A chance meeting at the Bellevue Psychiatric Observation Ward

With the passing of the great Bobby Fischer, chess has lost its undisputed king. Chess has lost its Richard the III. Nobody was so demonised in his later years as Bobby Fischer was. After winning the cold war singlehandedly on a chess board in Reykjavik in 1972, he became more and more reclusive and was despised and hated for refusing to play the role that everybody expected from him. Outspoken against the United States and rightly so in his later years, he was pushed to exile in Iceland where he eventually died.

Taking over from my previous post on the Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, I recalled that Mingus refers to a chance meeting with a young (but unnamed) Fischer at the Bellevue Psychiatric Observation Ward in his autobiography "Beneath the underdog". Here is the extract posted in the memory of the great Bobbie Fischer:

"There was a boy sitting across the table from me, reading a book on mathematics - I could see the equations and symbols. I saw him walking around earlier that morning - very tall and gangly, sandy haired, only about eighteen years old. I later learned he was a champion chess player and spoke seven languages. He was a genius, I guess. His parents had him committed, he told me, but he didn't say why. He didn't seem to mind. He was quiet and good-natured and always busy doing something. When he saw me looking at him he asked if I wanted to play a game of chess and he brought out his board. I showed him what I had just wrote.

He looked very thoughtful, and said, "I don't have time to hear everything, but I'm interested in music and keep abreast of what's happening. It's odd you say you haven't been productive. It seems to me you have several-Let's see-" and he counted in his head - "I'd say six or seven albums that came out last year. That isn't bad." I was amazed, but he was right, and I realised last year seemed like ten years ago to me.

He checkmated me three times in a row, and I could see he was getting bored, so I went back to my bunk and tried to write some poetry..."

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

This is a jazz album.

This is a ballet 

This is a six-part music suite.

This is genius.

This is Mingus.

This album sounds improvised but everything has been written down meticulously in advance. Every detail composed beforehand.

This is the only jazz album to have liner notes written by a clinical psychologist. Mingus’ clinical psychologist. 

You see Charles Mingus recorded "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" immediately after he left the Bellevue psychiatric hospital observation ward in 1963. This institution was famous for receiving, in its rooms with a beautiful view, a long list of artists and writers among whom were Malcolm Lowry, Norman Mailer, Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, who was commited after he cut off his fingertip and gave it to a boyfriend. The playwright Eugene O'Neill and the poet Gregory Corso also spent time at Bellevue in stages of nervous breakdowns.

Enter Mingus. Exit Mingus

"Mr. Mingus thinks this is his best record. It may very well be his best to date for his present stage of development as other records were in the past. It must be emphasized that Mr. Mingus is not yet complete. He is still in a process of change and personal development. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his. One must continue to expect more suprises from him…" Edmund Pollock, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist

But I nearly forgot, Charles Mingus wrote also his own liner notes on "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" album before the ones of his clinical psychologist. This is how they end:

"This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind has encompassed through living in a society that calls itself sane, as long as you ‘re not behind iron bars where there at least one can’t be half as crazy as in most of the ventures our leaders take upon themselves to do and think for us, even to the day we should be blown up to preserve their idea of how life should be. Crazy? They’d never get out of the observation ward at Bellevue.

I did. So, listen how. Play this record. "   

George Grosz and the Weimar Years

Through his caricature drawings (and I am referring to the period until the late 20s), Georg Ehrenfried Groß managed to create a vivid and fascinating picture of the Weimar years in Berlin depicting the four pillar society of the capitalist, the soldier/officer, the priest and the hooker in all their sleaze and depravity. In his famous drawing collections The Face of the Ruling Class and Gott mit uns (1921), as well as Ecce Homo (1922), Grosz depicts a bleak society of fat profiteers and greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie, drinkers, war-crippled dregs and lechers contrasting to the hollow-faced factory labourers, the poor, and the unemployed. His unrelenting attack on militarism and his acid critisism of Germany's decadent society earned him the nazi title of “Cultural Bolshevist Number One". He left Germany, in 1932, moved to the United States and ended his life accidentally when he fell down a flight of stairs in a return visit to his beloved/behated Berlin in 1959.

Mario Vargas Llosa in his essay "You nourish yourself with everything that you hate" finds similarities between the poet Charles Baudelaire and the painter George Grosz. Grosz, Germany's poète maudit according to Llosa, shared Baudelaire's romantic fascination for underground, outsider characters - criminals, gangsters, suicide victims, the proletariat and whores.

In my dream world, George Grosz illustrates works of Baudelaire... As Rita Hayworth says in the film Gilda "it's kind of a terrific combination". Isn't it?

Charles Baudelaire's prophecies

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), the famous french poet of "Les Fleurs du mal", kept a personal diary which was published posthumously under the title "Fusées" and "Mon Cœur mis à nu" in 1897, exactly 30 years after his death. It is an extremely interesting document, very personal, with thoughts and aphorisms put down as they come, sometimes angry and crude, sometimes contradictory but certainly prophetic if one considers the age and conditions in which we live in today. Take as an example two extracts from Baudelaire's notes:

"… Car, en supposant qu'il continuât à exister matériellement, serait-ce une existence digne de ce nom et du Dictionnaire historique? Je ne dis pas que le monde sera réduit aux expédients et au désordre bouffon des républiques du Sud-Amérique, que peut-être même nous retournerons à l'état sauvage, et que nous irons, à travers les ruines herbues de notre civilisation, chercher notre pâture, un fusil à la main. Non; car ces aventures supposeraient encore une certaine énergie vitale, écho des premiers âges. Nouvel exemple et nouvelles victimes des inexorables lois morales, nous périrons par où nous avons cru vivre. La mécanique nous aura tellement américanisés, le progrès aura si bien atrophié en nous toute la partie spirituelle, que rien, parmi les rêveries sanguinaires, sacrilèges ou antinaturelles des utopistes, ne pourra être comparé à ses résultats positifs…"

and further down he writes:

"… Alors, ce qui ressemblera à la vertu, que dis-je, tout ce qui ne sera pas l'ardeur vers Plutus sera réputé un immense ridicule. La justice, si, à cette époque fortunée, il peut encore exister une justice, fera interdire les citoyens qui ne sauront pas faire fortune. Ton épouse, ô Bourgeois! ta chaste moitié, dont la légitimité fait pour toi la poésie, introduisant désormais dans la légalité une infamie irréprochable, gardienne vigilante et amoureuse de ton coffre-fort, ne sera plus que l'idéal parfait de la femme entretenue. Ta fille, avec une nubilité enfantine, rêvera, dans son berceau, qu'elle se vend un million, et toi-même, ô Bourgeois, — moins poète encore que tu n'es aujourd'hui, — tu n'y trouveras rien à redire; tu ne regretteras rien. Car il y a des choses, dans l'homme, qui se fortifient et prospèrent à mesure que d'autres se délicatisent et s'amoindrissent; et, grâce au progrès de ces temps, il ne te restera de tes entrailles que des viscères! — Ces temps sont peut-être bien proches; qui sait même s'ils ne sont pas venus, et si l'épaississement de notre nature n'est pas le seul obstacle qui nous empêche d'apprécier le milieu dans lequel nous respirons?..."

For those who are familiar with the famous works of the poet, reading Baudelaire's personal notes in "Fusèes" and "Mon cœur mis à nu" might come as a shock. There is little structure and no continuity. But the power and the insight of these scattered thoughts reveal the man behind the poet. And it is evident that for Charles Baudelaire, poetry was not a carnival mask to be worn in parties, a hobby to pass the time, something playfully artistic. No. The ground was solid and fertile and ready to receive the seeds of poetry which then blossomed into the singular expression of an artist and thinker that was not floating in the clouds but was here on earth, in society, living in the 19th century or maybe was it the 21st?

The Chequer-board of nights and days

For Ramon

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (c.1120) translated by Edward FitzGerald...

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

... to the drawing of Escher and the chess poem of Jorge Luis Borges...

Ajedrez

I
En su grave rincón, los jugadores
rigen las lentas piezas. El tablero
los demora hasta el alba en su severo
ámbito en que se odian dos colores.
Adentro irradian mágicos rigores
las formas: torre homérica, ligero
caballo, armada reina, rey postrero,
oblicuo alfil y peones agresores.
Cuando los jugadores se hayan ido,
cuando el tiempo los haya consumido,
ciertamente no habrá cesado el rito.
En el Oriente se encendió esta guerra
cuyo anfiteatro es hoy toda la tierra.
Como el otro, este juego es infinito.

II
Tenue rey, sesgo alfil, encarnizada
reina, torre directa y peon ladino
sobre lo negro y blanco del camino
buscan y libran su batalla armada.
No saben que la mano señalada
del jugador gobierna su destino,
no saben que un rigor adamantino
sujeta su albedrío y su jornada.
También el jugador es prisionero
(la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero
de negras noches y blancos días.
Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza.
¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías?

... Humanity is still dreaming in black and white. In essence, little has changed. We have tried all the openings and all the defences, we have exchanged bishops for Queens and we have sacrificed rooks for pawns. We have studied the knight's tour and we have learned to play against the clock. Nevertheless, sooner or later, we will again be cornered, outnumbered and we will concede. But in the end it will not be a defeat. At least we can say that it was a draw. And the game was worth playing.