A Double Unfinished Symphony
Une notice nécrologique de l’amour
A sonnet sequence of 71 sonnets
by Phillip Whidden
“a summit of agonising grandeur; the relentless process is coming to an end now, and Music cracks under the inhuman strain, disintegrates and is sucked into the void. Whole slabs of sound crumble and vanish beneath the all-engulfing ocean of silence.”
~Autre/Outré (Source) and The Encyclopedia Sonnetica (Source) ©Phillip Whidden 2012 and 2022
Phillip Whidden holds the copyright of all the sonnets in this sequence.
Michel Foucault and Jean Barraqué
Foucault and Barraqué met in May 1952, Jean being a year and a quarter younger than Michel. The young musician had been a student at the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris, at the Paris Conservatoire and at the feet of Olivier Messiaen; the budding philosopher was a product of the École Normale Supérieure.
Part of the intensity of this amour came from the men’s shared taste for white wine and sado-masochism.
It was Foucault who introduced Barraqué to Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil. The composer embraced it as the piece of literature he wanted to inspire his music for the rest of his career. The two men in this young couple were devotees of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the same year that Barraqué met Foucault, Michel saw his introduction to Biswanger’s Dream and Existence published. In 1952 that Barraqué completed what has been considered until recently his first major composition, “Sonata for piano. “ He also completed the first version his Séquence in that year. A later version substituted lyrics from Nietzsche for ones by Rimbaud because of Foucault’s influence.
Barraqué was a life-long alcoholic and suffered from long bouts of depression. At least when he was young, Foucault also struggled with depression and treatment for his mental state.
Foucault retreated from the fierce affair to Uppsala where the course he taught was entitled, “The Conception of Love in French Literature from the Marquis de Sade to Jean Genet.”
About the poet
Phillip Whidden has been a taxi driver, a copywriter in advertising agencies, has worked in a plastic knives, forks and spoons factory, and has been a university lecturer in America and England. He also founded and ran a national-level pressure group in Britain.
His poetry has been published in Scotland, England and overseas, including the USA (California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Tennessee, Michigan and Florida).
Books, including poetry, by him have come out in Britain and in America.
Whidden has edited literary journals in Massachusetts and in Michigan. Plays by him have been produced in Maryland and Michigan.
Other items, including poetry criticism, stories and poetry have appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic. His poem, “Ode to an American Marine from Bountiful, Utah, Killed in the Gulf” was published in periodicals in both the United Kingdom and in America and can be read at http://spectrummagazine.org/files/archive/archive26-30/26-5whidden.pdf. The poem appeared in Chapman in Edinburgh, Scotland first but is unavailable online
His sonnet “Vermont” has been published in New York and by Cambridge University Press and online. It has been discussed in a survey of sonnets and used in a course on how to write poetry, both of these on the Web.
Some of his poems have been set to music, including a setting of a sonnet about Prince Philip the Sunday after his death. (Search Youtube if interested.) He has performed on his flute and piccolo in Massachusetts (including Harvard) in the Chapel Chamber Ensemble), , Manhattan (including in Columbia University’s chapel), and in various places in Scotland and England (including St. Alban’s Cathedral).
Whidden has done poetry readings in Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and London.
“Once at a concert in St-Séverin, Paris, I heard a choir singing the 1950s anthem, ‘Cry Out and Shout, Ye People of God,’ ” says Whidden. http://uk.ask.com/videos/watch-video/cry-out-andshout/srKqA6y6Y1lXMpkHlQz3ew?o=2463&l=dis&ver=11&domain=uk.ask.com&host=UK
…..
[1.] Stainless Steel Tubes Struck in the Orchestra
“the percussive writing is vivid and exploratory, particularly in the importance given to the resonance phenomena” ~ “Barraqué, Jean”. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians [Dominique Jameux]
It wasn’t so much harmony as chimes
Reverberating, with their echoes felt
Inside each other. This one’s would-be crimes
Were answered, swelling, just below the belt
Or, rather, registered before the strap
Was even lifted in the brain. They knew
Each other as a mother knows the trap
Her son is in before he has a clue
The vice exists. These two were buzzing with
Each other’s resonance. Their organs sensed
The partnered parallels of painful myth
Vibrating in the sins each reverenced.
Intelligence and needs were shaking deep
Inside. The thrills and risks in both loomed steep.
…..
[2.] The Muse
“he was listening to dying” ~ The Death of Virgil
Where silence is, no music can exist
As long as quietude remains. Relief
Comes flooding in a man who’s just been kissed
By love or even lust as strong as grief.
When silence is replaced by roaring sound,
That sound we name l’amour, then need becomes
The notes, the chords, the gaps, the very ground
Of songs and symphonies. Nullity numbs,
Is slave without a master and his whip.
The universe needs noise. If that commands
Our whimpers, then bring on the raping tip.
Give acquiescence to desire’s demands
And hear cacophony and melody
Break out. Hear strength and liberty break free.
…..
[3.] Barraqué to Foucault, Silently
My veins lay still as fossils stark in rock
Until I met you. Then they came alive,
Fearsome as dinosaurs’ hearts, in the shock
Of seeing veins there in your wrists. A jive
As fierce as Magyarish music thrilled
My arteries: as sweeping, wild and free
As six-yard harps, as gypsy strings that filled
My ribcage and the air with melody,
A melody romantic, brutal, drunk.
I rode it like a Saracen attack
On stallions. Instantly the world had shrunk
As if the universe’s force fell back
Into a singularity of hope,
As if black hole grooms, burst-prone to elope.
…..
…..[4.] Petrushka-like Personalities
“voice-locked, voice-releasing, to the last reverberating harmonic echo
from the furthest spaces of universal unity” ~ The Death of Virgil
….
This pair created two ballets as one,
Gesamptwerk, one together in two keys,
Performed so perfectly that unison
Resulted, not just loving harmonies
In spite of dissonance expected in
Relationships as frantic as their own.
Refusing to be puppets in the din
Of bourgeois disapproval’s bagpipe drone,
Jean Barraqué and his Michel Foucault
Stood up against the charlatans of cant.
Their orchestrations merged as rivers flow
Together, waters forming in a slant
To make one larger power. They were free
To write a music with philosophy.
[5.] A Double Whole Note
Michel told Paolo Caruso that
La musique contemporaine was as huge
An influence on Foucault as that brat
Of nineteenth-century thought, that centrifuge
Of sacred and profane, that Nietzsche. New
Composers were opposed to older shapes
And structures. That at least was Foucault’s view.
The twelve-tone sound, eeriness made by tapes,
Unheard of patterns paralleled his break
From dialectics and rigidities.
Refusing to be strictured like a snake
Brain, Foucault shunned musty aridities.
And as the gods would have it, it was then
He found a breve salvation in Jean’s den.
….
[6.] History of Men’s Sexuality
Develop your desires by disjunction.
Implied in this is juxtaposition.
Wild promiscuity is the function,
Of cocks’, slime’s, testosterone’s ambition.
Lust means proliferation for the male.
This explains why Christ’s spiked to a cross,
Because most men are desperate to nail
A lot of blood-fed caverns, drop slick dross
Of off-white semen in them, past man’s count
If possible. Religion is opposed
To maleness. Bishops only want to mount
A sculpted dupe on wood, his options closed.
Of course that isn’t true. These mitres grunt
To mount an altar boy, make him their cunt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-JzKR1FwsQ
.
…. [7.] Barraqué on Therapy
“a composer is someone who desires, as a male desires” ~ Jean Barraqué
Composers are the men who know desire—
Desire as males express it—and discharge
Their passion through the multi-voiced choir
We designate as music. They enlarge
The strains of love through notes and phrases set
Down distantly upon a page. These marks
Of ink and lead are so they won’t forget
The manner of affection as it arcs
Throughout the universe. Their fondness shapes
Concertos, suites, sonatas, melodies
And movements that are sent through special stapes
Connected to the heart to cure unease.
Schubert left his symphony unfinished.
Perfection doomed cannot be diminished.
[8.] Bright Stars
The waiting is important and the man
You do it with. The preparation makes
You both become the twins to fix a plan
That only twins could manage, double lakes
Which hope to form a mighty river from
Combined and star-like clarity. Design
Of thought or composition will succumb
To your combined inducement. Your star sign
Is set to be the Gemini. Yet twins
Don’t always need each other equally.
The liberty of one male twin begins
Beyond the realm where brother love can be.
The placement of pale patterns in the stars
Still leaves them separated by black scars.
[9.] Foucault Eats Barraqué,
Normalien /Abnormalien
The brightest students in the whole of France
Spill out from there and meet their brothers on
The Left Bank of the Seine. Clairvoyance
Is hardly needed to predict the brawn
To be expanded in this mix and place,
The muscularity of intellect
In masculinities of inner space
Discovered in the members of this sect
Set side by side in café and in bar.
It’s like a sun that sucks a sun, their heads
There gourmandizing on the other star.
They feed into dark holes in brilliant beds.
These two were galaxies of brains that ate
Each other’s bodies in a cosmic spate.
…..
[10.] Julian the Apostate Proclaimed
Emperor Near Notre Dame Cathedral
|
The year Michel met Jean he wrote his first
Great opus. Barraqué of Notre Dame
Became the lover with a champagne thirst
For Foucault. After that, Jean knew no calm
Except what wine could bring. “Sonata for
Piano” still remains. That summer, though,
Is gone. Where is the heat they knew before
That warm embrace, the heat without a glow?
Where is the heat and sweat of yesteryear,
When passion dissipates the paltry night
Before great love began? A hormone’s leer
Turned choirboy’s throat into an acolyte
In Aphrodite’s temple. Thus, the loss
Of kissless hours became a lukewarm dross.
[11.] Composition
http://www.homepages.lu/colbett/assets/images/Chartres_small.jpg
Believing love and music must be so,
We launch ourselves to feeling and to thought,
Like rockets knowing surely they must go
To interplanetary realms where “ought”
And “should” become synonymous with “free,”
Yes, manumission. Thinking leaps the bounds
As music soars, controlled in liberty,
As symphonies are masters of chance sounds
And silences, as sonnets are a choice
In liberation, options of the heart
To bind itself like lovers using voice
And quietude–like descants from Descartes.
Emotions leap on Atlas missile fires
As thought and love rise, light-struck Chartres spires.
[12.] Tacit
“oh, lovely imprisonment of youth, enfolded and ready for freedom” ~ The Death of Virgil
To meet your man in May was marvellous,
Your brief man, Foucault. Small in time span of
His passion, tall and thin, he gave the truss
You needed, Broch’s La mort de Virgile. Love
Provided you with inspiration to
Give guidance through that slough of fire, your swamp
Of nihilism. Meaningless to you—
And Nietzsche, music, God your romp—
You gave yourself philosophies of No,
Tormented others with your own opaque
Destructiveness. You chose the paths of woe.
You chose a vampire’s loneliness and stake.
The young Michel, already losing hair,
Refused your measureless and flame-like snare.
[13.] A la mode
They went to taste Jean’s favorite white wines
When Messiaen had finished with the class;
These best and brightest, these young French Einsteins
Of theory, these the ones who would surpass
Their fellows in the framing of high thought,
Philosophy and composition. They
Could analyze and deconstruct the lot—
A symphony, a syllogism, lay
Out complicated patterns, and devise
A way to play with all such matters, joke
About the highly serious. So wise,
They laughed and shrugged off solemnity’s yoke.
Two queers dismissed straight-up sobriety,
These wits of wine café society.
[14.] Crippled Thinking: the Theory of Everything
“day and night, they penetrating each other and becoming the bi-colored cloud of dusk” ~ The Death of Virgil
We spend our lives by probing in the dark,
The light, and half-light. We are probing for
The masterpiece, the master love, or stark
Emotion even. Always wanting more
Than bread and water, we turn crumbs to flesh,
And water into wine and blood to drink,
Imbibe them when we’re bored and need a fresh
Creation to enlarge us or to shrink
The Tuesday world we find ourselves trapped in.
We probe with pens and penises. We probe
With single-mindedness and doubled sin.
We stumble in the blackness, hope for strobe-
Light revelation powers to remake life
And stab out ignorance with probing’s knife.
[15.] A Note to Foucault
“As ugly as a louse,” Foucault declared;
This Jean knew forte too much concerning
The naughtiest of boys. Love might have fared
A little better, more than flared, burning
Like waves of flame, if you had shown respect.
But you sailed only as a wondering eye
Across Jean’s tetchiness. You merely trekked
Along the margins of his world, that high
Fraternité of modern music. Your
Curiosity—for it was nothing more—
Produced your paradoxical word blur,
“A certain turmoil.” Needing to adore
You, Barraqué got shallows, sex, and pain.
He wanted Deluge and got acid rain.
[16.] Palimpsest and Elusive Sea Change
“yes, he had always deemed as priestly the task of the singer, perhaps because of the strange consecration to death in the enraptured fervor of every work of art” ~ The Death of Virgil
Your most important finished work that year
Jean Barraqué, Séquence (1950-1955), Joséphine Nendrick, Soprano – YouTube
|
Proteus
You met Michel, your Séquence, was to change
Like Proteus through time. Hysteric, queer
Rimbaud cadences were replaced. Its range
Became as wide as Nietzsche—or perhaps
As narrow. Foucault re-infected you
With Friedrich. Michel caused a mild relapse
To pessimism, maybe—not that true
Depression wasn’t always at your side.
You were like “L’epoux infernal” true in
“Délires I”, ocean waves, dressed as a bride,
Withdrawing, segueing to that blue inn.
The voice of Ariadne in lament
Is symbol of crescendoing descent.
.
[17.] Fusion/Fission
.
A man whose sex life was suppressed knew power,
Though like a pressure cooker. To distress,
Repress your heated forces is to cower
Away from life. Although, since to oppress
A vital part of man is to let loose
Another part of him, so Nietzsche’s mind,
His frontal brain was opened like a sluice
Of flood-strength waters from a dam. To bind
His sexuality resulted in
A tidal wave of thinking. It aroused
These sadomasochists who knew that skin
Knows pain of power musically espoused,
A crying out, creation of new thought,
Slicing through a rawhide Gordian knot.
[18.] Where was Foucault?
What causes silence in composers’ lives?
What causes inspiration to run out,
Or will to wither? What trauma deprives
These men of music, dries them up in drought
Of noteless paralysis? Maybe their
Subconscious succubi or incubi
Infesting inner ears, or an affair
Now made of stainless bed sheets tells us why
They cannot write sonatas, can only
Produce an orchestration of a piece
By some previous master. Too lonely
In thinning stratospheres men hear notes cease.
Two years went by. Orfeo was re-dressed.
Tenor weights crushed down on Barraqué’s chest.
.
[19.] Platonic Investigations
.
I’ve known you. I know you. I’ve known your cave ,
The secret one between your aching hips.
I’ve known your other trap that I enslave
By gagging it while thrusting through your lips.
I know your smarting, stinging, bruising skin
And how it twitches, whimpers, tries to squeeze
The knowledge of my mastery within.
I know control that turns your needs to pleas.
My curled, manly hairs know how to find
Their way inside your nostrils as I stick
My knowledge and control inside you, bind
Your strict desires with willing flesh that’s thick.
And if its ugly, vein-bulged thrustings fail,
I know the shadowed things that make you quail.
[20.] Untimely Meditations, August, 1953
Exactly how should young French lovers act
With passions more immortal than the pull
Of tidal moons whose fragrant beams distract
Male thought, and with the sentiments that full
Moons nakedly imply? No, what men do
Is sit composing at a desk alone,
The men they love away and only true
To arched philosophy. Their minds are prone
To Nietzsche and twelve-tone music, each
Hunched over high-minded tasks of
Brains, reading Friedrich on a sunny beach
Or in cafés, or writing high above
The staves long phrase marks. When these two men think
Of one another, they reprise sweat stink.
[21.] Light and Dark, Light and Dark, Eternal Recurrence
You go to Italy on holiday
And sitting on the sand you pore over
Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche. How gay!
A suntan from hopelessness! Moreover,
While you are sweating through sunless reading,
The men around you spend their time in thought
About non-Platonic caves for breeding,
That cave between a woman’s thighs, that slot
Which doesn’t need philosophy but takes
What dicks deliver mindlessly. Of course
You think of Barraqué and how he slakes
Himself with snot-like stuff from your dark horse-
Like member (as you turn the page). The blight
Of Nietzsche never set your cock alight.
[22.] Singularity
It’s rare as an albino cock among
The barnyard’s pecking hens, especially
Among a brilliant set of men, the young
Ones most of all, but Foucault found that he
Could do it. Maybe separation made
Him see the truth about his lover’s need.
What Barraqué required was his cascade
Of affirmation. That consuming greed
For praise of compositions Jean had penned
Was like a vacuum inside his soul.
He needed tideless torchlight from his friend,
An endless, flaming, steady barcarole
Of tribute. So, Michel began the song
Which filled his letters all that August long.
[23.] Octaves, Stark and Parallel
Does blunt “baraque” mean “hut or shed”? If so,
A butcher’s son might well be called a hard
Name like that word. Severity like woe
Came out of him in music, notes as scarred
As Foucault would have left him, if he could.
Or does that “baraqué” mean “well built”? Then
That terminology speaks, understood.
He liked his music as he liked his men–
Though almost everything unfinished seemed
His goal; at least his major work was left
With hungy holes. His pieces, so regimed
That they can hardly breathe, appear bereft
Of tenderness and peace and pasture greens.
It is as if emotions are machines.
[24.] Coloratura Rack
.
As taut steel stretched out to almost breaking
Point, music flows in judders from your pen.
It leaps and shudders, just like the shaking
Of abdomens and genitals of men
Exhausting tortured cum in screeching need.
The cobalt music makes the sound of steel
Snapping or tearing. Their tormented seed
Is captured in the notes which make us feel
As distant from old beauty as the shrill
Soprano who is trilling octaves rakes
Away from loveliness. The lust-like thrill
Of this octaval locking of the quakes
Of pitch is in the mastery imposed.
It is a primal ugliness enclosed.
[25.] Auschwitz Orchestra
Unhinging everything, despair unfolds
Our fastenings. The loss of hope is proud
In violence or in the rusts and molds
Of apathy beneath a mushroom cloud.
What is the point of Beethoven, or Bach
Or Debussy in landscapes set with gas
Chambers or the crematorium bloc,
Or soldiers pitching lime into a mass
Grave? Strict , hostile music, however tense,
Will not absorb the Hiroshima glare,
Nor puffs of smoke from Polish chimneys dense
With hatred and with children’s vapored hair.
That harshness and that freedom in the key
Of shriek can’t banish holocausts’ decree.
[26.] Not Exactly a Jingling Jihadist Suicide Bomber
.
While you and Foucault leapt to art and life,
Philosophy and maybe love, close friends
Perceived you as a nihilist, yet rife
With music in your head, no bomb that rends
Mute bystanders into shreds, or grenade
To send its force and shrapnel through their veins,
But only notes and octaves, sounds that fade,
Explode and reach diminishment. Your pains
Were for your composition: it would change
The world. Still your sonata did not take
You anywhere, did not increase the range
Of human happiness, was more a stake
Through hearts, a stake of distrust’s godlessness.
Your universe rejected the caress.
- Serial Torture
We make a pyramid of freedoms, not
A cube of lust and nothing more. Flesh parts
Or stabs. We make a polyglot
Of love, each giving, taking. My kick starts
Form angles, complicated inclines in
That shape of pain your heart and nerves relish.
Your foot treads down and holds my neck in sin.
A whip brings agony to embellish
Disharmony, an ever changing love.
No melody is sought. Sweat and the scent
Of blood rise up to snuffling nose above.
Your soul and arse want lovers to torment
Them. Cheeks desire division. There’s no grace
Note, only chords of whimpers from your face.
- Measures of Perfume and Agony
If not in symphony, at least we make
The movements that our lives and meat and deaths
Require. We fashion sounds from smell and quake
Of bodies in arrangements with our breath
As ragged as the rhythms of a pack
Of hot hyenas on the carcass of
A lion. Hear the meter of a smack
Of lips, the gaspings from the spit of love.
Black notes are odors, underarm and crotch;
Whole notes are tinctures drawn from cum and sweat.
Our harmonies are more like stain and blotch.
Arpeggios of pain sing more like threat.
The nose but not the heart is forced to blench
Because we make our melodies of stench.
- Camping in the Wilderness
There’s worse than life without a meaning, Jean.
There’s death, for instance, and a life that means
That evil is the purpose since the dawn.
You lived in Hitler’s century. Rachel keens
For Jakob in a concentration camp.
The gulag offers Stalin’s answer. You
Can read your concrete Kierkegaard and stamp
Your heel on Foucault since you drank the brew
Of Nietzsche. You can rage among the past
Of melodies and symphonies because
A young philosopher has touched your vast
Disturbances and vehemence at laws
You feel that men are trapped by. But the truth
Cannot be knocked down like a Succoth booth.
- Turning in Upon Ourselves
“Must we not hate ourselves if we are to love ourselves . . . I am your labyrinth.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Can labyrinths adore each other, love
The hidden alleys in another maze?
The complications multiply above
Sweet credibility. The heart’s eyes glaze
With cataracts of disbelief at such
Improbability. Can such a set
Of complications be defied by touch
Of lips on lips, or by the tiny jet
Of semen towards a man’s aorta, or
By tortures we inflict upon the one
We dote on? Can it be that ever more
Dead ends we find in him deliver stun
And miracle of passion we don’t choose?
The love of maze for maze produces blues.
“everyone wandered around in the maze his whole life”’ ~ The Death of Virgil
- The Tempests
“The relationship with Barraqué was tempestuous and potentially dangerous for both men.” Macey, 45
“…suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange.” Shakespeare, The Tempest
Free to be excruciatingly strict,
Two men put violence of liberty
To test. They make two tempests with slicked
Skin, crushing dual tempests into three—
Their separate storms and then the one combined
From two. When force of manly youth is thrown
In, ramping exponentially, confined
Grenade-like shapes increase the realm of groan
With blasts and lust and other destructions.
Philosophy and music were not meant
For chaos wrapped in chaos. Male fluxions
Spew everywhere they shouldn’t. Love is rent.
Potentialities of tone and mind
Are detonated like a target rind.
http://www.patspeer.com/chapter16%3Anewviewsonthesamescene
- Dream and Existence Le rève et l’existence“This book, my dear Jean, I am not giving to you: it is returning to you, by force of fraternal rights that make it a common belonging, and a sign that cannot be wiped out.” ~ Michel Foucault to Jean Barraqué.The dreams of existentialism, Marx,
And all that rot are not, of course, the same
As beds and music. Philosophy’s arcs
Are very well and all that shit, but tame,
Tres tame compared (contrasted with) the ruth
Involved in eyes that stare into the face
Of someone you are penetrating. Truth
Explains itself in varied ways and grace
Is not the flagrant medium most used.
A searing pain, a deepened thrust, a chord
Of dissonance, of harmony abused,
Go slicing like a certain hand and sword.
A melody that’s not a melody
Results when brothers make a blood decree.
- “Light as Thistledown Moving,
Which Floats on the Air”
Through quiet hearts of men their dreams drift down,
Around, and up, like floating seeds in air,
Like unborn babies learning how to frown
In amniotic wombs, or how to snare
A smile. Our men will dream their separate ways,
One maybe in a metal universe
Where everything is rusty, even rays
From candles, while the other one will nurse
A muted set of visions. Yet they both
Will know the jittering of eyelids, know
Their nightmare-shaped depressions, and be loath
To let such dark experiences go.
They dream their dreams of dandelion drifts
And threats and welcome undertow-like gifts.
- “The Dream Itself, the Dream Entire”
“it was a challenge to question oneself as to the reality or unreality of one’s own existence” ~The Death of Virgil
In wakeful hours Michel was “I,” and Jean
Was “I,” an “I” and “I” across a desk
Or tablecloth, but when Jean’s head was on
The pillow of Michel, something grotesque
Occurred — and when Michel’s head lay there, by
Young Barraqué’s as well. Nonentity
Is what the dreamers were. The I and I
Were evanesced and each identity
Produced a new and separate I, the dream’s
Own personality that filled the head
Of Jean or young Michel, two separate screams
Or lullabies. The men themselves were dead
Not only to each other’s night, but to
All, except each dream, its chaos and its spew.
- Twilight Campaign
In daylight sometimes you opposed my mind,
My will, my needs, and often I opposed
Yours, too. This only meant that we weren’t blind
To each one’s heart and knew we were supposed,
As men, to stand against the universe.
Males stand in opposition to the world.
A standing penis, fleshy in its terse
Demands, opposes with its aching, curled
Bell-gong thrusts impedimenta to its
Power. Just so. But in our dreams at night,
With shoulders touching and our hairy tits,
We share subconsciously our darkened light:
Then maleness turns to softness and becomes
An evenfall, to move to mellow drums.
- Unicorns Trying to Capture Unicorns
He hath as it were the strength of an unicorn ~ Numbers 23:22
What dreams did these two dream when they lay side
By side asleep, rumpled in Jean’s bed? Did
They dream of other things, things worldwide,
Things wider than the ego and the id,
When slumbering near, near each other in
The sheets of Foucault, with his arm across
Jean’s chest, a snoring nose above a chin
With dried slime on it, aftermath and dross
Of wild abandonment in lust while they
Were waking? Did they want independence
In conscious and unconscious hours? Their prey
Was love, but like a lingering transcendence—
At night, inhaling each other’s visions
After daytime clashes and collisions.
- Giving and TakingWe tanked up love by taking alcohol
And giving pain; perhaps the other way
Around. He’d show up, standing in the hall
With wine, a whip wrapped round it. “Barraqué,”
He’d leer. “I’ve brought you something specially
To please your gourmet tastes.” We’d eat and drink
And then we’d swap our taking fleshily
The other’s meat and give the smart to shrink
The partner’s ballsack with a twinge of fear
For worse to come. Delicious was the long
Main course, a torture fiery as the spear
That second Edward took, that red-hot prong.
The flambeé sweet to end the evening’s feast
Would be the leather tongue, his gifted beast.
- Thy Days are Numbered
“to dream toward death and dying” ~ The Death of Virgil
The later spring belonging to these two,
Imposed a serendipity on Jean.
An unsuspected, fated rendezvous
(Like midnight met with morning in the dawn,
Exposed together), brought the twenty-four
Year old composer to the mind that gave
Him purpose for his music. A rapport
Like steel and magnet, like a tidal wave
Needs shoreline, brought Michel and Barraqué
In concert or at least within the same
Society of concepts in that May,
A two-note motif to begin a flame.
Three years and more went by, though, till the flash
Of conflagration turned their spit to ash.
A flaming ocean? No, a sea of fire.
It burned a half a decade, less, too small
To be Pacific, more inferno, pyre
And Caribbean love made to appal
The rest of us who settle for the mud
Or puddles we call love. Elijah’s stones
And trenches disappeared in heaven’s thud,
A consummation Barraqué’s harsh tones
Wished they could capture, opposite of pain
As passion is the obverse side of grief.
Their discipline was punishment, a cane
Not lessened in intensity though brief.
The philosophe, composer and their raw
Lust hexed themselves in hot ménage à trois.
- September 13, 1954: a Postcard Sent
by Foucault to Barraqué from Venice of the
Mosaic Baptism of Christ in Ravenna
The first wee bit of writing that you kept
From him, a souvenir, displays three blokes,
Two semi-naked. Jesus, though, is swept
(Nude) over by the river. Water strokes
His genitals, but they remain as cute
As cute can be with no erection,
The pubic hair surmounting a small newt-
Like pecker, his cock and balls confection
Made of newt and dual tadpoles, God in
Three. Up above a bird dive bombs downward
(Though not to eat them). To cover the sin-
Full nudity, Personified, Clownward
The Jordan proffers Christ a greenish towel.
We bet the two of you laughed out a howl.
40.
He wrote you charming letters from his home
In Vendeuvre. Their tone was enjoué,
But he was like an exile from your Rome—
Out in the provinces near Poitiers.
You wanted him, not words; his shoulders, arms
And ribs against your ribs, not smiling lines
To store away and cause you later harms
To heart and breathing, to explode like mines,
Because a cedar chest is not like chest
To chest of yesteryear no matter how
Delightful were the sentiments and breast
Sending words. You wanted to kiss his brow.
How empty letters are when full of joy,
Too like a smile that’s almost warm, but coy.
- Antonio Folquer —
Penelope Rejected
The one who loved you always and who gave
And gave—Antonio—you treated as
A kid who worshipped you or as a slave.
He gave you everything he could, whereas,
Because you couldn’t share your creations
With Tonio, you gave him nothing back,
Or nearly nothing. You threw privations
To tenderness and love. Your private claque,
Unpaid and solitary, he was kind,
Available to you in every way,
And yet you proved that lovelessness is blind.
He said yes, si and oui—and you said nay.
He was a bit of Heaven. “Go to hell,”
You shrugged. Tonio wasn’t like Michel.
- January 30, 1955
Again he wrote to you, this time upon
A theme you later learned to know too well,
A theme appropriate to you where on
The isle of Corsica you had your hell
Of separation. Obviously he knew
Of Tonio’s devotion to you, since
Michel compared the luckless man to blue
Penelope awaiting her lost prince.
And worst he likened an evening trip
By Tonio and him to see a flick
To walking to Emmaus. What this flip
Allusion meant for him and his sidekick,
And who their Saviour was, just might have harmed—
Unless it was you. Then you’d have been charmed.
- Correlative Absolute
The metaphor for life is music. No
Motif results in a mistake that’s shaped
Like God, the real God, not the dead one. So,
No melodies would mean no discourse. Raped
Of meaning would be existence, sheer
Electrons ordered as meaningless stuff;
Thus spoke wise Nietzsche. Philosophy, queer
Lust, logic, everything were not enough
Without the beauty of composition.
Not writing composition; no, the sound
Of notes in rhythm was the condition
Required for living. Music is the ground
For living large, for rising high above
Mere physics, resonating’s the heights of love.
- On Wings of Myth
“Only myth exists in music.” ~ Jean Barraqué
What myths were in your music, Barraqué?
Were they of Orpheus with Argonaut
Calaïs, or Apollo in the sway
Of limb-heat love with Hyacinth, who caught
His death from Zephyrus’s lust? Or did
You dream of burned Patroklus on his pyre,
Or Alexander by a pyramid,
Hephaistion with him in solar fire?
You chose the sacred way of hero, god
And emperor. You chose Michel’s bright mind
And body, Foucault your divining rod
For what your compositions redesigned.
Your greatest myth, though, was the sick caprice
Of Virgil to destroy his masterpiece.
| 45. Dissonant Harmony “because the stillness itself was vibrant” ~ The Death of VirgilThey make their kind of love, a love that’s more A mirror image of their things, a love That’s more a bedroom looking-glass’s lore Of what a man should feel, constructed of A thrust of angles with a hardness at Once soft, much softer than the image near the bed, Reflected in the shiny surface flat Behind the frame and glass. That silver dread Is fear of death capitulated on A bright dark metal mocking in the room If either man attempting futile spawn Thinks sound or thought can capture in the loom Of male experience some lasting form, Some immortality against the norm.46. Singing a DuetSo if you heard him, really heard his voiceAs wise as he imagined it to be,You would have understood there was no choice.Your only hope was that disparityBetween the universal and the tightMale intimacy Foucault’s arms offeredWas non-existent. That is what that mightOf mind, his moving skin and whip proffered.If he had heard your mind and music, gaspsAnd silences between percussive slaps,He might have grasped that every artist claspsDreams, prophecies and music as true mapsOf sphered realities beyond. But couldYou hear? No. Both high hearts misunderstood.47. Tirésias EnceinteA man who has a blazing passion mustBe fiery when he speaks about it. LipsAnd heart will flame-throw concepts that combustThe air around him, blot out and eclipseThe lesser lights that fill his sky. All earsNearby know this is not just pregnancy.It means delivery instead with tears,A birthing filled with anguish. It is heWho must fulfil a prophecy—or makeIt harsh, ineluctable like the pangsOf labour. He requires the word to breakThe skin with shattering, clairvoyant fangsAnd make new blood flow from his listener’s mind.His audience is left all-seeing, blind. 48. Paris’s Early Spring Had DisappearedAn early letter that he wroteTo Jean revealed the early spring was gone,Sennacherib’s wolfed host the angel smote.The city had collapsed that hopeful dawnOf promise and had glisteningly replacedIt with an icy failure. Fog and frostWere brothers of the coldest clan. They pacedDominions out, interchanged them, but lostNo conquered place to warmth. Instead they passedThem back and forth, fraternally, the mistBecoming crystals and the crystals castBy wind as moisture and harshly kissed,Becoming trapped against the grass and ground.A metaphor for doomed affairs was found. 49. Intimate Disaffection “especially as one was ignorant of whether the threat lurked within or without” ~ The Death of VirgilWhat meaning is there when a man extendsHis arm and places fingers, palm and thumbTo touch with them the chests of men, of friends,And other masculinities who comeWithin his scope? What does this touching say?The skin might whisper, “Here is love, here heatOf my commitment to your heart.” “Away,Don’t come so close, too close, or you’re dead meat,”Might be another message from this sign.The message is ambiguous.Sometimes the threat and warmth, desire combine. Sometimes estrangement is contiguous With harmony, especially for those Who want the pain another man will pose. 50. Refining Precious Mettle You went to silent mode, a silence more 51. The banishment of love is just a slough Of shoulder, silence. He sends no answer. A desperate flood of letters gets rebuff By mutness. You are left the sole dancer, Alone in northern darkness, on a floor Where millions dance apart, a floor that’s clear Gold, see-through, on a plane that’s on the shore Of total solitude. He treats your fear With unconcern. Hunched in solitary Conviction, he writes his music instead Of love letters. Up there in his eyrie He feeds his compositions with wings spread. Perhaps he pulls black feathers from his chest. The point is, he is not at your behest. 52. The blind clairvoyant can see that love Is weightless, useless. In his solitude He knows himself, his strength. He looms above The agonies philosophers exude. He leaves the thinker who left him. He cannot even feel a pity for Him: prophecy in music treats as whim The pining lover. Foucault’s absent core Is meaningless, musically, deaf, and so Is non-existent. Why reply to pains As distant to your composition’s flow As galaxies perceived as smudged light stains? A harsh creator doesn’t need far praise And love’s an aberration of star rays.
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Jean Barraqué
Michel Foucault