Conspiring
Against Emptiness and Non-Existence:
Mandelstam’s
Gothic Pine Cones
by
John Baalke
To build means to
fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space.
The fine arrow of the Gothic belltower is angry, for the whole idea of
it is to stab the sky, to reproach it for being empty.
Mandelstam,
“The Morning of Acmeism”
In his memoir
Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandelstam
writes: “Stupid vanity and a sense of
false pride held me back from berry-picking as a child, nor did I ever stoop
over to pick mushrooms. I preferred the
Gothic pine cones…I would stroke the pine cones. They would bristle. They were attempting to persuade me to do
something. In the tenderness of their
shells, in their geometric giddiness, I sensed the rudiments of architecture
whose demon has accompanied me all my life” (Harris 355). Looking back from a middle-aged vantage
point, Mandelstam recognized a fledgling Gothic sensibility in his childhood
preference for pine cones. Here,
perhaps, was the rudimentary pointed arch, the seed of verticality, and the
tender bristling of teleology that would eventually form the cathedral of his
poetics.
But how did
Mandelstam arrive at his Notre Dame and the intuitive pinnacle of Acmeism? What comprised his Gothic sensibility, and
how did the “fight against emptiness” work itself out in his poetry? These are huge questions which cannot be
answered in this brief consideration, but it is still worth taking a closer
look, even if it is only to see the small and dry thing (like a pine
cone). Such an attitude is the key to
understanding Mandelstam’s sensibility; inclining the mind’s eye toward the
exact curve of monstrous ribs, the fine geometric tracery of tall windows, how
the plain light of day shines through symbols in stained glass.
The Neoclassical Pine Cones
Mandelstam’s
pine cones were first, and foremost, neoclassical pine cones. As such, they were not steeped in ether to
make potpourri for the gods, not suitable for Romantic metaphors of flight to
flit over abysses and circle about the infinite; they were subject to earthly
dynamics like gravity and squirrels.
T.E. Hulme states in Romanticism
and Classicism: “The classical poet
never forgets his finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with
earth. He may jump, but he always
returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas” (
Mandelstam’s
pine cones were subject to the classical boundaries, but he recognized that
they possessed a certain dynamic in their resistance. It is in this vicinity that the struggle with
words can begin, and a “cobblestone…is transformed into substance” (144). Out of emptiness and non-existence comes the
pine cone, the ribbed vault, Notre Dame.
One must acknowledge the limits and their inherent resistance to really
have anything at all. Mandelstam
states: “The first condition of
successful building is genuine piety before the three dimensions of space – to
look upon them not as a burden or unlucky accident but as a God-given palace”
(144). This dynamic neoclassicism is
borne out in Mandelstam’s poem “48 – The Admiralty”:
In the northern capital
a dusty poplar languishes.
The translucent clockface
is lost in the leaves,
and through the dark
green a frigate or acropolis
gleams far away, brother
of water and sky.
An aerial ship and a
touch-me-not mast,
a yardstick for Peter’s
successors, teaching
that beauty is no
demi-god’s whim,
it’s the plain
carpenter’s fierce rule-of-eye.
The four sovereign
elements smile on us,
but man in his freedom
has made a fifth.
Do not the chaste lines
of this ark
deny the dominion of
space?
The capricious jellyfish
clutch in anger,
anchors are rusting like
abandoned plows―
and behold the locks of
the three dimensions are sprung
and all the seas of the
world lie open.
(Brown and Merwin 5-6)
Here the
clock-tower of
In his essay On the Nature of the Word, Mandelstam
writes: “We have no Acropolis. Even today our culture is still wandering and
not finding its walls. Nevertheless,
each word…is a kernel of the Acropolis…a winged fortress of nominalism, rigged
out in the Hellenic spirit for the relentless battle against the formless
element, against non-existence…” (Harris 126).
Mandelstam’s pine cones were brought into the circle of Hellenism by the
Russian language; impersonal objects were transformed into “domestic utensils”
which both surrounded and connected to the body. Essentially, this was the idea of embodiment. Mandelstam elaborates: “Hellenism is a
system…which man unfolds around himself, like a fan of phenomena freed from
their temporal dependence, phenomena subjected through the human ‘I’ to an
inner connection” (128). This “inner connection” or embodiment is
figured in Mandelstam’s childhood experience as he stroked the pine cones and
the pine cones bristled in response.
Mandelstam’s sensibility was classical to the point of maintaining a
natural equilibrium; the domestic and everyday, the craftsman, the sense of
human order and finiteness, and the Hellenic sense of embodiment.
The Symbolist Pine Cones
For a time,
Mandelstam’s pine cones may have been something else; perhaps, a likeness of
the “colossal structure” of Russian Symbolism, a sealed image in the
Baudelareian “forest of symbols.” Soon, however,
Mandelstam realized that Russian Symbolism (unlike French Symbolism) lapsed
into the Romantic pitfall, and was really a pseudo-Symbolism. The Russian Symbolists, notably the brilliant
Vyacheslav Ivanov (whom Mandelstam admired), took the Baudelaireian sense of
“correspondences” to the mystical level.
This was another form of what T.E. Hulme called “spilt religion” where
“[t]he concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over,
and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience” (Adams 768).
In On the Nature of the Word,
Mandelstam expresses the dilemma of the Symbolists: “They sealed up all words, all images,
designating them exclusively for liturgical use. An extremely awkward situation resulted: no one could move, nor stand up, nor sit
down. One could no longer eat at a table
because it was no longer simply a table.
One could no longer light a lamp because it might signify unhappiness
later” (Harris 129). Once again,
Mandelstam found himself in the struggle against non-existence, trying to meld
the representation, the symbol, the form, and the thing itself, the pine
cone. If everything was a symbol
denoting something else (which in turn denoted something else), then nothing
existed as itself, nothing was real, nothing really existed. Existence requires empty space be filled with
real things―domestic
utensils― with which the human “I” connects.
The Russian
Symbolists gutted the image and repacked it with something foreign, creating a
forest of “scarecrows.” The so-called
“correspondences” were false; the word-image bond was broken, and what remained
amounted to “eternal winking” at best. (128)
The Symbolists “sought to turn language into music,” creating a
sheerness of sound that would serve as a means of getting beyond, to the
mystical. Mandelstam viewed language in
very physical (Gothic) terms, and sought to counter “the demand for music in
words by concentrating upon the verbal, logical qualities in music – the
discursive reasoning of it” (Brown 202).
Mandelstam converses with the Symbolist dilemma in his poem No. “96”:
A hush that evening in
the organ forest.
Then singing for
us: Schubert, cradle songs,
the noise of the mill,
and the voice of a storm
where the music had blue
eyes and was drunk and laughing.
Brown and green is the
world of the old song,
and young forever. There the maddened king
of the forest shakes the
whispering crowns
of the nightingale
lindens.
With darkness he
returns, and his terrible strength
is wild in that song,
like a black wine.
He is the Double, an
empty ghost
peering mindlessly
through a cold window.
(Brown
and Merwin 20)
The poem
opens in silence; it is “evening in the organ forest.” This is Mandelstam’s controlling image for the
poem, and it runs counter to the Symbolist “forest of scarecrows” with its
unreal “correspondences.” Mandelstam’s
forest is Gothic, literally filled
with complex and integral organs (and organisms), in every sense of the
word. In his essay Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam writes: “Long before Bach and at a time when large
monumental organs were not yet being built and only the modest embryonic
prototypes of the future wonders existed, when the leading instrument for voice
accompaniment was still the zither, Alighieri constructed in verbal space an
infinitely powerful organ and already delighted in all its conceivable stops,
inflated its bellows, and roared and cooed through all its pipes” (Harris 406).
Mandelstam
proceeds, constructing an organ in verbal space out of the real and historical
man, Franz Schubert. The organ plays and
the singing begins: Schubert, his Wiegenlied (cradle song), the mill, the
storm―his loves, labor, death―the altogether familiar view of the
congenial man at the tavern. The
accreted Schubert rings out for a moment then fades into the periphery as
Mandelstam moves from the man to “the world of the old song” and its hopeful
tension between the earthy and immortal.
Against that “world,” there is a mad king, linked in the image by
Mandelstam to the mythic medieval king of the
forest, Goethe’s “Erl-King,” reiterated in song and music by Schubert. Mandelstam accretes the entire sense of
Goethe’s poem in this image: a father
calling his son back to the certainty of the natural world as the Erl-King
lures the child’s life away in fear.
In the lines
that follow, Mandelstam juxtaposes “The Linden Tree,” fifth song in Schubert’s
final song-cycle Winterreise (Winter
Journey), and its inherent medieval romantic emblems of the linden tree and the
nightingale, which are tied back to German mythology and Freya, goddess of
love. Mandelstam continues to press the
logic of the poem forward as the king of the forest “shakes the whispering
crowns / of the nightingale lindens.” In
winter, the lindens only whisper in the wind because the nightingales are
gone. The king of the forest wants music
(like the Symbolists), but sometimes there is only silence and whispering;
Dante and Schubert understood this. The
linden tree may be emblematic of love in May, but in December, it is emblematic
of death as in Schubert’s Winterreise. There is a breakdown of correspondence in the
forest of symbols at this point.
In the final
stanza, Mandelstam weaves at least four textile warps (to use his terms),
creating the effect of palimpsest: the
man Schubert, Schubert’s “Der Doppelganger” based on Heinrich Heine’s poem
“Still ist die Nacht,” “The Erl-King,” and Winterreise. Brown and Merwin render the first phrase with
what seems an appropriate sense of Mandelstam’s intended doubling. The king of the
forest returns “[w]ith darkness,” meaning both at night and bringing something;
namely, the darkness. The second line
equates “darkness” with “that song,” indicating the king has brought his own
dark song, and the nature of the song is intensified with “terrible strength”
and “black wine.” The dark song is
undiluted, full-strength, and wild―it is Polyphemus blinded by nobody
(Odysseus) in the cave. The song is
wildly blind― there is no logic, no discursive reasoning―it is the
empty song of the Symbolists.
Mandelstam
raises the meaning of emptiness and non-existence to the tenth power as he
brings the poem to a close. The phrase
“He is the Double” condenses meaning from Schubert’s life and musical works. Late in life, Schubert suffered from the
effects of syphilis which eventually led to his death. The double
life he had led became more apparent to the public, and there was nothing
Schubert could do about it; he had to face his own turpitude. In “Der Doppelganger,” the narrator sees the
tormented self reflected in the moon, his “double-goer” and “pale
companion.” Similarly, at the end of
“The Erl-King,” the reader is left with the impression that the Erl-King is the
desperate father’s double. The final song
of Winterreise finds the estranged
poet casting in with the penniless hurdy-gurdy man on the street in an
unresolved doubling.
All of these
warps, and perhaps others, are part of the “conscious sense” of Mandelstam’s
phrase “He is the Double,” and one understands the complexity of this real doubling, but in the logic of the
poem, the double of empty Symbolism is empty Symbolism; it is the “empty ghost,” and it peers “mindlessly”
at nothing. Symbolism is incapable of
real doubling since it operates on the principle that A always equals non-A,
and this means that A will never see
a double of itself because it is not itself.
Doubling requires the law of identity:
A equals A. Mandelstam believed this
was the sovereign law of poetry, and the obvious basis for logical
relationship. In The Morning of Acmeism he states:
“For us logical relationship is not some ditty about a siskin but a
choral symphony with organ, so difficult and inspired that the director must
exert all his powers to keep the performers under his control” (Brown 145-146).
The Gothic Pine Cones
Mandelstam’s
poetic included “genuine Symbolism surrounded by symbols, that is, by domestic
utensils having their own verbal representations, just as men have their own
vital organs” (Harris 131). There was true “correspondence” and “logical
relationship” between Mandelstam’s pine cones and their verbal representations,
allowing the pine cones freedom to denote and connote a full range of meaning,
and to take their rightful place in literature, history, science, architecture,
and music. In dynamic resistance, they
could grow and bristle, or sportingly tumble with gravity on any given day as
every earth-bound pine cone should. Most
importantly, they could be wholly themselves down to the exact curve,
conspiring against emptiness and non-existence with Mandelstam’s “Notre Dame”
(3rd stanza):
An elemental labyrinth,
and inscrutable forest,
the Gothic soul’s
rational abyss,
Egyptian might and
Christian modesty: next to a reed –
an oak, and everywhere
plumb is king.
(Brown 187) (lineation mine)
Works Cited
Brown, Clarence. Mandelstam,
Brown, Clarence and Merwin, W.S.
(Trans.). Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems, Atheneum,
Harris, Jane Gary (Ed.). Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and Letters,
Ardis,
Mirsky, D.S. A
History of Russian Literature, Alfred A. Knopf,