Do You Hear How They Beg for Realities? from Dave Bonta on Vimeo
[UPDATE (11/29/09): Video has been thoroughly edited in response to criticism in the comments to this post. I located a recording of Salinas himself reading the poem, and used that together with some public-domain electronica I found online for the soundtrack. English has been relegated to subtitles. Video clip has been given a spotlight effect.]
Yesterday morning, I was fortunate enough to witness and film a garter snake orgy, and I’ve posted an eight minute and twenty second-long, full-color video of that — it’s quite mesmerizing, I think. But since this is (Inter-)National Poetry Month, I decided to try and make a video poem with the footage, too, and that’s obviously what I’ve posted here. Originally I thought I’d illustrate one of Vicente Aleixandre’s love poems. In searching YouTube for videos of his work to use on Moving Poems, the best one I found featured a babe running in slow motion along a beach, and I figured a Nobel Prize winner deserves better than that. But in the end, it was the Pedro Salinas poem “¿Las oyes cómo piden realidades…?” that best fit the footage. Those who read Spanish can find the text here.
There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to improve on W. S. Merwin’s translation. I realize I’m breaking copyright law with this kind of usage, but I figure it’s worth risking a takedown notice to expose more English-language readers to the work of one of Spain’s greatest poets. This is the first time I’ve attempted a video poem for anyone’s work beside my own, and I welcome feedback. (I think this one might’ve benefited from some background music — something with lots of jarring dissonances, perhaps?)
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On an unrelated note, the Festival of the Trees does include three poems this month, though that’s far from the only reason to check it out at The Marvelous in Nature. Seabrooke did a beautiful job with it, I thought. Spend some extra time at her blog, too, if you can — it’s one of the best written, most informative nature blogs out there.
I should put in a plug for the Nature Blog Network blog while I’m at it. Don’t be fooled by the awkward title: if you have even a casual interest in nature, this is an essential addition to your Bloglines or Google Reader subscriptions. Not only will it keep you up-to-date with reminders about all the different nature blog carnivals, but it also has regular round-ups of conservation news and a variety of feature articles including interviews with nature bloggers and surveys of nature blogs by region or specialization. The network itself is for blogs that are primarily focused on the natural world, so for example you won’t find Via Negativa there, but you will find my microblog The Morning Porch. And of course you’ll find my mom’s website, where in this month’s column she answers the question we’ve heard from so many visitors to Plummer’s Hollow: “What About Bears?” Which — to return to the subject of this post! — includes a brief video I shot last year. No poem in that one, though.
i’d leave just the snakes and the strange Spanish recording where i don’t understand either. the English ruins it.
orgying snakes and blurred old spanish:
this excites me.
Hmm. How would you feel about English subtitles? Would that also be too distracting, do you think?
I must admit that one reason I decided to include both languages was to lengthen the audio track, and thus increase the amount of footage I could include!
In Manitoba’s interlake (and elsewhere but no where near as plentiful) there are numerous Garter Snake hibernaculums. Limestone pits. In the spring thousands of the smaller males emerge from their winter quarters and wait for the larger females to emerge. Only one male emerges (ahem) victorious and she secretes a waxy plug to foil any further suitors.
Sitting in the pit amongst them ranks as one of my all time favourite animal encounters. Their scales over the rocks makes an audible shhhhhhhhh as beautiful as any poem.
Oh wow, you’ve been to the Manitoba snake pits! Next time, please bring a video camera — with a dish microphone, if possible. I’d love to hear that.
You can kind of tell which one’s the female in my video; she’s larger than the others. In the full-length video, I included the clips in the order in which they were taken, but in the poem video, I showed them in the order in which events actually occur. We’ve witnessed this several times now, and one male does always emerge as the chosen partner, and the two of them move off and find their own spot. What happened yesterday I think was that my filming of the coital pair disturbed them and they separated short of consumation, causing the whole pattern to repeat an hour later. (My mother witnessed the second pairing-off while I was inside getting lunch.)
This is fantastic. I kind of agree about just using the Spanish recording, but my gosh, this is wonderful.
Glad you liked. (The Spanish recording is actually my own reading, by the way. I lowered the pitch and speeded it up a little to try and hide my terrible accent.)
Downloaded the 8 min version overnight. Couldn’t watch. Too much! Too strong. Pulsing. Throbbing. Clasping. Quivering. Too much. All too human yet all too not human.
I’m sure I’d be memerized by the event in person, though.
Maybe the problem is that I’m watching on a laptop.
Bill – I understand not being able to watch something because it’s too intense — I’m that way with some things, too.
Speaking of the pulsing/throbbing aspect, I was thinking this morning that if I redo this, Pakistani kawwali music might make a good background. Though I don’t know if Sufis would be offended by the implied pantheism there.
“All too human yet all too not human” — great line! Yes.
It was a long time ago Dave, and unlikely to happen in the near future, although I’d love to do it again. I should have some pictures from then, but I can’t seem to lay my hands on them.
Maybe when your son gets a few years older, you could plan a trip there as a way to frame the big “birds and bees” talk. :)
Irish repression left me with incomplete information. My own mother hemmed and hawed through that birds/bees talk, and never once mentioned the centrality of writhing.
(Avid eyes, indeed.)
I got the straight dope from Mom at the age of seven. We had ducks and chickens, so it was no great surprise when I found out from my older brother, just “Gross! I’m never doing that!“
Three cheers for visual aids, and facts generally.
My mother was in situ training for a career deposing evasive witnesses. For an interminable period mid-conversation, the sex organs drew closer and closer without ever quite meeting. Had I not asked that final slot A/tab B question, she never would have voluntarily mentioned intromission.
If people possessed transcripts from their childhood, would they cease writing fiction?
Maybe so. But for the sake of my poetry, I sure wish I’d taken better notes!
:-) I have a snake phobia (probably a left-over relic in my reptilian brain stem from my childhood in Kafue National Park in Zambia) and can’t watch the video, though I’d love to! I’ll be hallucinating snakes later if I do. Once I read an entire book, because I had to, on a Southern US snake cult where they let rattlers coil on their heads, after ‘milking’ them by disturbing them with one’s snake boots and eliciting a fjuicy fanged bite on the leather, by quickly covering all the strange photographs in the book before my snake-sensitive eyes could see them! Yes, mad. Everyone has their own madness, she says, mumbling and hissing quietly.
As a feminist I wore as much serpent jewelry as I could find and researched dragons/snakes in world mythology in depth and painted Jungian mandalas with them to be, finally, and at 30 years of age, Individuated.
The phobia continues, however. The Sybils at Delphi used to be put in underground snake vaults to spend the night or a few nights and if they survived they became prophetesses (who probably had their visions from safe levels of poison, or so it’s been surmised).
Nah, I don’t want to go for de-tox of the phobia, the cure more terrifying than the thing. In pet stores if there are snakes I will involunatarily begin to freeze from the toes up as I was taught as a young child running free in bush rife with Black Mambas and Spitting Snakes and 30ft pythons and whatnot.
I’d love to see the garter snakes copulating. I’ve always wanted to see a garter snake group orgy. It must be a beautiful motion of instinct, weaving and reptilian passion.
Can’t. Sigh. Not sure why I left this comment either. (Except I want to support you in this filming:)
Thanks for letting us inside the mind of a snake-phobic, Brenda. My mom admits that she used to be mildly phobic, but always supressed it when we were kids because she didn’t want to pass it on. Now she is able to watch things like this with no problem at all. But I don’t think she was ever anywhere near as phobic as you.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t a genetic basis for snake phobia of some kind.
Thanks for your kindly response, Dave. Fortunately, my kids aren’t snake-phobic at all – rather the opposite, they’re fascinated by them. With me it’s probably a result of severe early snake-phobic conditioning that simply stuck in the psychic layers long after its usefulness was gone. It’s like a crack in the wall, you could fix it, but that would entail a lot of work, time, effort, and perhaps it’s not that bad, and so you just live with it. Still, I would like to watch this video and will keep it noted for a particularly brave day. ::grins::
You could always push Play, then switch to another tab in your browser so you’d only hear the poem, and wouldn’t have to watch!
Glad to hear your kids didn’t inherit the phobia.