Dr. Barbara Mossberg's Transcript of Informal Remarks at the Barre
/“Poe’s depiction of loss, of remorse, of what cannot be recovered, in this and many other poems, of our being HAUNTED by loss, of life struggling by being prematurely taken—and specifically habits of long lost green valleys, of nightmare pandemics, of what is NEVERMORE—are eerily prophetic.”
“When you feel remorse and grief, and haunted, your conscience—your soul—is honored; when you allow the imagination in, you are honoring our deepest and noblest humanity.”
Dr. Barbara Mossberg | Fall 2023 | Dramaturg Presentation of Poe taster to NEVERMORE | Ballet Fantastique | October 6, 2023
Transcript of Informal Remarks at the Barre (City center for dance) by BFan’s RESIDENT HISTORIAN, Dr. Barbara Mossberg Professor of Practice, Clark Honors College, University of Oregon Eugene, OR
Hail remarkable Ballet Fantastique Team. Led by University of Oregon’s own Hannah Bontrager and Donna Marisa, this mother-daughter duo that is going to go down in cultural history. The work—or we could say, joy of this enterprise, not only to transform ballet into art and a way of speaking to humanity’s deepest springs of joy and awe as our brain/body rises to the occasion of being human, lifting us in flights of imagination. You are seeing tonight at the Barre an athletic prowess infused with spirit that gives legs wings, buoys the torso, so that we remember when we were birds and could fly, and still do in our dreams. You take extraordinary lives—on the human stage—larger than life--often forgotten or overlooked in our curricula—Cleopatra, Casanova, the Beast, Ichabod Crane, and do alchemy, transforming them into new beauty and truth and wonder and awe for our times.
The imaginative genius and brilliance of BFan married to the genius and brilliance of Edgar Allan Poe, who I want to say deserves this, comes amazingly at a moment in our history when we can perhaps for the first time, really get Poe. He arrives at our cultural shores as a refugee from a century in which he could play a pivotal role as an editor of various journals, the equivalent of being today’s Elon Musk or Robert Murdock—that kind of power to publish, to format; and yet, though he did publish, he was not regarded for his genius. He was so far ahead of his time, like von Newman who is the subject of a new book out called MANIAC, not only inventing genres we take for granted today, sci-fi, detective fiction, the short story, gothic, the origins of French symbolism leading to today’s modern literature, cosmology, cryptology, but prophetic in terms of today’s major issues and realms of knowledge we are grappling with and taking up the real estate of headline news, Supreme Court cases, and the work of countless nonprofits in environmental preservation.
We could say that the earliest recorded human literature, scratched in clay onto cuneiform, is about what have we done to earth and each other: Gilgamesh in 5th century Iraq loses his immortality for taking down Humbaba, Guardian of the Cedar Forest, and uprooting the trees all the way to the Euphrates. In most of our human literature and song and drama, across the world, we hear the strains of worry and anguish over what have we done? Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard shows the tragedy of cherries razed for development, Wordsworth says “a glory has passed from the earth,” Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner describes the fate of a boat full of people: everyone is cursed to die because the narrator has killed an albatross—now near-extinct; the narrator is doomed to tell the story, so that no thing in in the kingdom of God should be killed. Scottish troubadour Robert Burns calls for the respect for nature, even a mouse: ”I am sorry man’s dominion has caused thee to startle at me, thy fellow mortal.” By the time we get to early 19th century America, forests, species, habitats, peoples, are being eradicated. At exactly the same time that Henry David Thoreau is going to the Walden woods to “live deliberately,” and not find out at the end of his life he has “not lived at all,” and write the words of such power that it is the genesis of the conservation and environmental and civil rights movements, Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most prominent writers and editors and newspaper men in the country, is writing about irretrievable loss, a doomed society, “The Masque of the Red Death.” In stories and poems, beautiful life dies prematurely and is grieved. What have we done?
Most famously in “The Raven,” we hear that the answer to whether the beautiful Lenore can come back—whether there is balm in Gilead—whether we can escape the gaze of the Raven, “Nevermore.” Abraham Lincoln read this poem: He’s in the middle of a Civil War, of such brutality of scale that on one day 26,000 people were killed. This war is his responsibility. As the grieving leader, is he alone in his grief, up at night with his books, looking for answers from ancient and forgotten lore? Is he asking, what has he done? And he reads this:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— . . .
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
Lincoln first discovered Poe in the 1840s. Lincoln’s law partner later wrote that Lincoln, “carried Poe around on the Circuit—read and loved ‘The Raven’—repeated it over & over.” Poe’s depiction of loss, of remorse, of what cannot be recovered, in this and many other poems, of our being HAUNTED by loss, of life struggle, of being prematurely taken—and specifically habits of long lost green valleys, of nightmare pandemics, of what is NEVERMORE—are eerily prophetic. In our days of climate crisis, and extinction consciousness, BFan brings Poe once again to mind, brings him here, 150 years after the Civil War, with the moral soundtrack for our age . . .
This past July 4, I was in Concord, Massachusetts, at the Walden Pond Henry David Thoreau made famous, speaking to the Thoreau Society, a plenary speaker at a conference with the title, NEVERMORE, bringing Poe’s writing to an international colloquy of scholars on the topic of extinction. Poe is foundational to today’s scholars—and always has been to the public. My own mother who viewed my poetry career askance told me her favorite lines she carried with her throughout life were his poem, “Alone.”
He is a people’s poet. In “The Raven,” the narrator yells at the Raven, “Prophet, said I” . . . well, HE’s the prophet . . . We see Poe’s prophetic intelligence every day in science, the environmental movement, in literary genres he invented, in models of criticism.
Every place he ever lived and wrote is now a museum, writing awards are named for him, the Baltimore Ravens are named for his poem “The Raven.” He is credited with so many genius inventions—he is a puzzle maker and solver—Sherlock Holmes came out of his writings, Jules Verne built on his sci fi—his imagination was scientific (and prophetic in cosmology, said to describe the Big Bang 80 years before scientists came up with it), and most of all, the depiction of beauty, the fantastic—of the soul— . . . When you feel remorse and grief, and haunted, your conscience—your soul—is honored; when you allow the imagination in, you are honoring our deepest and noblest humanity.
This creative is who you are bringing to light, to life, to quantum immortality, in a production which carries on his tradition of the literal “fantastique.” You honor him, and by bringing his work to light, and flight, in this ballet story, you honor the human body and imagination.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of Poe’s death, his mysterious death which haunts our minds . . . Every day for sixty years the Poe Toaster left on the grave of Poe three roses and a bottle of cognac: I bring this now to you for your manifestation of being’s imagination: for all that this fantastic, ingenious, creative, beloved company gives to our community and our own creative way of understanding our world . . .Thank you. Thank you for the lift, thank you for what you show visibly and dramatically is possible.
. . . BALLET FANTASTIQUE, EVERMORE, TOAST! I CAN’T WAIT!