Poetry and Desire

I have never much liked children's music, so the songs I sing Helena Iara are mostly songs I like, and of these, one that she seems to enjoy is "Minha Casa", by the singer-songwriter Zeca Baleiro.  This afternoon, after singing the first verses to her, I began to think how very difficult it must be to get all of the references, especially the line, "Não quero ser triste, como o poeta que envelhece lendo Mayakovsky na loja de conveniência": I don't want to be sad, like the poet who grows old reading Mayakovsky in the convenience store.  The fact that a Brazilian pop song could mention a Russian futurist poet already shows how different it can be from American commercial music, but the real problem is how to explain Mayakovsky to a baby girl.

Like many figures of twentieth century marxism, Mayakovsky works much better as a myth than as a man: the great poet who condemned capitalism and banality in his pre-revolutionary poems, and then, while in Petrograd in 1917, participated in the Smolny revolt and the storming of the winter palace.  He continued to write poetry after the revolution, but also did beautiful propaganda posters, prose, and helped to stage the annual re-creation of the storming of the Winter Palace, a ritual insisting that the revolution belonged to the Russian people, not the Bolshevik Party.  And then, even better, he not only saw the corruption and oppression of the Stalinist era, but first condemned it and then, as a final protest, committed suicide.  He came to represent both hope and disillusion, the promise of communism and its betrayal.

The story is romantic for a girl or teenager, but as I told it (and quote the occasional line I remembered, like "I am not a man, I am a cloud in pants.") I had to wonder if it really made any sense to a baby girl, or what I could imagine of the perspective of a baby girl.  And the truth of the matter is that it's not an easy story to make interesting for a child... and that is, after all, the point of these conversations.  So I told her a little bit about the Mayakovsky museum, one of my favorite places in Moscow, his trip to the United States... but it still didn't work.

Which brought us back to "Minha Casa," the song that started the whole story.  The verse continues, "Nor do I want to be happy, like the dog who goes for a walk with his happy master below a Sunday sun.  Nor do I want to be stagnant, like a man who builds roads but never travels.  I want in darkness, like a blind man who touches the distracted stars."

Mayakovsky desperately desired, and was betrayed.  I think that's why he is such a romantic figure and worth writing a pop song about.  If you read about the young Mayakovsky, as he traveled from his home in Georgia to Moscow and then to revolutionary St. Petersburg, you get the sense that he was like a blind man touching distracted stars, reaching out for anything that he could believe in.  He desired in darkness, and grabbed on to what he could find.  The problem was, I think, not so much that he was wrong in his desire or that he had grabbed the wrong distracted star, but that once he grabbed the star, it was the only one.  And as the star changed, from Lenin to Stalin, democratic to totalitarian, he couldn't believe there were any more to grab.

Babies' desire seems exactly what Zeca Baleiro is singing about: babies don't want to be happy or sad: they just live those emotions.  Their desire is the blind man's reaching, unsure of what he wants, but knowing that something is out there.  Not art for the sake of art, the formalists' creed, but desire simply because it is there.  Desire justified by itself, not by its object.  And I think this idea of desire is an important lesson for adults, who so often "know what we want", only to find that what we wanted only makes us miserable.  And, for me in the case of a daughter, what I didn't think I wanted at all is one of the most wonderful things I have experienced.