R. Nemo Hill presents
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS at THE STONE /
www.thestonenyc.com
16 October, 2006
corner of Ave C & 2nd Street, 8 PM, $10 “donation”
“...Like him who strips at sight of the sea,
like him who has risen to do honour to the first land-breeze
(how is his brow magnified under the helmet)...”
Texts by St-John Perse
~1~
“Images A Crusoe”/ Pictures for Crusoe
music by Louis Durey, Opus 11
Beth Anne Hatton, voice
Ishmael Wallace, piano
text read by Jee Leong Koh
translation, Louise Varese
intermission
~2~
“Exil”/ Exile
text read by R. Nemo Hill
translation, Denis Devlin
~3~
“Scenes D’Anabase”/ Anabasis
music by Paul Bowles
Beth Anne Hatton, voice
Ishmael Wallace, piano
Vita Wallace, violin
text read by Jee Leong Koh
translation, T.S. Eliot
“Out of the poetic obscurity he encouraged for himself comes Alexis Saint Leger-Leger, born in 1887 [in Guadeloupe, French Antilles), dying in 1975. French diplomat in China, general secretary of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1933 and 1940, forced into long exile in America, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960. He wrote under the pseudonym of St-John Perse. Between his literary life and his life in the world there seemed a gap so wide that the two identities sometimes appeared as two different people...”
(biographical note, Letters, St-John Perse, Princeton University Press, 1979)
"I don’t think you ever took my obsession with the sea seriously; it struck you as a literary affectation when, in fact, because of my birth, childhood, and ancient insular atavism on a small Caribbean island, the sea is to me something absolutely basic, mingled with my very blood; and without my noticing, it has spread to every part of my being.
There is nothing metaphysical in all this. When I was still very young, I heard a grown-up peremptorily state that woman was the fifth element. I countered bluntly, saying that it was the sea, which, in my mind, was quite distinct from water and air.
Dear, great, friend, to me you will always be the most human man of letters I have ever met. Do you know what I admire most about you? Your abiding inability to pass judgment on those whom fate places in your path as friends.
Do you bring the same fatalism to your judgment of a whole period? The one in which I met you cast a lovely radiance on the earth. It was a golden age that still had about it, without our realizing it, much of the glorious leisure that once reigned over the empire of the Four Seas. The war has blighted all that and severed many a thread. But you are not one ever to be caught unawares by destiny; and the past disappears so suddenly into the depths of the sea that it forces us to confront our future masks with a sharper awareness. As long as there is still movement, there is no cause to despair of the morrow. The important thing is to live, with our strength intact, coiled close at hand like fine rope rolled upon the deck."
(Saint-Leger Leger, letter to Joseph Conrad, Peking, February 26, 1921)
"But tell me if this would be possible: that the outside cover bear only the word
Eloges [Praises] devoid of any author’s name, which would only appear on the inner title page. If you thought this were really too contrary to publishing practices, I would immediately withdraw the directions I gave Verbecke. But it would be really nice if that were possible. Please don’t think I’m a crank. It’s just that it seems to me that poems should always preserve something of the sudden, anonymous way they come into being."
(A. Saint-Leger, letter to Andre Gide, Pau, August 1911)
[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited October 13, 2006).]