by Lesley Jenike
“Enter Time, the Chorus” wants to know what happens when I applique my experience on top of historical time. It wants to know how art and literature became material presences in my life and how they shape my view of history—both with a systemic H and a personal h.
“The best understanding of a work is always to be gotten from the work itself.” –Kenneth Koch
When an actor leaves the stage, she enters the ineffable. Her story continues, only there aren’t any words for it.
I suppose you might see the unsayable as a weakness, the totemic as lifeless. You might think it’s the vibrant motion of a visible narrative that keeps art alive. You might believe it’s too easy to end in ellipses, literarily or figuratively, and that to do so would suggest the story begins and ends with you.
//
Poet Louise Glück has her gripes with hazy endings. She writes, “The void itself, the tremulous incipience of the ellipsis notwithstanding, has a strangely burgher-like stolidity,” giving a thick, weighty shape to the nothingness—as if it were an unsmashable statue, maybe.
At the end of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, poor, wronged Hermione has become nothing, that is, a statue. Forgiveness is impossible. Any apologies Leontes might make break against her like waves. But that’s not the whole story. The play ends in a sort of ellipses…a last, enigmatic gesture in Arden’s gigantic Complete Works of Shakespeare. It reads,
Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand, and answer to his part
Perform’d in this wide gap of time, since first
We were dissever’d: hastily lead away. Exeunt
Shakespeare commences with his magic and Hermione is human again, the broken family is reunited, and life goes on. “Lead us from hence,” Leontes says, “where we may leisurely / Each one demand, / and answer to his part….” meaning, after the actors have left the stage they will continue to talk, to explain, to describe what happened during that “wide gap of time,” only they’ll do it without us, far away from here, in an undetermined future we can’t see. In effect, The Winter’s Tale goes on and on, because even though the actor has disappeared, the play itselzf has not. The play knows and the play may or may not say.
Let’s say I am the play.
//
In 1962 Niki de Saint Phalle propped up a plaster Venus on-stage and shot at it until paint splattered all over its face, its breasts, its armless torso—Bang! Bang!—in a play about the making or remaking of a city, the city of Boston precisely, which was, in actuality, built during what scientists call the Little Ice Age—a change in climate that lasted the length of the seventeenth century, and likely longer.
The Little Ice Age ushered in unusual meteorological events. The salinity of the ocean changed. Strong storms rose up at odd times of the year. Bodies of water iced over when they hadn’t before, and for longer stretches when they did.
Boston may have helped to bring about the Little Ice Age, with assistance of course from the small pox epidemic that preceded it, dislocations, relocations, massacres. Naturally there were geologic and astrophysical reasons for the seventeenth century’s unusually cold winters, but let’s not underestimate the human effect. Let’s not minimize the structural forces grinding out across the planet that made Boston possible.
Boston was built in the coldness of time, not its fullness.
In 1962, long, long after the Little Ice Age ended and our Long Hot Age began, the poet Kenneth Koch wrote a play called The Construction of Boston in which Robert Rauchenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Nikki de Saint Phalle in a single day (shrunk down to an hour), contrive to make Boston using—what else?—their art! The artists played themselves.
History as a series of definable events—community-building as a series of constructions, not to mention the removal of native populations, the filling-in of marshland, land disturbances, tree harvesting, wildlife poaching, witch trials, births and deaths, ostracizations and welcomings, roof raisings and roof razings, immigrations and departures—
all these and more Koch eliminates in favor of art. All is redefined and reimagined as art. And not just any art, Robert Rauschenberg’s, Jean Tinguely’s, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s, de Saint Phalle who shot guns loaded with paint at her canvases, Rauschenberg who stuck a tire around a dead goat, and Tinguely who took junk and reanimated it, giving his machines pencils with which to make their own drawings.
In an hour or so—however long that singular 1962 performance was—the Puritans and Pequods, the whaling ships and Revere’s ride—all gave way to a revolutionary notion that we can change history, or at least subvert it, even the history of a place as old, rooted, and inescapable as Boston. One needn’t haul ass to California. One needn’t ride a steamer to Paris. One needn’t change her name, her hair color, her religion. One needn’t disappear into the brush. All one need do is make art and in making art, make a new city on top of the old one.
Somewhat later in time, in an operatic recreation of the original play, the opera itself steps onto the stage and sings, “I am the opera, here to explain myself!”
It’s not entirely unusual for an abstraction to tell a story. Shakespeare did it in The Winter’s Tale, imbuing Time with great ambivalence and a penchant for narrative, which is to be expected of Time:
“Time. I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that make and unfold error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings.”
The Winter’s Tale was first performed in 1611, deep in the heart of that world-wide freeze. Among many other things, it’s a play about paranoia—a psychosis rampant in certain provinces during the Little Ice Age, notably the Massachusetts Bay Colony which saw America’s original witch hunt, progenitor of subsequent “witch hunts” played and playing out in our own Big Hot Age, or so I’m calling it because I don’t know if it has a name.
No one knew when or if the long winters would end. No one knew what to call it, this disruption in Time.
//
It’s 1996. Boston is buried under a foot of April Fool’s snow. I’m on the phone with my mother and I’m crying. “Are you ok?” she asks. “I know I shouldn’t hang up until I know you’re ok. Are you ok?” I’m crying. “Do I need to come up there? I don’t need to come up there, do I?”
It’s 2019. My daughter and I look down into a pond at the local plant nursery. Roiling koi practically crawl out of the water to gulp the fish food we throw at them, a dime-per-handful. My daughter asks me, “Where do the fish go in the winter?” And I say, “It’s like they become statues and freeze until it’s spring, then they thaw out again.”
A winter’s tale.
In Shakespeare’s story, Leontes believes his wife has cheated on him with his childhood friend and that the child his wife bears isn’t his, so he abandons her in a faraway country. How long does it take him to accept that his wife didn’t cheat and his daughter is his? According to Time the Chorus—sixteen years. According to theatrical time—maybe two hours.
We can quantify the Little Ice Age, say it began in a certain year and ended in another with a century in-between, but what is time to the mother frozen solid on an Amsterdam stoop, her baby in her arms? Motherhood is a time-fuck. It’s a play performed inside a walled garden on the greater property of historical time and geologic time. Our movements inside the garden are constrained, miniaturized. We populate our little plots of ground with sculpture and ephemera. If we’re lucky, there’s an old tree no one bothers to cut down.
Time is a chorus, which can mean a single narrator, as in The Winter’s Tale, or for ancient Greek dramatists it can mean a whole group of narrators speaking in unison, though the fact of their union is illusory. The chorus is a collection of people, each with their own minds, their own bodies, no matter how homogenous their society, how hammered down they might be by their mutual culture into identical, metal bowls. Time is of two minds, of three minds, of four, and so on.
It’s one thing for a universal property to announce itself, make known its intentions, then bungle our hope for Aristotelian unity, but what about the medium itself, speaking of itself?
I am the play and I’m here to explain myself.
At first, I thought I was an actor, so I went to Boston because New York was just too big. I needed to get the hell away from Cincinnati and my warring, divorced and perpetually divorcing parents.
You go to school “back East” is what they say, if you are of certain means with certain ambitions, but I wasn’t any good. Too much in your head, my instructors said. When during an improv exercise I pretended to look for a lost contact lens, I was nearly laughed out of the studio. Would it really fall all the way over there? I had no real sense of reality.
When I was made to give one classmate a massage or to fall backward into another classmate’s arms, I thought to myself, what ignominy! When I passed out during floor exercises in a movement class then woke to the teacher’s yellow, gnarled toenails by my face (Good to have you back), I knew I was probably dead, and how gross, and I was never going make it—it meaning a fruitful connection to the universe, fame, or a paying gig.
I walked in circles trying to feel my chi. I huffed like a gorilla and trilled like a bird high up in my nasal cavities. I clung to a barre and lifted my leg several degrees lower than the optimum height. I sat on the floor of an old, wood-paneled classroom feeling like an Elizabethan kindergartener and listened to the palpably narcissistic dramaturgy professor dismantle everything I thought I knew about plays, about play. Why is it called a PLAY? It’s called a PLAY because we’re all just children PLAYING *mind blown mind blown mind blown*
I wasn’t cast in any of the shows, but word got around campus that I wrote. My acting coach seemed vindicated. Too much in her head. Makes sense. Actors need to be unsolidified and I was walking around with cement on my shoulders.
//
Hermione steps down from her pedestal and is a living, breathing woman again. Despite her reanimation, she never speaks directly to her husband Leontes who has accused her of infidelity. Forgiveness won’t come easily, and it may not even arrive in language, at least none that we’ll ever hear.
Sixteen unexplained, off-stage years have gone by, and we’re left wondering which she is—art or person, dead or alive, past or present. But despite sometimes being hidden, Time is still there, biding its time, and I’ll tell you what happened. I am the play, after all:
It took way more than sixteen years for my father and mother to sit down at the same table again. It took grandchildren’s bar mitzvas and graduations. It took old age and softening bodies. It took alcohol and fortitude. It took years of my life and my sister’s and brother’s lives spent in utter panic. It took careful calculation and the consideration of feelings so delicate they went mainly unremarked upon, only felt, like a storm still miles away. It took therapy on our part, not theirs, and three subsequent marriages. It took the loss of memory, and the gaining of it. It took work. And dead pets. And menopause. It took so much time. It took my mother on the floor of my Boston apartment in the mid-Nineties, prone on an air mattress like one of those stone effigies immobilized by her bad second marriage, her bad first marriage. It took the suppleness of Time for me to see my mother is actually just a hurt little girl and that I was only playing at empathy. In fact, I was a play about empathy and I called myself The Construction of a City, “the Earth’s best city or at least the darkest and the coldest at some moments of the year.”
//
Kenneth Koch was a native of Cincinnati. He lived there until he was 18, then he escaped and joined the army, went to Harvard, then to Columbia—Boston, New York, Paris.
A professor of mine who knew Koch once drove him from the airport to the University of Cincinnati where he was to read and lecture for a bunch of eager grad students. My teacher told me Koch hadn’t been back in years and years at that point, and he could see a marked change in Koch’s face—a sudden pain—as they crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky into the city that raised us, my teacher, Koch, and me. To Koch, time retracted suddenly, like a tape measure, and he was back at the beginning, as if no time had passed at all. Yet, every hour, every second he’d spent away lay coiled inside the case.
In Kenneth Koch’s libretto for The Construction of Boston, Niki de Saint Phalle brings to Boston “art and beauty with a magic pistol that she fires.” The truth is, de Saint Phalle didn’t spend a terribly long time in Boston, though her first child was born there. Her name was Laura.
In 1953 de Saint Phalle experienced a psychic break. She was committed and underwent electroshock therapy. Then one day, she woke up
and decided to point a gun at her canvases—not to destroy, but to create—exploding the paint into ecstatic shapes, missives, mighty fireworks.
“Fire at that ancient statue!” the chorus cries, and Niki de Saint Phalle strikes.
“Music, awake her; strike!” says Paulina to her musicians, “Strike all that look upon her with marvel. Come!”
When I was a kid, one of my fantasy jobs was to be a historian and I thought I’d “write on the side.” I had no idea what “on the side” really meant, or even what it meant to be a historian which—it turns out—actually requires a lot of writing. I knew writing would be my life’s occupation, only that I’d have some other day job too, but what I didn’t realize then was that history, research, and writing were, in fact, all of a piece, part of my make-up, and what makes me tick. It took me just about 40 years to figure out how they all went together—at least for me—and what’s exciting, I’m still in the process of figuring it out. “Enter Time, the Chorus” wants to know what happens when I applique my experience on top of historical time. It wants to know how art and literature became material presences in my life and how they shape my view of history—both with a systemic H and a personal h. It wants to make connections—however gossamer—between myself and Kenneth Koch, the Little Age, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Shakespeare. When I was younger, I never would’ve attempted such presumptuous speculations; now that I’m older, I can’t stop myself.
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Lesley Jenike is the author of two full-length poetry collections, including Holy Island (Gold Wake, 2017), and several chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or will appear soon in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, At Length, The Bennington Review, Rattle, Verse, and many other venues. She’s currently a regular blogger for Ploughshares, and teaches writing and literature at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH were she lives with her husband and two small children.