Stanzas and Cinema: Bergman and Poteat

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The Seventh Seal (release date 1957; written and directed by Ingmar Bergman)
Louisvillians can rent from Wild ‘n Woolly here or anyone can rent from Netflix here

Ornithologies by Joshua Poteat (Anhinga Press, 2006)
Purchase from Carmichael’s Bookstore here.

A few days ago I had the unfortunate experience of attending the funerals of two family members in one week. After shedding my protocol funeral blacks and uncomfortable heels, I took the opportunity to huddle close to the couch with my trademark Diet Coke and fourteen-year-old Husky mix’s raspy, geriatric snore to ponder one of my favorite films, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. This film is maddeningly bleak, starkly beautiful, and full of existential turmoil. A most exquisite companion to the themes and questions posed in Bergman’s magnum opus, in my humble opinion, is the young poet, Joshua Poteat’s debut collection, Ornithologies. Poteat’s work revels in a wisdom and understanding that can only be the direct result of possessing an antiqued soul, tarnished from manifestations of burned and wingless birds, of light and dark, of answers to questions that scream and secret themselves. Together, these works weave a tapestry of longing from the frayed and stripped ventricles of the human heart.

The Seventh Seal has been discussed, analyzed, and argued over for decades. It is terribly beautiful and morose with poetry and symbolism swirled religiously into every frame. The film opens with this passage from Revelation, from which the title borrows, “When he broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour” (Rev 8:1). The silence is what Bergman busies himself with in Antonius Block, a knight with inner turmoil after arriving back to Sweden from ten years in the Crusades. Sweden has been consumed with the black plague so it is only fitting that on a craggy beach, while Block’s squire, Jöns, is resting, that Death appears to begin a game of chess with Block. This chess game extends throughout the film and provides the catalyst for Block’s inner journey as well as his danse macabre with Death himself. We are introduced to a cast of characters who are unwitting pieces in a game much larger than what we witness on Block’s chessboard. There are the actors Jof and Mia and their infant boy, Mikael; a witch; several terrified townspeople; as well as a band of monks who travel about flagellating themselves in reverence to the God that would impose such suffering upon His people. Jof is prone to comforting visions of the Virgin Mary and other saints and angels, providing a sharp contrast to Block, who desperately longs to know if God truly exists and has only Death to question. Death’s stoicism and occasional silence does nothing but deepen Block’s questioning and anxiety over the existence of an afterlife and the true meaning of humanity’s role in this world. Jöns, with his simpleton ways and wide opossum scowl of defiance, provides some comedic relief but succumbs to his darker qualities as the film moves on. This film is so chock full of Christian symbolism (a meal of wild strawberries and milk mimics the Eucharist, for example) and speculation it would be impossible to touch upon every morsel of fear and doubt that plays out on the screen in what I believe to be a deeply personal journey within every being who views this classic. I will allow you to make your own judgments and revelations about this beauty, to curl inward and accept what the images show you.

Joshua Poteat’s arresting debut, Ornithologies, will undoubtedly lend itself to your journey. This quite hefty collection, weighing in at 106 pages, is remarkable. Poteat’s words become meditations on the dead, a book of psalms unearthed and claimed as holy. These poems are, as the title suggests, full of birds, bags, and bushels of them (so many there is even a full index of species with the page and place each is mentioned). These winged creatures become the ligature that string together this melancholic and oddly nostalgic haunt of images and masterful lyricism that will glide over you like the mosquito-eating brown bats that trouble the azure-blue sky of dusk in the South. The collection is mired in the fantastic as we see in the poem, “Nocturne: For The Aviaries”: “Had I five hummingbirds, / I would make a love charm / and string them from the tongue / of a small copper bell in those branches, / necks hovered together, broken. // Had I a swan, it would sleep / under the hives / with a bucket of fresh milk, / with the splintered white faces of goats.” Poteat also tackles a deeply American subject, the Civil War, in language so rich with imagery it cloaks itself in the forgotten cries of thousands of dead soldiers, as in these lines regarding the Malvern Hill Battleground: “This must be how the soldiers slept, / with the night all around them / and their bodies knowing where it was. // And this must be how the deer moved / over the fields long after the battle, drinking frost / from the eyes of the dead with their small pink tongues.” Poteat’s work sings; it sings of fireflies bearing the skin of God in their bellies, of ribcages woven into baskets by tuberculosis, of Christ slapping rotting eggs from lepers’ mouths. The grotesque becomes a sacred thing in both Bergman’s and Poteat’s work. Ornithologies becomes the fertile spring which follows The Seventh Seal’s chilled and barren winter, both equally urgent, necessary, and striking. Antonius Block never finds the answers he is looking for, but Poteat reminds us, “To live at all is to grieve,” and grieve we do, whether it be for lost loved ones or lost youth, for ten years ago or ten seconds ago. We grieve, we love and we live, as clumsily or as gracefully as we know how.

 

Nicole Pollitt is a poet, book nerd, bee wrangler and volunteer wildlife rehabber. She grew up between a library and an old art deco theatre in a small Central Kentucky town.