is painful, embarrassing;
creativity is envisaged as a revised and re-revised ground out act
of human will – which might suggest to us yet another possible
interpretation of the poem's title. But out of the cadence
and cohesion of the poem, formed from the criss-cross of its
subject's random thoughts, emerges a figure who overcomes adversity
to achieve, but is as unable as any to understand the reasons
for his success. Which takes us full circle to piano sonata,
No 32 op 111 to look for another sort of explanation and beginning.
copyright © John
Couth, 2005. All quotations are copyright © David Hart.
