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Paris

POETRY

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

‘Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!’
PEDAGOGICAL SKETCHBOOKS, Paul Klee, 1925

 

Cruising from Westminster to Greenwich, we passed
Tate Modern, the old Bankside power station –
art as regeneration. The current show
was ‘Paul Klee – Making Visible’. “Making
a fool of himself, more like!” called the captain
over the tannoy. There was much laughter
and some applause. The 02 Arena
and the Thames Barrier came into view –
two works of abstract art as engineering.
In the Royal Hospital’s Painted Hall
are Thornhill’s baroque maritime murals –
representational art as décor
and establishment propaganda.

On the return trip, a different captain
made the same remark – to the same effect.
Klee and his peers had been many decades
dead and were, seemingly, still a threat –
despite the sponsor, EY – Ernst & Young –
trusted global accountants and auditors!

Klee catalogued his work precisely.
‘Making Visible’ followed his schema.
In the ‘20s room, I studied his ‘Wohin?’ –
‘Where to?’ – oil on paper, A4 more or less –
a stylised landscape of seven trees –
straight trunks, leaves and branches circular,
six deep green, paint richly daubed, the seventh
a discreet orange – and varicoloured,
irregular fields, no lanes, paths – the title
painted in as part of the picture.

I had seen the work before: exhibited
in Chicago’s Art Institute, built
as part of the 1893 World Fair –
architectural art as marketing.
The exhibition was a reprise –
a sort of victory roll – of the Nazi’s
‘Entarte Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’,
mastered by Goebbels, opened by Hitler
in ’37 in Munich’s Chamber
of Visual Arts. In addition
to Klee’s, there were works by Chagall, Grosz,
Kandinsky, Kokoscha, Mondrian et al –
snatched from the public galleries of the Reich.
One might have expected the exhibition
to have been followed by the public
immolation of the works of art,
like the burning of books in ’33.
Some disappeared as Europe broke apart.
Many, like ‘Wohin?’, travelled safely
abroad. Money makes the art go round.

In ’33, vilified by the Nazis,
he left Germany and returned to Bern.
His was, as he put it, ‘a thinking eye’,
seeing truly the scope and the nature of things;
Picasso’s ‘master of colour’; versatile
in his use of materials; prolific.
In ’36, he was diagnosed
with scleroderma, an incurable
degenerative disease, that affects
motor skills. He died the month the Werhmacht
took Paris. He painted to the end.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CIVIL WARS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

After the horsemen and the slaves, before
the Stalins and the Hitlers, were the skilful
cities – cosmopolitan, pragmatic,
loud and solemn with towers, spires, domes.

There are some who would reprise a fictive past,
revert from countries of convenience
to imaginary nations, ignore
the corrupting legacy of empire,
the corrupted remittance of colonies,
oil trumping Crusades and martyrdom.

Europe could break like a slate across old
fault lines – a slate smudged with alphabets.
Europe could rub out its history.

There are swastikas in Brick Lane and Berlin,
lampooning in Paris and Soho.
When liberty is assassinated,
freedom is curbed by the rationale
of abhorrence, the politics of outrage –
Jews, Christians, Muslims, the conflicted peoples
of The Book confounded. So, whose Europe?

The cities are filled still with parks and squares.
Storks, pigeons, starlings roost above music
and commerce. After the horsemen and the slaves…

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE LAST CALIPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.3K views

Ataturk dissolved seven centuries
of the Sultanate and the British
cloaked-and-daggered the aging Sultan
by sea to San Remo and exile.
Ataturk made the Sultan’s middle aged
cousin, Abdülmecid II, Caliph.
He seemed to carry his descent, as it were,
from the Prophet as lightly as a Pope
from the Saviour. He liked the pomp
and the public circumstance of the role
so much Ataturk sent him packing too.

Classical composer, husband of four wives,
painter, lepidopterist, gardener,
a Victor Hugo fan and of Montaigne’s
Essays – especially perhaps ‘By
Divers Means Men Come To A Like End’ –
he went into exile on The Orient
Express en famille and lived in Paris
and Nice. ‘He may be seen strolling with a mien
of great dignity along the beach,’
wrote a foreign correspondent, ‘attired
in swimming trunks only, carrying
a large parasol.’ He died in his bed
in his house on Boulevard Suchet
as Paris was freed from the Nazis –
his beard, of which he was proud, still resplendent.
He was buried in Medina – Madinat
Al-Nabi, City of the Prophet –
as, officially, the last of the line.
It could have been worse. His seems to have been
a charmed, perhaps even charming, life –
with an enviable retirement, due,
in large part, to Ataturk’s shrewdness.

What would either of them have made of
caliphate proclamations from the deserts
of Syria and Iraq; stage-managed
beheadings broadcast worldwide; Semtex strapped
to the gut and the heart?

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

The Armistice was agreed at 5.10 –
in Foch’s personal railway carriage
– among the cigar and brandy fumes.
The Chancellories of Europe knew
thirty minutes later. Big Ben was rung
for the first time in four years and gas lamps
lit in Paris. There was dancing and streamers.

Foch insisted the truce would not take effect
until 11.00 – ostensibly
so the news could be keyed and carried to
each trench and dugout on the Western Front.

Thousands of soldiers were killed that morning.
The last to die – at 10.59 –
was Private Henry Günther from Baltimore,
advancing with comrades in ignorance
through the wild woodland of the Argonne.
The division’s history records: ‘Almost
as he fell, the gunfire died away
and an appalling silence prevailed’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

ABERFFRAW, YNYS MÔN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

Sand dunes, sharp with pampas grass, muffle

Caernavon Bay, St. George’s Channel,

the Atlantic. The Ffraw’s estuary flows

narrow as an eel. The curlews call.

 

The non-conformist chapel is up for sale

and the visitors’ centre does funeral teas.

The highway bypasses the village,

though here, fourteen centuries ago,

was the urbane, Christian court of Cadfan, Prince

of Gwynedd. Nothing remains. The Vikings

razed the wooden palace. He was buried

some two miles away, the slate gravestone

inscribed in Latin not Welsh by his heir:

Catamanus rex, sapientissimus,

opinatissimus, omnium regnum –

Cadfan, wisest, most renowned of all kings.

 

A penchant for dissension kept the Celtic

empires shifting like sand. They founded London,

Paris and Vienna but Rome and its

civil service, under new management,

finally seduced and traduced them.

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POETRY

GEORGE GERSHWIN AT CHIRK CASTLE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views
Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725
Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725


As we walk up the steep driveway, stopping

for breath at the curve where the castle

comes into sight – raised to block the routes

through the Dee Valley and Glyn Ceiriog

to starve the Welsh – a beribboned Rolls

descends, bride waving, followed, on foot,

by the wedding party in straggles –

black suits and brown shoes, wispy wedding hats –

treading the incline with tipsy effort.


‘The radio and the telephone

And the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies,

And in time may go!’


George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershovitz,

the second son of Russian immigrants,

ex song plugger in Tin Pan Alley

at Remick’s on West 28th Street,

in his thirtieth year visits Europe,

renews acquaintance with Alban Berg,

Ravel, Poulenc,  Milhaud, Prokokiev

and William Walton, hears Rhapsody in Blue

and Concerto in F performed in Paris.


From the grassed walk above the Ha-ha,

we can see the main gates, unused now,

the lane to the station, the Cadbury

and MDF factories, the market town

of Chirk itself and, beyond, the panorama –

from Bickerton Hills to The Long Mynd –

as we follow the trail of illicit confetti

to the Doric Temple aka summerhouse.


‘But, oh my dear,

Our love is here to stay.

Together we’re

Going a long, long way.’


The 8th Lord Howard De Walden – Tommy

to friends and family, Eton and Sandhurst,

Boer War and Great War, race horse owner,

playwright, theatre impresario –

turned its 14th century chapel

into a concert hall and invited George.

The westering sun shines upon us, dreaming

in the Temple, your head upon my shoulder.

A flock of starlings swarms suddenly

above the town – waltzing, deceiving like

a net, substantial, delicate – and is gone.


‘In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

There’re only made of clay,

But our love is here to stay.’


There is no public record of what he played

or when or how he got here. I like to think

he chose the stopping train from Paddington,

to work on An American in Paris,

and that Tommy met him personally

at Chirk Station, drove him up the hill,

in his Hispano-Suiza, through the baroque

wrought iron gates replete with wolves’ and eagles’ heads –

and as they, genius and renaissance man,

chatted about the history of the place,

along the chestnut lined drive among

the grazing sheep, George thought of Brooklyn’s

geometric streets and of Manhattan’s roar.


Remick's Music Store, 1914
Remick's Music Store, 1914

 

 

Note: an edited version of this piece has been subsequently published in ‘A Jar of Sticklebacks’ – http://www.armadillocentral.com/general/a-jar-of-sticklebacks-by-david-selzer

 

 

 

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