Through
i
How hard it can be to look at one’s past. To turn to salt at
that cold heat that comes from the blue flickerings of charred embers. To be
taken back to it time after time, as if on a train, a train back and back and
back, taking you to the cold destination where you are immolated on your
history. To a gulag. To a lager. That holocaust of the what has been. Not even the
survivors survive it. Tell any survivor they survived and they’ll rightly tell
you, you must be joking, just look at my
scars.
ii
There’s something about the instantaneous that robs us of our
experience. To experience something we
have to live it a while. This is why our current culture of the immediate is so
degenerative. I remember being on train home to London when a terrorist attack
occurred in Paris. My present company kept checking their phone for updates on
the story. What insight were they trying to glean from this? They were
approaching it as a spectacle. They were partaking in it as a consumer. As a
pig hungry for the troth to be refilled with swill. The media knows this and
behaves accordingly. It is its bread and butter. It knows people engage with it
in a consumptive manner. Therefore, it is a product. As any product it needs to
have a selling point. It’s selling point is speed. This is the thing, money
famously cannot buy time, however you canput a price upon expedience. Expedience
is not something we do to make the most our time, it is what we do when we do
not have enough of it. Money aims not to expand time, but to shorten it. This
is why our culture has become one of convenience. It is a spiritual suicide.
After all, what could be more convenient than death? To make an obvious point,
the reason bullets kill people is because they move too fast. Immediacy kills
our response. What we are left with in its place is a reaction. This does us no
favours in the long run. What does do us favours in the long run is the long run. For the past to be of any
use to us we have to nurture it. You have to live it, you cannot buy, nor pay
for it to go away. At the time of its conception, the event is too immature to
give us an insight. At the time of the event it is just that, an event. We have
not given ourselves time enough to truly feel it. The difference between an
instant reaction and a considered response is around about the same as the
difference between crying and weeping. If you find that statement rather opaque
I suggest that you take the time to think about what it means to you. Too give a small clue, we weep
alone. Speaking from my perspective as a poet, it is the difference between the
inspiration and the poem. The inspiration is embryonic, it needs time to form.
If a baby were to be birthed at the moment the sperm fertilised the egg it
would surely be too feeble to survive. We have to hold it in our womb for a
considerable amount of time come into fruition. Once it is out of the womb we
have to look after it. To look after it best we have to let it be its own
thing.
iii
The
snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are
not very pure or true
I’m
sitting drinking a black coffee in the Volkstheatre café on Neustiftgasse. I’ve
been reading Sylvia Plath’s Daddy. It
holds a lot in its three pages. One of the things it has a lot of is disdain.
The disdain is levelled at the façade of the mighty, that subterfuge that has
ossified and become a ridiculous reality parodying the pure and the true. It is
essentially a spit in the face of the affected face that death pulls when it
gets us to act as its amanuensis. Looking out the window I can almost see the
Heldenplatz. I wonder..
What could be more preposterous than a
Luftwaffe?
More contrived than a master race?
More insulting to nature than a caparisoned
horse?
More insincere than a group of people
marching together for a common cause?
More propagandist than a memorial?
More totalitarian than an enforced silence?
…
At what point does a past become a history?
When does the hand become a clenched fist?
When does reverence for the dead become the
self gratification of necrophilia?
When a
drama becomes unbelievable the dramatist often counters this by putting
spectacular elements into their production. He fills the stage with sound and
fury. Problematically, the phonier it is the more the public will deceive
themselves into believing it. They have a genius for self deception. They hear
the bluster and the blarney and they ordain it to be the truth. To a certain
extent they are right, it is genuine hokum. 24 Carat. However, the rest of it
is about a sincere of a clown’s offering of a cream pie. Sadly, the mob in its
need for commonality and a shared belief are highly susceptible to it.
Unfortunately, what they end up believing in is that that shouts loudest.
Subsequently a frenzy is stirred up that robs us of our humanity. What this
frenzy gets fat upon is an absence. An absence of being questioned, of being
called into account. The façade grows even stronger. It eradicates the words
such as shame, remorse, sympathy and their synonyms. It does so unapologetically.
Impenetrability ensues. It seduces us by telling us we too can become
impenetrable. It tantalises us with whispers of immortality. Man, in his
childish way, tries to overcome his fear of death by causing it. The murderer
becomes fool enough to believe that he is the master of the grim reaper. That
he is the one summoning it to the end of his bayonet. The grim reaper goes along
with this. Why would it not? It has tricked man into becoming its servant. It
has tricked into carrying out its will. He has blindly walked into its
servitude and he shall carry the stench of its chores to his grave.
Not God
but a swastika
So
black no sky could squeak through
iv
(From Words)
Axes
After those strokes the wood rings,
And
the echoes
What
comes first, the history or the putting of it into words? Plath describes the
language of her childhood as..
An
engine, an engine
Chuffing
me off like a Jew.
A
Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I can’t
help wonder whether it the memory exists without the ability to express it. We
have all, more or less, with the idea that memory existed as a construction.
That Kaspar Hauser had no mode to express his past left him carte blanc, for
example. Now, lets wonder whether the past is made up mainly of memory. It has
to be a large part of it. Is memory not made up of words? Is there a chasm
between what is expressed and what if felt? For instance, there must be words
in other languages to mine that express things that I have no term or phrase to
express. Does this detach me from that thing I feel? Am I less able to feel it
than the culture that has a word for it? It has been observed that people from
different cultures have different patterns of behaviour. Normally this is
explained in an historical context, or a geographical one (weather, etc.).
Perhaps we could concede that there are linguistic factors also. As a poet one
has to try and bridge the chasm between emotion and language (or else we are
left with scraps, the void signifier of sentimentality). It would be a cliché
to say that Plath lived her poetry. It may also miss the point. She died it.
She died gassing herself to death..
I may
well be a Jew.
The
book has a feel of deathbed poems to it. The suicide she had carried within her
since being a little girl had reached its termination point. It would have been
rather tasteless of the disease to carry on, stringing its vessel along with
the parsimony of its reprieves. The dying do not have much by way of what is
ahead, just that eternity as expansive and vague as the ocean. What they have
in abundance is what has been. Past. This is what Ariel is made of. A very rich song it makes out of it. I’ll tell
you why. It’s because it never averts its gaze..
Stupid
pupil. It takes everything in.
Sticky
business. It is an echo that does not bounce away. The term nostalgia has its etymological
rooting (roots are prominent throughout Ariel) in the Greek for old wound. Think of that pick tissue puss that emanates
from a scab once it has been picked. It emanates without leaving. One thinks of
to stick to one’s fingers as a child. How sweet it was. How unpleasant also.
The more you would lick it, the worse it would get. It wasn’t so easy to sever
one’s self from it.. Like a marriage. We are wed to our past. For better or for
worse..
And I
said I do, I do, I do.
There
seems to be a suggestion inherent to the word ordering of the phrase, for better or for worse. The implication
of the syntax is that it inevitably ends for
worse. Some may find this pessimistic. It isn’t necessarily so. You see, it
does not negate the first part, when it is for
better, it nearly is. There can be
moments that come out in nighttime far more luminous than the ones that get
lost in the fabric of daytime. There is the clarity of after hours. Those
moments of calm that come after all has been said and done.
And
then it ends and the peacefulness is so big that it dazes you.
The
paradox of one’s past is though it keeps expanding, growing ever older, when we
look back at it it puts us in a childlike state. We look back to when we were
little. We sit there at the table opposite to the authoritarian who scared us
so. We have inadvertently disobeyed his
role. We did that in the act he performed by which we were conceived. Our birth
is proof he is human, furthermore, a body, and he hates us for it. He asks us
to explain ourselves. In his presence we do not know who we are. All we are
when he is around him is him. The very notion that we may be something other
confuses us and the words stick in our throat. We hear the start of an
assertion, but we, stammeringly, cannot get passed the I..
Ich,
Ich, Ich.
Frightened
mice. Eek, eek, eek. The shadows of
the past stand in front of us as imposing as a statue.
Marble
heavy.
However,
then comes the realisation of one’s vantage point. The one of being at the
other side of time passed, the hereafter. We find the statue to be that of
Ozymandious. That mighty man. When we come to look him in the eye we find that
he is no more. He has blown away in the wind of the passing seasons. All that
is left of him are his feet of clay.
You do
not do, you do not do
Anymore, black shoe
V
Breath
Gas
fills the room
Coating
it in its charity
Like
silence
Untouchable
Yet
omnipresent
The
gentle caress of God
Tiredness
desolidifies like coal burning into ash
I close
my eyes
And
sleep
And
ever
Oh, you
mighty men
You
have now idea
How
calm a woman can be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM
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