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Algimantas Mackus
CHAPEL B For Antanas Ðkëma Instead
of the somber grace to live Death’s this
aged and faded Death’s these fanatic plowboys Death’s the manuscript sheets turned yellow
Death’s the names of new republics drawn Death’s a collage of water and stained glass Green all green Sharp as sharp Quick so quick Black on black
THE VOICE of a continent prays for explorers
You had to be born of rain and ocean, torso. The map a fateful hand etched finds one voice Cold so cold I want only the cold The voice of a continent assailing explorers
is Voice of a landmass, now body and sex, Round as water, salty as it is,
MARIA was made for sex
Maria you ease back to die
BECAUSE you did not pray for solid everyday
detail
IN DYING Now I draw one timeless hour aside In coalmines they dig up coal They bury Lashing plantation whips break With shoulders and chest laid Now I draw one timeless hour aside
IT’S NOT TO go to sleep we gather
It’s not to dream dreams we gather Maria no longer slept, The handouts held back for yourselves A fish the storm tossed up It’s our loins giving out, now we have The words we speak fade
TOMORROW we go see you off
Let your lifeless hand close
Tomorrow we go see you off
Our moss-covered hands keep churning
IN MOURNING 1 Right at seven that morning At seven a.m. And right at seven a.m. At seven that morning And it was right at seven a.m. So it was right at seven a.m. The blood fanfare stiffening So it was right at seven a.m. had trumpets and trombones proclaiming It was at seven o’clock that morning At seven o’clock that morning So that right at seven a.m. It was at seven that morning 2 And I do not want to see And I do not want to see 3 What I would like is to have the strong What I would like is to have the simple
What I would like is to have the old What I would like is to have the supple 4 You landed in a dead landscape I have not stated the blood news. You are sure to know now I have not announced the blood news. You broke all ties to a natural life Now you are like a boat Now to avoid Now you are a citizen
OUR EXILE fading There’s no way to measure the blood,
The foam withdraws into myth.
In Triumph And death won’t be won over. And death won’t be won over. And death won’t be won over.
Author’s notes Chapel B: 9/13-14/1961. Jamaica Ave., New York, N.Y. An undertaker’s establishment: “Two chapels under one roof.” The first chapel is designated Chapel A, the second Chapel B. The bier for Antanas Ðkëma is set up in the latter. IN DYING: Paul Celan’s Todesfuge is the intended model: Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends IN MOURNING: A las cinco de la tarde. Echoes of thematic and rhythmic particulars, even of overall tone and structure to some degree, from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias occur throughout In Mourning. The “five o’clock in the afternoon” of its first part here becomes “seven o’clock in the morning”. The car crash which killed Antanas Ðkëma happened around seven in the morning. “There’s no color …” [in the untitled, penultimate section]: “There’s no milk to the foam. There’s no blood to the foam. There’s just ‘Zhilvin, ayee!’” (Antanas Ðkëma, “Þilvinëëli.”) IN TRIUMPH: A counterstatement to Dylan Thomas’ And Death Shall Have No Dominion: And death shall have no dominion.
Meaning death: notes for a postscript The compulsion of an overwhelming rage pervade
Chapel B, yet an underlying grief, brimming resistance while
tending to reiterate inexorable dissolution, gives the poem its shape.
The formal, often bitterly ironic lament commemorates at least three
fatal terminations, of which only the first was actual, though the poem’s
configuration shows it destined for inevitable merger with two larger,
figurative endings. A celebrated Lithuanian émigré writer has been killed
in an auto accident, and as a result, the aggrieved generation of his
fellow expatriates is brought to face not just the quaint and tenuous
transience of their aggravated, postwar displacement, but a doomed demise
as well for the resettled culture they have been struggling to preserve
in exile. One plain, factual irony is that in the days just prior to
the tragic event, the author whose unexpected and violent death occasioned
the poem was feted for the sustained and exceptional continuity in his
literary and theatrical work over the past twenty-five years. Such jolting
absurdity could not fail to add a strain of diminished hope to the huddled
dream of an already beleaguered community. At all levels, Chapel
B is an unsparing, haunted and at times ghastly delineation of the
complex disintegration in progress, yet its whirlpool of agonized modulations
yields consistently clear sightlines. As the rhetorical dynamic throughout
evolves from profound trauma, the parts accumulate for a force that
carries the awesome gravity of a crashing breaker, its foaming red crest
drenched in blood and sunset.
A preliminary clue to pronunciation: Mackus is roughly Mott’s Kuss, while Ðkëma transmogrifies to Shkaym-uh. Chapel B. In the original, the title is given in English. Dedication. Early one morning, on September 11, 1961, just a couple of months shy of reaching fifty, Antanas Ðkëma was killed in a crash somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the coal-mining belt where restless generations of immigrants, including thousands of Lithuanians, had worked the excavations (see the section In Dying). A patch of early morning fog which precipitated the collision also obscured it. It was Labor Day, and Ðkëma was one of several groggy passengers in the fatal vehicle returning to New York City from Upper Michigan, where he had been the focus of a weekend celebration to acclaim his twenty-five years of sustained professional activity as a stage actor, director, and playwright. Having started his career in pre-war Kaunas, Ðkëma was among the thousands forced to flee Lithuania in the last year of the war. After a transitional period spent in refugee camps in West Germany, he was allowed to emigrate to the United States and to settle in South Boston. To date, he had managed to complete a controversial novel and publish two volumes of provocative expressionist sketches, while working solid hours at low-paying jobs, in the meantime, to support household and family. The best of his writing focused on postwar exile, and he was largely known for a series of original plays which addressed the maladjustment and displacement endemic to émigré experience, evolving some common fears to extremes of rage, derangement and despair. Author. One of the speakers at the convivial colloquium had been Algimantas Mackus, at twenty-nine a full generation younger than Ðkëma and already a notable presence on a still hugely striving if barely flourishing émigré scene. With two books of poems published, the first in 1950 when he was just eighteen, Mackus was still more widely recognized as a regular announcer and program director of daily Lithuanian-language radio broadcasts for the area around Chicago; the city where he worked and lived, long famous for the vigorous sprawl it accrued from diverse ethnic sources, was well into a fifth decade of boasting the next highest urban concentration of Lithuanians after their capital Vilnius. Although he was a native of Pagëgiai, a small town in western Lithuania, Mackus spent parts of his boyhood in Kaunas and Vilnius, as his parents, both of whom had undertaken careers in the postal service, were being reassigned. Ultimately, after a layover in Germany, the family resettled in the United States. Mackus was enrolled for two years in Chicago’s Roosevelt University but did not pursue a degree. Although reviews and published translations attest that he followed the latest developments in international writing, his own literary ambitions kept him active within the Lithuanian community, as radio programmer for a Lithuania broadcast service and editor of its magazine. The best of his earlier poems had a reductionist metaphysics draped in terse, nostalgic declarations. Their pronounced, if often naive, theatricality gave the effect of an absurdly deboned realism that earned Mackus the ambiguous reputation of an avant-gardist. It was a stance he espoused, lauding Ðkëma in his speech for having stayed with the avant-garde past an advanced stage in his own career. Mackus was back at work in Chicago when he heard of Ðkëma’s death, one day after their last meeting, and was so shaken that he left immediately for the funeral in New York without notifying his wife. In the brief eulogy he delivered at the service, Mackus reaffirmed Ðkëma’s solid standing in the avant-garde, which he now further defined as “a heroic simplicity to stay actual and accurate for the authentic truth of his creative word”. Over the next few years the poet completed Chapel B, published separate parts of it in journals, and chose to give its first full public reading early in September 1964 to commemorate the third anniversary of Ðkëma’s death. Mackus himself was killed in a car crash just a few months later, one that occurred early in the evening, at six minutes past seven. Having just signed off as the last voice on the broadcast program for December 28, 1964, Mackus was being given a lift home. With Chapel B already scheduled for publication, the book was issued in march 1965 as a double memorial. “Lithuanian landscape”: Small as the country
is on a map of present-day Europe, having the overall shape of a clenched
fist or an anatomical heart on the coastal plain that touches the eastern
bend of the Baltic Sea, Lithuania’s borders still encompass the geographical
center of Europe. Its general flatness is relieved only by the amber-rich
sandy coastline and numerous bright lakes in the interior, with gently
banked rivers and neatly parceled remnants of nearly depleted ancient
forests out of which its inhabitants first entered history during the
Middle Ages. (“How many gods do you have?” asked the missionary; the
local plowman made a broad sweep with his arm and replied: “As many
as the trees around here.”) The consolidated Lithuanian tribes were
the last European nation to accept Christianity, roused as they were
to an effective resistance by the crusading Teutonic Order of Knights
from the West and almost simultaneously checked encroachment by the
hordes of nomadic Khans, the original Red menace sweeping in from the
East. A rapid expansion over the recovered territories made Lithuania
for at least a century the largest single domain in Europe. It is no
exaggeration to say that the institution of Christianity, albeit indirectly,
brought on oppression and historical demise. In effect, the converted
people became exemplary Christians: self-abnegating, hard-working peasants
under various absentee barons, anointed in Warsaw or Moscow or Berlin.
Rapidly, the country turned into a crucial crossroads for the single-minded
ambitions of some bloody campaigners: Gustavus Adolphus with his Swedes
against several Prussian Fredericks; Napoleon’s ill-fated gran’armée
on its way through to Moscow; Hitler’s killer elite and Stalin’s countering,
chilling aftermath. The drastic, brutal Soviet occupation, being the
most recent, is the one the poem most often alludes to.
“Sunshine” and “moonman”: Sun and moon are female and male, respectively, in the surviving myths of Lithuanian folklore, which typically play on their sexual and spousal linkage. A readymade pun in the near conjunction of the terms for “(sun) rising” and “going off with” reverberates in a kind of semantic repercussion. “Vilnius”: The once and present capital of Lithuania, over long periods under dispute, has been variously referred to as Wilno or Vilna. Legend has it that a howling wolf signaled its founding to the instigating Prince Gediminas in the early 1300s. As the central bastion for a rapidly expanding Lithuanian principality, the city was from its beginning multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and so multi-lingual. The Jesuits had instituted the basic Latinate program for its university there by the end of the 16th century, with at least two poets of world rank (Adam Mickiewicz and Czeslaw Milosz) among its later, secular graduates. A large concentration of Jews within the limits of the city, which Napoleon in passing termed “the Jerusalem of the North”, made it the most sophisticated center of Jewish scholarship and tradition for several centuries. While relatively untouched by the rash of pogroms which had swept Tsarist provinces, the city’s Jews were not spared the Holocaust and under the German occupation during the Second World War its vast ghetto was wiped out. The poet Mackus, who had spent most of the war and the last six years of an otherwise itinerant childhood there, felt especially attached to this city. During the last public toast he made in the presence of his friend, the last time ever the latter was to be so honored, Mackus declared that he had come to associate Antanas Ðkëma with Vilnius. “Black Maria”: A popular term for the closed police van used to transport prisoners, as well as the small-box design of the first portable cameras; also, though less widely, applied as a tag for any secure, light-impenetrable chamber outfitted for torture. Here, however, a variable figure often reflects the multiple allusions, alternating somewhere between the Virgin Mary and Billie Holiday, as the muse of last appeal, inviolate though victimized enchantress. Maria recurs as the name most commonly assigned newborn girls in Christian families. In Lithuania, as in few other Catholic countries, there is a thriving cult around a specifically situated emblem of Maria as the Mother of Mercies. This is the image which was painted on oakwood panels (and soon ascribed miraculous powers) late in the 17th century for a chapel above the portals of the Gate of Dawn at Vilnius, where it is still installed. The painting depicts Maria in splendor, wearing a crown and radiant halo, with all but her face and hands covered in bright silver garments. Before restoration, the features had darkened so much that they appeared black against the highlighted silver. “… in black or white”: The phrase makes a modest proposal and launches racial role reversal as a recurring motif. Furthermore, it introduces the main structural tactic of advancing the poem by a series of diametrically opposed contrasts, a procedure whose first successful development is often ascribed to Pindar. In our time, Paul Celan forged a celebrated contemporary elaboration in German as Atemwende, breath reversal; the term, which he had coined for a poem and also gave as title to one of his books, then became a focal point in his later poetics. It has been singled out as an elegant modern variant on Pindar’s technique; so have the specific parts of Lorca’s Lament parodied in the present poem. “Gethsemane”: An olive grove, by tradition the Garden of Sorrows, to which Christ retreats after the Last Supper. Two of the key night-scenes in the Via Crisis are enacted here. First, the anguished, all too human meditation causing Jesus to sweat blood, and then the betraying Judas kiss which signals his arrest. “Fire Sermon”: All is insubstantial, melting into fire. The crux of Buddha’s preaching is preserved in his cautionary parable of raging desire. “Green all green …”: The second section begins with a paraphrase of Lorca’s famous Somnambulist Ballad. “Lomzh”: Another multi-lingual town, like Vilnius. This one is in the Polish provinces. For a period early in the Second World War, during the poet’s boyhood in Vilnius, his parents had engaged a Polish housekeeper who was from Lomzh. “Poland not lost no not yet”: A line from the Polish anthem serves here as an ironic reminder of the tragic parallels in the histories of the two neighboring nations, from head-on contention over the multi-lingual Vilnius district to their mutual distress over forced absorption into a Soviet empire. Long prior to the Partition of 1794, as a result of which it became the Romantic prototype for all “countries erased from maps”, Poland was joined with Lithuania in a Greater Union. “Lorca”: The great modern poet, whose model and intensely mournful Lament Mackus acknowledges in his Notes, also celebrated the variously inventive local traditions of multi-cultural Spain. Like Ðkëma, he became widely known for his work in the theater and also spent a brief, productive exile in New York. He too died a premature, violent death. Rounded up by the civil militia while summering in his native Granada in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was shot in a mass killing and unceremoniously buried in a common grave with other nameless victims of the anti-Republican Nationalists before the authorities had made anyone aware of his fate.
“Our language is fading”: Even in ordinary usage, the Lithuanian word kalba conveys a complex of related meanings, as it does here, which alternate according to context and can denote formal speech, or plain talk, or intimate palaver, as often as language. “The aristocrat of Indo-European languages” was the late Bruce Chatwin’s memorable tag, since Lithuanian is now the oldest within the living Indo-European family of languages and, along with Latvian, the last surviving in the Baltic branch. Grammatically, it is said to show a close kinship to Sanskrit, with many archaic elements still embedded within its current demotic; until lately, when industrialization brought in a flood of foreign appropriations, scholarly estimates had set Lithuanian on a par with ancient Greek in its development. Since early in the 18th century, when the last known speaker of Old Prussian, another of the rare Baltic languages, expired within his region, just to the west of Lithuania, which had undergone extensive Teutonic and German colonization, the Lithuanians have been haunted by the prospect of their own language becoming extinct. The “Zhilvin” refrain carries two allusions. The more immediate of these echoes Ðkëma’s harsh though graceful conclusion of his short story about a recently widowed, grieving young immigrant woman’s abrupt decline into homelessness. The last scene shows her descending the stairs into the New York City subway, hand in hand with her new-found companion, an Afro-American man. The refrain itself, moreover, derives from the best-known Lithuanian folktale, Queen of the Water-Snakes, where it recurs in the course of a formulaic interrogation. The water-snake, which was held to be sacred in pagan Lithuania, merits high regard to this day, with severe local taboos against harming it; far from surprising, therefore, to hear it confirmed, right at the start of the earliest cautionary account which may well have assimilated the plot for its topical allegory on Viking raids from another far-flung spin-off of the Persephone legend that a water spirit has successfully impressed an ordinary human girl, persuading her to go off with him to his kingdom under the sea; nor any more surprising that she starts to miss the homefolks, soon enough. She plans a return visit which her spouse reluctantly approves. But before allowing her to set off with their two sons and young daughter, he gives them the specific code by which to signal him for their return. Call out my name, he tells them, from the shore. If I’m alive, a wave will break in white foam, and if I’m dead, in blood. The reunion takes place, during the course of which the visitors regale their avid human kin with amazing details of their regal, richly maintained subaquaeous homelife. The humans grow intent on gaining access to the exotic kingdom. They isolate the sons and threaten each in turn, but neither one will reveal the secret. When they confront the daughter, she breaks down and tells all. The kinsmen rush off at once to summon the serpent and, when the password brings him to the surface, proceed to hack him to bits. In time, and without having caught on, the visiting queen prepares to go back. The relatives give leave without any hint of their treachery. Once the queen’s party reaches shore, she intones the proper summons. In response to her call, red foam rides in on the next wave, while a voice from inside the wave breaks the truth of the murder. On seeing and hearing this, the queen at once is literally rooted to the spot, as are all her three children. The mother transforms into a spruce tree, the sons change to oak and maple, and the girl becomes a shivering aspen. Vyt Bakaitis
Algimantas Mackus (1932–1964) left his native Lithuania shortly before the end of the Second World War, when he was twelve years old. Together with his parents, he resettled in Chicago and for the rest of a tragically brief life was active in the vigorous Lithuanian community there. Taking a lively interest in the latest aesthetic trends, he gained early recognition as a leading figure in the emerging group of younger writers which he termed “the generation of unadorned speech”. He published three books of verse in his lifetime. Chapel B appeared after his death. Vyt Bakaitis is the author of a book of poems, City Country (New York City: Black Thistle Press, 1991). Two bi-lingual volumes with his translations of Lithuanian poets have also appeared: There Is No Ithaca by Jonas Mekas (Black Thistle, 1996) and XL Poems by Julius Keleras (Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers Union, 1998). His versions of the Romantic classics Hölderlin and Mickiewicz and the contemporary Lithuanian Tomas Venclova are included in World Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Breathing Free, a bi-lingual compendium of his selections from the past two hundred years in Lithuanian poetry, is scheduled for publication this year by the Lithuanian Writers Union. |
