Golden Birds: An Obsession by Maggie Mae Nase It has only recently come to my attention the presence in this world of golden birds. I've seen blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, bluebirds, blue jays, cardinals, and some sort of raffia purple bird as an ornament on my mother's Christmas tree, but I've only ever read about, heard about, seen pictures of golden birds. Yet, they're everywhere, from poetry to art to music to history to folklore to many combinations of the aforementioned and can all be connected to the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century. But suddenly being aware of their existence is not quite enough. What does this influx of golden birds mean? What do they symbolize, if anything? Where did they come from? How do they aid the modernist movement? As my father would say, "Inquiring minds want to know." Ever noticed that once something is noticed, it's seen practically everywhere? Welcome to a literary, sculptural, and musical obsession with golden birds. I. This obsession all started with the poetry of Mina Loy. Not too concerned with being published, she left it to friends to send in her poems to different magazines here and there (Kenner). One such poem was written after viewing a sculpture, or sculptures, by Constantin Brancusi, a French modernist sculptor. Loy comments upon the modernist sculptor's bird series not only in linguistics, but also in form.
The toy become the aesthetic archetype As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega of Form into a lump of metal A naked orientation unwinged unplumbed —the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight The absolute act of art conformed to continent sculpture —bare as the brow of Osiris—
an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence … (Loy 273) The look of the statues compared to the look of the poem printed on the page are so similar, both long and narrow. Many of the stanzas are rounded like the birds, the placement of "As if" and the dash in the twentieth line reminding me of the tips of the statues—sharp, pointed, sudden. Loy doesn't let the form get in the way of the words, however. Her elevated diction, with words and phrases like "aesthetic archetype," "unplumed," "lopped the extremities," "incandescent," "chromatic flames/in labyrinths," "polished hyperaesthesia," and "gorgeous reticence," seems to embody the elegance, the high-brow artistry of the statues (Loy 273). (Microsoft Word fails to even recognize both "unplumed" and "hyperaesthesia" as words, marking them as misspelled.) The lines and stanzas of the poems are far from traditional or lyric as well, just like these unadorned, simple statues of birds. Yes, they look like birds, but, as Loy describes in the poem, they have no wings, no "crest or claw". Loy seems to get right down to business, eliminating the extra, unneeded words like the "crest and claw." Helen Vendler, a prominent poetry critic, calls poetry an "arranged message;" the arranged message of "Brancusi's Golden Bird" embodies the sleekness, the shininess, the almost soft quality of Brancusi's work (Mares). The poem has become the golden bird. Brancusi's first bird sculpture, Mǎiastrǎ, was actually his break, William Tucker observed, from traditional "constrictions of human subject-matter" (50). He tested the boundaries of sculpture with his bird series, (spanning thirty years with twenty-seven sculptures, according to Hugh Kenner) eventually having to switch from marble to bronze because the marble could no longer take the constraints Brancusi put on it, thus the development of his golden birds: "Brancusi developed the bird theme with growing audacity," Tucker explains, "Ironically, marble, the material of academic perfection in the nineteenth century, was unable to sustain the structural demands Brancusi made in the progressively more ambitious and more attenuated versions of the Bird in Space from 1928 onwards" (50). In art circles and beyond, the sculptures are seen, according to The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, as "icons of modernism in the arts," beacons of the monumental movement; so new in fact that "his nonrepresentational aesthetic was so revolutionary at the time that U.S. customs officials wanted to tax his sculptures as raw material rather than works of art" (Ellmann 273n). No wonder Loy, a modern poet herself, chose to write about them, subconsciously or consciously. One characteristic of modernism in general that appears in both Loy's poem and Brancusi's sculpture is that of eliminating the extras, getting right down to the core; as Tucker observes, "Brancusi's proclaimed concern with the ‘essential' in sculpture belies the apparent modesty of the work, and reveals an ambition to put himself beyond history and criticism" (58). Even the nature of the word "modern" in itself implies to be "beyond history," as I think the general stigma in the creative arts was. The catalyst for Brancusi's bird sculptures, according to Kenner, was actually a cross-cultural folktale: "Mǎiastrǎ, 1910-12…was inspired by the legendary Pasarea Mǎiastrǎ (Master bird), a magic bird in Romanian folklore famed for its radiant plumage and marvellous song, a messenger of love who guided and protected Prince Charming in his search for his Princess" (Kenner). The same folktale with its "Master bird," Kenner continues, influenced Igor Stravinsky when he wrote his breakthrough piece, The Firebird: "The Russian form of [Pasarea Mǎiastrǎ] was the inspiration for the ballet L'Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) by Les Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghi…Paris, on 25 June 1910. The performances of the Ballets Russes were attended by many artists of avant-garde and may have prompted Brancusi to take up the Romanian form of the legend." It's completely amazing to me how everything is connected, how these golden birds are influencing more golden birds and more golden birds to be explored. Chronologically, Stravinsky composed a piece about a golden bird, the firebird, based upon an old legend; then Brancusi sculpted a series of golden birds that prompted Mina Loy to write a poem. All three broke, or continued to break the boundaries of their medium using a lineage of golden birds. Stravinsky broke the bounds of traditional counterpoint techniques (when two melodies occur at the same time) in his music with its use of dissociation. As Lynne Rogers explains, dissociation in Stravinsky's music is "a contrapuntal structure that organizes the texture into highly differentiated and harmonically independent musical layers. [It]may be seen as a type of counterpoint, but one that differs profoundly from traditional, tonal counterpoint" (476). Instead of there being two melodies, Stravinsky applies contrapuntal technique to the piece in such a way that it "organizes the texture into highly differentiated and harmonically independent musical layers. Melodically distinct lines combine to create a single harmonic progression that governs an entire texture" (Rogers 476). Listening to the piece, a ballet, it tells a story, presumably the story of the search for Prince Charming's princess, like the folktale. It's dramatic, it's complicated, it's alarming, it's moving, it's engaging, it's everything to want in a ballet and more; more because he gives us something new. This ballet isn't written like every other ballet; this ballet is written with a new technique, a new complication to listen for. II. Mina Loy was only the catalyst for my obsession. When I read "Brancusi's Golden Bird," two other poems including golden birds came to mind, the sculptures and music only relevant through further reading and research. Yet parallels can be made. Another form of golden bird sculpture is alluded to in a William Butler Yeats poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." He wrote more than just one poem on or in or about or around (or any other relation of a squirrel to a tree) Byzantium, using the Byzantine Empire as a means for exploring death, especially his own mortality, his own speculations at what may lurk after death. Yeats noted of this poem that he "read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang" (Ellmann 124n). The poem is situated in four roman-numeraled stanzas, the golden birds coming up in the last section. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (Yeats 124) The birds were a functional art in this palace, an entertainment, contrasting Loy's description of something (I hesitate to say "merely") pretty (though she does allude to the Egyptian god of the underworld, the "symbol of the indestructibility of life" in the twentieth line "—bare as the brow of Osiris—"(Ellmann 273n). These birds have a greater purpose, to "keep a drowsy Emperor awake" and "sing/To lords and ladies…/Of what is past, or passing, or to come." The poem in its entirety is about the journey "out of nature," beginning with what is left behind in the first stanza, moving to the "holy city of Byzantium" in the second stanza, which he then discovers is "the artifice of eternity" in the third stanza, before discussing what is, what might be "to come" in the last (Yeats 123-4). It moves; the poem itself is sailing to Byzantium, a place where everything was covered in gold or bronze or jazzed up in some way (in my impression), where appearance of wealth was so important even architecture and the exact placement of important buildings was attended to in detail (Rosser 177). (Byzantium is most likely referring to the capital of the Byzantine Empire, what is now Constantinople, in Turkey.) After searching through the different rooms and periods of the palaces in A to Z of Byzantium, and finding nothing of a golden statue, I remembered that it's the idea that counts, not the reality. It's the golden birds who count. These are the first birds to have a voice, or one that can speak of what it could say. (The Firebird technically does speak through the music, but cannot say anything.) Vendler describes the birdsong as having sensual connotations, as "'drowsy' is always, in Yeats, a sign of the sensual" (35). She implies that the bird's song is somewhat better than that of the "ignorant, sensual song of the young," though she uses the word "different" instead of better: "the bird has the historian's knowledge of the past, the journalists' detached view of the passing scene, and the prophet's apprehensive speculative vision; but the golden bird's song is nonetheless, like the song of the young, music of this temporal world, not of a timeless eternity" (36). It is better; everyone, including the young, takes advantage of time, often wishing it away—"I wish it were the weekend…I wish summer would come sooner"—the golden birds have fallen somewhere between naive existence and "timeless eternity." Yes, their function in the world is merely entertainment, but they do speak of extraordinary things, "Of what is past or passing or to come." Because they can speak of the future, they do exist in timeless eternity, however trivial that existence may be. Jahan Ramazani points out that another aspect of the poem is its apparent function or genre, the self elegy. The golden bird of the final stanza—whose ironic significance has been overemphasized—is the elegiac apotheosis of the self-mourned poet; it resumes the Miltonic and Keatsian tradition that will lead to the Steven's self-apotheosis as bird in the late self-elegy "Of Mere Being." Thus, even when the Yeatsian artwork shares in ‘the artifice of eternity,' it still occasions the poet's rehearsal of death and dying. (159-60) Getting over the fact that Ramazani never says why others considered the golden bird ironic, the reader or critic is now expected to believe that the golden bird is a symbol of or at least associated with death? One theory, my theory, is the possibility of the golden bird to be or be in association with a phoenix, as in Wallace Stevens' poem "Of Mere Being." A mythical creature that is said to have "scarlet and gold feathers," the phoenix, on realizing its own mortality, "would build a pyre and set it on fire. The phoenix would be consumed by the flames but would arise anew and alive from the ashes to live another five hundred years" (Webber 419). Because (I imagine) of its odd ritual of death and rebirth, the phoenix is "associated with immortality and was an allegory for resurrection and life after death" (Webber 419). In this way can golden birds more easily be associated with death. Because of the final line and the content of it in relation to the rest of the poem, it can only be gathered that the golden bird described in "Of Mere Being" is a phoenix. The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. (Stevens 267) What other bird would have "fire-fangled feathers" to "dangle down," besides a phoenix? After all, a "gold-feathered" bird whose feathers are on fire would make them both scarlet and gold. The phoenix has appeared in legend and myth across the world in early years (especially in Egyptian religion) to movies and books of today (probably most recently famous in pop-culture, JK Rowling's Harry Potter series), even music; "firebird" can be just another name for phoenix. Stravinsky and Stevens were invoking the same symbol. Though parallels can be drawn, "Of Mere Being" is certainly its own poem, far different from Stravinsky or even Yeats. Both Yeats' and Stevens' birds, Nancy Prothro observes, are "artificial" and "in a surreal, austerely present eternity" (357-8). But this golden bird "does not look upon a human scene and does not sing of ‘what is past, or passing, or to come' in the temporal world. [It] describes a scene unperceived by the human eye. The last stanza, without pathos, without sentimentality of any kind, presents a world from which man has vanished" (Prothro 358). He never mentions who "us" is; he never specifies that it's a human mind that the palm is standing at the edge of. It's just the golden bird, the phoenix, and eternity. Yet. "paradoxically," Prothro continues, "although this poem is of pure being without consciousness of being, it is not a poem of pure reality. Reality, as it is presented here, is art, is an act of the mind" (357). The only reality is the reality of death, of "the last thought," and, lucky us, we're "beyond the last thought." We get to see a glimpse of life after death, or lack thereof. Two chronological branches have stemmed from this obsession with golden birds, from a ballet based on a legend to sculptures based on the same to a poem about the sculptures, and from a symbol used in both the ballet and another poem to another sculpture in yet another poem, both meditations on afterlife. Where did this plethora of golden birds come from and why are they here? They're apparently a vessel in which to break through traditions associated with a given creative field. They're everywhere in creative circles, like the influenza epidemics of generally the same time period, though the mortality rate is far less. The mortality rate only affects the poetry circle for some reason. All of the poets alluded to death, or what comes after, with their golden birds; Yeats using the birds to speak of what "is past, or passing, or to come," Loy with her "Alpha and Omega" (an allusion to Christ from the book of the Bible, Revelation) and Osiris (god of the underworld) and the mention of being without sin, ("immaculate conception"), and in Stevens, the bird in the palm that's beyond the last thought. But, more importantly, all of the artists using golden birds in this time period, the modernist movement, used them to break free of the traditional constraints of their genre. The golden birds could be merely a convenient coincidence, it's true, the mythological connotations of the phoenix a perfect metaphor, a means to an end. Whatever the coincidence, it does not change the fact that the artists themselves are like, have in fact become phoenixes, burning the old, becoming resurrected to live on another five-hundred years. Works Cited Brancusi, Constantin. Bird in Space. Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice. Oxford Art Online. New York: Artists Rights Society, 2007. 7 December 2008. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/popup_fig/img/grove/art/F017304 -----. Golden Bird. The Arts Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute of Chicago Online Collection. New York: Artists Rights Society, 2008. 7 December 2008. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/91194 Ellmann, Richard; Robert O'Clair; and Jahan Ramazani, ed. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed, Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 2003. Kenner, Hugh. Loy, Mina. "Brancusi's Golden Bird." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Ramazani, Jahan; Richard Ellmann; and Robert O'Clair; ed. New York: Norton, 2003. Lloyd, Michael, and Michael Desmond. European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery. 1992 p.193. National Gallery of Australia Online. 7 December 2008. http://www.nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=89746&ViewID=2&GalID=2 Mares, Cheryl. Modern Poetry I. Course Home Page. Aug.-Dec. 2008. Sweet Briar College. 5 December 2008 http://mares.english.sbc.edu/Fall2008/393reqs.html "Phoenix." Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2006. Answers.com 8 December 2008. http://www.answers.com/topic/phoenix Prothro, Nancy W. "On the Edge of Space: Wallace Stevens's Last Poems." The New England Quarterly Vol. 57, No. 3. The New England Quarterly Inc, Sep. 1984. 347-58. JSTOR. 6 December 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/365580 Ramazani, Jahan. Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self Elegy and the Sublime. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Rogers, Lynne. "Stravinsky's Break with Contrapuntal Tradition: A Sketch Study." The Journal of Musicology. Vol. 13, No. 4. University of California Press, Autumn 1995. 476-507. JSTOR. 7 December 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/763896 Rosser, John H. A to Z of Byzantium. The A to Z Guide Series, No 16. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Stevens, Wallace. "Of Mere Being." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Ramazani, Jahan; Richard Ellmann; and Robert O'Clair; ed. New York: Norton, 2003. Tucker, William. Early Modern Sculpture: Rodin, Degas, Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, Gonzalez. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007. Webber, Elizabeth and Mike Feinsilber. Mirriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions. Springfield, Massachusetts: Mirriam-Webster Inc, 1999. Yeats, William Butler. "Sailing to Byzantium." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Ed. Ramazani, Jahan; Richard Ellmann; and Robert O'Clair; ed. New York: Norton, 2003. |
this breast of revelation
To Be the Brancusi of Poetry." The New York Times Book Review. May 16, 1982, p. 7. Literature Resource Center. Online. 7 December 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC?vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=vic_sbc&srchtp=athr&ca=1&c=5&ste=16&stab=512&tab=2&tbst=arp&ai=U13708751&n=10&docNum=H1420005107&ST=mina+loy&bConts=12598975