Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 20

21/2/2016 Tübingen, Germany

In Bautzen today a scene of horrendous tragedy and implication—the burning of a building meant to be used to house refugees while thirty people stood around goading and cheering, with youths trying to prevent/hinder the fire brigade from extinguishing the blaze. The fire was deliberately lit.

•

Went to the Hölderlin Tower today with Tracy and Tim. Was last there in the late 90s. Very moving, always. Distressing (terrible) to see great plane trees cut down along the river’s edge. Everywhere the felling of trees? A blight? Opportunism? The mass cull of trees around Tübingen is ongoing. These are trees authorities say are ‘in their downward cycle’, being 200 years old. Maybe, but many others around the area are young trees suffering the same fate. Hölderlin would have seen these trees in their early days—through his window, as Zimmer talked with him. And as for that late, great ‘prose poem’ (as transcribed from memory by the author of the novel Phaeton), the lovely blue... The spires (of the churches) reaching into the ‘lovely blue’, these plane trees (the lines of the poem still living across the river on the island) are spires, and their loss—should they also be eventually taken—is a loss for birds and insects and other creatures (including humans) and for the trees themselves. Their spirituality is the fact of their right to existence. Apparently, some years ago, two women placed votive candles inside the hollow of a great plane tree on the island for Valentine’s Day and set the tree alight—it took eighty minutes for the fire brigade to extinguish and the tree’s interior turned into a chimney, wasting the canopy with flames. With the sickening rise (again) of neo-Nazism in Germany, feeding on the hate generated by the humanity of offering homes and a life for refugees, the association with all burning with the indelible stains of the past is impossible to ignore. From Valentine’s Day to Bautzen. The links are there. Not tenuous, but disturbingly present. We cannot walk the streets without graffiti of hate (often overlaid with graffiti of welcome), and other burnings have taken place in surrounding villages.

In the tower I was taken by the remarkable letter with three palimpsests of poem drafts1. Astonishing. And a magnificent coal tit in full song on the limb of a weeping willow in bud, over-reaching the river. And the trunk—massive—of a plane tree on its side on the island, with kids climbing over it. Innocence and experience are in need of revising, as is the neo-Romantic sublime that underpins so much Westernised ‘ecopoetry’. Only intense conservation and respect for environmental intactness—environment beyond the human (all humans)—and highlighting the intensity and worth of ALL life will bring a repair to the biosphere and all of us—adults, children... Animals—within it. As the white cat arched itself and waited at the door of Zimmer’s house to be let in. On this warmer winter’s day with blue breaking through the clouds even thirteen-year-old Tim leapt about.

27/02/2016 Tübingen

Went for a good walk with Tracy and Tim around the Österberg this afternoon. The grassed banks and copses of forest as we walked east, then turned back down to the Neckar where downriver of the hydroelectric bridge/plant was a flotilla of about thirty swans, with new arrivals skiing in at regular intervals. Many songbirds in riparian vegetation: great tits, coal tits, blackbirds...

Deeply moved to see the Denkmal to the memory of the Jews who were murdered or driven into exile by the Nazis and their sympathisers. It is located where the old synagogue had been—burnt down by the Nazis. The memorial is on the Gartenstrasse at the Synagogenplatz. It is one of the most affecting places I have ever come across. It is horrific to know that the university here (and of which I am part at present) was built on the ‘foundations’ of the expulsion of Jews in the late fifteenth century (the founding of the university coincides with this disgraceful act). The monument is made from rusted steel and includes the names of those who escaped and those killed. It also includes information about the synagogue and the acts of the Nazis. I will write a poem. This is why I write. Poetry can only be experience or witness. Witnessing is ongoing. Witnessing of the moment is the means by which we might try and stop a horrific event. But witnessing continues—when we stop witnessing, the horror begins again, or regains momentum. What shocked us further was that it took until 2000 for this monument to be erected. An apartment building has been built on the site!

Language needs to be reclaimed and reconstituted to note and record and converse with the horrors of the past. Poems are not objects but living memorials. They are always active. We need to be vigilant in our texts—wary of the bigotries absorbing discourse as they are now (again) in Germany and elsewhere over Syrian refugees and (the irrational fear of) Islam. Even the ‘picturesque’ village of Bebenhausen (I am trying to unpick that ‘picturesque’ notion in a new series of Graphologies)—with its monastic underpinnings (and antlers over doorways tapping into the hunting heritage and the active hunting blood-rites stuff of the contemporary ‘outdoors’ hunter person of modern Germany’s aching forests)—even Bebenhausen was a major ‘retreat’ for Nazis after the war. Somewhere picturesque and ‘authentically German’ for them to retire to.

Donald Trump and Citizen Kane. Boosterism. Trump’s ‘democracy’ is the world’s dictatorship. We eat his/their shit!

28/02/2016

We walked up to the Spitzberg this afternoon—hazy, glary light and cold, a prelude to the snowstorms predicted for tomorrow. Walking along the paths of the south-east corner of the forest, we passed a frozen pond that has been de-silted and de-shaded (euphemism for trees removed) as part of a preservation programme for the Kammmolch—the great crested newt. This creature is on the red list. A group of off-their-faces late teens wandered into the forest and past the pond, seemingly oblivious to all around them. The forest as their refuge. Collective aloneness. One of them seemed to be suffering drug psychosis, but was left alone in the moss and fallen trees to work it out. I would like to hope some of them were trying to connect with the forest, but they appeared to be indifferent to it. I always hope for the best. It is a place of great plant diversity—beech, oak, conifers, many plants we won’t see till spring (when we will walk here a lot!), hundreds of insect species, bird diversity, wild pigs, and hopefully bats. A walk east along the heights takes you to the Schloss, walking past the ‘Bismarck tower’—cold block of concrete. Views all round of the Neckar and Ammer valleys, of the small towns surrounding Tübingen and Tübingen itself. Small farmlets on the south-side terraced hill where there were vineyards during the nineteenth century.

29/2/2016

Just been listening to Tennessee Williams reading his early poetry—CD in the back of Roessel’s and Moschovakis’s edited Collected Poems (2007). The reading of ‘The Summer Belvedere’ and ‘Little Horse’ were particularly moving and slant. I admire his off-angle ways of seeing and his joy in language and sound. There is almost epic movement in ‘Belvedere’ without the poem leaving the immediate environs. War, damage and immediacy—little losses against the large, the private madnesses.

Little snow overnight—a dusting—but not the 15cm they predicted. Weather predictions here are invariably wrong.

Thinking more and more about memorials and memory places.

Old hospital looms large

& ground holds the left-overs

of bodies donated to science

or the Nazi-era

sterilisations. I send

my poems to a friend

in Tel Aviv for feedback.

There’s support but language

slippage means anti

is anti anti. Sun is

through now & the old

hospital with its peaks

looms large, grandiose,

controlling its body.

Rest in peace. Rise up.

Reclaim.

We are making our own ‘desire lines’. We are creating grooves we might get stuck in. We vary our path slightly or add new lines. Extensions. Augmentations. Radical diversions. Large cats walk lower ledges of apartment buildings. Each day the spray-painted tags multiply. The message is the name. The name is the word. So many were here. So many mark their paths. Flag desire, its lines, its wish-fulfilment, emptiness. Listen to steps on cobbles, the soft ground open by the river. Sound of bicycles in the tunnel, wet tyres drying with motion. The tic-tac-toe of this town, like and unlike. Our walking.

In my new Blake-Dante work, both Blake and Dante have become whispers, echoes, marginalia to the concerns of here and now. As all else was echoes to their heres and nows. Not templates but residues I work through and around. As Tim maps Iting (his many-years-old-now imaginary world) in increasing detail and with greater and great complexity, so I unmap and remap my engagement with literature, music and art that have scaffolded my own work. I am not completely undoing but I am replacing, working in and around, and going elsewhere. There is no ekphrasis. Tim’s self-immersion in world music has also been an epiphany for me. Nepalese, South Seas, many African countries, Japanese and Chinese music—he has a capacious appetite for breadth and difference and I learn from him regarding musical notation and the textures and tones of specific instruments. We are up to page 166 in our nightly reading of Finnegans Wake.

3/3/2016 Tübingen

Have started reading and (re)considering the work of Pierre Nora (1989) on history and memorial sites. Considering Klee’s, ‘Art does not reflect the visible; it renders visible’ as footnoted in Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991: 125n), we might contest and rejoinder: Art is a concept of the visible, its truths are interior and invisible. It is the invisible I track as I walk and collate all I see, experience, learn. I do not wish to make these things visible as such, but rather suggest that they might be thought of as visible. That is, I want to be aware, but NOT appropriate. I want to observe but not fetishise in the consuming/possessing sense of the word. Others might have good reason to absorb or comment in that way, but I don’t, personally. Further, to ‘possess’ can be temporary, to own is to desire the exclusive use (or the rights over usage) until ‘it’ is either sold, given, inherited, lost or stolen. Talking of the Bauhaus, ‘as artists associated in order to advance the total project of a total art’, Lefebvre notes (as consequences) three points: ‘1. A new consciousness of space 2. “The façade” [he notes: ‘Fascism, however, placed an increased emphasis on façades...] 3. “Global Space”.’ (ibid: 125) Regarding the latter, he says, ‘Global Space established itself in the abstract as a void waiting to be filled, as a medium waiting to be colonised. How this could be done was a problem solved only later by the social practice of capitalism: eventually, however, this space would come to be filled by commercial images, signs and objects. This development would in turn result in the advent of the pseudo-concept of the environment (which begs the question: the environment of whom or what?).’ (ibid: 125)

My response, taking into consideration the vagaries of translation-loss and recontextualising to my own ecology of poetics (maybe the only ‘eco’ that poetry can ‘possess’!):

Space does not need to be filled—all space is already filled, or filling and emptying or in a state of ‘about to be filled’. Not just symbolic ‘dark matter’, but an eternally active spatiality, a flux of movement and exchange in which privilege is local and immediate but never permanent. I step and my steps leave a mark—I step again and the mark gets deeper but doesn’t erase the first step. But it is at once physically and conceptually eroded and its initial presence needs be restated (in poetry, in art, in music) to ensure respect for its initial presence, for knowledge of its intrinsic worth. In the same way, the poem text lost and present, or word-of-mouth, suffers entropy and is remade—it is flux. How can we respect indigenous space and open that space to people in need of a place? How can we entertain and respect multiple arguments for presence? How can we all be and not take away from each other? Space does not need to be filled: it is not a vacuum to be fed. It is a presence. But a presence that can tolerate mutual ‘occupation’.

Environment as the presence of all matter—living and ‘enlivening’ as it exists without the consequences of colonisation (theft). It is through the active notion of occupying space because it is ‘there to be occupied’ that invasive mentality gains traction—the poem should resist this as much as we should in our living actions. Instead of ‘left’ and ‘right’, maybe we should think in terms of how people wish to ‘control’ or ‘respect’ this ecology of space. Liberty of space or control of space.

Lefebvre is wrong in his deployment and understanding of constructs of (natural) environment. When he absurdly writes, ‘Pollution has always existed...’ (ibid: 326) he seems to treat it more as metaphor than reality. There is nothing ordinary about waste. Understanding the waste we produce—from the house, the town, the city, or a camp, or a tent or in the open—is pivotal to understanding the weight of being human, of a consciousness of occupying space to the exclusion of other living entities. Pollution as metaphor is the convenience of being able to pollute in reality and to pollute reality. This is the kind of crap that has allowed anti-green Marxists to (re)negotiate human space and biosphere as ALL, to negate intactness of ‘environment’. They are the colonisers who work hand-in-hand with the capitalist destroyers. [...]

20/3/2016 Tübingen

Walked through forest to the Wurmlinger chapel in its island hill with Tracy and Tim. A nice 16km round trip—not far, but a good walk. Enjoyed ourselves greatly. Thinking of chapel-in-the-forest poems—Uhland’s poem is on the outside wall. His poem of burial and song and life and loss. And I think of Michael Dransfield’s poem ‘Geography’ and those exquisite lines which have imprinted me since I was a teenager:

in the forest, in unexplored

valleys of the sky, are chapels of pure

vision. there even the desolation of space cannot

sorrow you or imprison. i dream of the lucidity of the vacuum,

orders of saints consisting of parts of a rainbow,

identities of wild things

JK