The Idea of Order at Key West

I am posting the YouTube video (Kseniya Simonova – Sand Animation (Україна має талант / Ukraine’s Got Talent) because I was so moved by both the story and the teller. Her artistry in telling is lovely in and of itself. She stands before the light table tossing a chaos of sand against the light. We are moved by her intensity as well as by her gesture. In the end, we are moved by her aloneness – what is left, the signed and finished piece which in its process was self-annihilating.

Her work telling this story reminds me of a poem by Wallace Stevens.

The Idea of Order at KeyWest

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

I’ve always been haunted by Steven’s poem. It depicts the artist as maker of the world – as maker of a world that makes sense to her. That the world itself is chaos. Not rage, not anger – these are human emottions – but nothing. Matter, perhaps. But whatever it is, it is without meaning until she sings the story.

Kseniya Simonova takes the process of chaos and incorporates it into a story. She doesn’t even use language which in and of itself stills (or names and, hence, stills). Her process of thesis/antithesis – synthesis is an art. She does not actually name until she signs. “She was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang.”