Excerpts from Doctrine of Similarity
6. Dust to Dusk
Charles Bernstein, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is known as a theorist and writer of "language" poetry. Among his 12 collections, the two most recent are "With Strings" (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and "Republics of Reality: 1975-1995" (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). But he's also an active essayist, editor and translator, and has collaborated with composers.
Our excerpt — four sections from "Doctrine of Similarity (13 Cannons)" is the third scene of the libretto for "Shadowtime" (1998-2000), a collaboration with composer Brian Ferneyhough on the life and work of the German Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The opera was commissioned by the Munich Bienalle for May 2004, and will have a U.S. premiere in July as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. [More information and audio at PENNsound.]
"Doctrine of Similarity" refers "to a key essay by Benjamin in which he explores the mimetic/echoic relation of language, world and cosmos," Bernstein told the Forward. There's lots of mimicking and playful echoing in the poems as well. Bernstein works with words as meanings and words as words — as objects to be manipulated, shuffled, distorted and juxtaposed, often exposing new meanings not apparent at first glance.
In "Sometimes," the burning book and "staying alive at a particular time" clearly refer to dramatic events in Benjamin's lifetime, cut short at age 48 — he was an influential literary theorist who escaped from Germany, only to die crossing into Spain in 1940. In the second half of the poem, Bernstein rearranges the opening phrases, redirecting the text toward our present predicament. "Sometimes/ you burn a book because" — the phrase is not completed because "because" cannot make sense, or perhaps because for those who burn books, "because" is its own reason. Bernstein produces a new text with multiple possible readings that resonate with and extend the initial expression.
A similar approach can be seen in "Schein," a German word with many meanings — sheen, shine, glow, illusoriness, sham — that Bernstein puns over into English, researching the "space between shine and shame."
Finally, in "Anagrammatica," Bernstein obsessively rearranges the name Walter Benjamin into a series of identities, some apt epithets — "Brain mantle Jew/ Brain mental Jew" — others at best cryptic, like "A mint bran jewel." The work reaches cadence with "Atman Berlin Jew," attaching the universal soul of Hinduism to a very particular identity that proved to be Benjamin's fate. In one deft anagram, Bernstein tersely eulogizes a major thinker who lived in complete freedom of mind, but died as a Jew.