Any man’s soul is a piece of country

Not remote, not close, never neighborhood

But hovering as a landscape emerges

In the glowing noon sun,

No, I am quite sure in this, No,

Not like the fata morgana,

Then far more like the Fairy Morgana.

It shall change with every day

Though hardly perceptible

Impossible to see if you visit it too often.

But he who comes now and then

To him change should be observable

or even heard or smelled.

Also the change can be touched by sensitive fingers.

 

From such reasons, among others,

But often by consequence,

Quite unusual for me, by the way,

I frequent it rarely.

 

Just returned from such a visit

On your behalf

- You said I owed it to you –

I found it different

Not, I admit, as after a tornado,

Neither recovering a long dry summer

But rather as if amazedly bewildered

By the generosity of beautiful weather

Of long sunny days and soft rain

The leaves drawn heavy and complacent

The flowers absorbed in pure narcissism

And the birds singing just

For the sake of song.

 

Any man could see

That some goddess had dwelled there

Reluctant to leave.

But I with a mind’s eye, why

Does it perceive waste land

Roaming on dumping-grounds

among the debris of used time

when it surrounds a paradise?

 

I wonder

Shall I tell you the truth?

 

In the left pocket of my coat

Form the last winter I found

A piece of ivory black wood

Found on the beach,

Charcoal, I presume, from

The solstice bonfire of summer,

Producing images of the darkness to come.

In it, however, deep into its weightless 

And yet resistant matter of darkness

A glow as if fire was still somewhere.

And I remember the Areopagite’s words of

The shining darkness

The second darkness veiled in the darkness

Which is but a pretended, though convincing darkness,

A pretext of a much more profound darkness

Behind which the third darkness dwells

The abode of our soul.

It must be obvious that evil is in the white

In the synthesis of all colors preventing

The safe conduct of distinctions

While black being no color at all

Transgresses perception and the intensity of senses

Using the hole as mimicry

But without the stamina to resist filling it

With softness.

There are indeed skulls with candles

Behind the hollows of the eyes

But damned be the ones who produce

Anthropomorf images of death.

Indeed, amber might display transparent glow

Miming the sunset

But the fulguration of death

Must be closed in the small closet

Of a charcoal.

It belongs to the left pocket

And is not harmed by being forgotten

For a while

But what the right pocket contains

I guess

Is a tattered unreadable slip of paper from God

Which we probably must have been able

To decipher

Some time long ago

Why else keep it?

Socrates said:

Either there is a life after death

And we shall meet justice

Or eternal sleep without dreams

What do you prefer?

However, there is an alternative

Eternal sleep with eternal dreams

In sleep is rest, oblivion,

You know

But sleep without oblivion and without judgment?

People say life is a dream,

If so, dreaming is a dream of dreaming

This is trivial, I admit,

But I don’t want to follow the meta-races

In order not to bore you.

On the other hand if dream is life

Reality is a dream of life

And we shall be awake forever

Because we are dreaming.

Growing older I came to love sleep

But what shall we dream about in eternity

Possible worlds?

Rather necessary ones

But such might not

Emerge from our lives

So, how would they be like?

 

A psychologist once told me

”it is never too late to have a happy childhood”.

I asked him, if it could be

Too early.

Honestly, I am incapable of judging my childhood

But now when I begin to remember

Some images which belong to it

Or they seem to remember me

I wonder how bereft they are of emotion

They are objective

Detail-focused, photos, impressionist paintings,

Calligraphies I presume

Of a Tao picture written by a hand

Unknown to me

Without a trace of drama.

There is a strange indifference to happiness

In these memories

But a beauty of events

Stripped like paintings of a master

Who knew the importance of objects

And of eventing

As if he had been a true Chinese philosopher.

Who knew the significance of colours

And of forms

And their black ink outline

Stolen from the Tao by the impressionists.

Totally indifferent of points of view

But eager about perspective.

Is that what is left of childhood

A liberating anonymity:

“Ole was there”

Among the things

Taking part in events

The props and wings of which

Were far more important than the play?

 

Could memories be a message?

If I should produce it

In which capacity then?

The past made me

But I make the past in every second

So it would be circle-like

Such is shunned by philosophers.

Are they send from the Great Unknown?

Stupid to overrate one’s importance.

But a calligraphist there might be

Someone writing my memories

With a soft eidetic distinctness

Adam Smith’s impartial spectator

assigned a quite new task?

Could he be in the service of

Beauty?

 

In this darkness the white elephant

Appeared colossal

But there was no red woman on his back

No black Madonna

Just the green caresses from leaves above

The yellow moon

Making shadows oscillate from brown to blue.

Yet thought is monochrome

And movements silent.

The polychrome world mingles noise with voice

Laughter with roaring swift echoes of distant wrath.

 

Psósophos – phoné

Let there be wonder

And errant songs

Recovered voices and well met deaths.

 

In hell’s huge pot it’s all white, anyhow.

 

The white woman of tenderness

The black pierrot

The yellow whale

The brown pope

The blue helmet

And the green violin

I adore thee.

 

Green smells of rotten sugar

Blue of brown peppermint

It’s time to let the white turn yellow.

It’s time to leave and come to the garden

In which the roses talk

Of train service.

It’s time to deny that mixing black and red

Shall produce brown

It’s time to adore the big brown hunter

Known by the ancient as the honey eater

Because naming (s)cares the game away

Game and god god and game

It’s time for ultramarine

And above us *dyeu-

*dyeu- for ever

Shining

Blue

But don’t underestimate black

burning glowing gleaming shining, flashing blazing

 

Our face is burnt by the sun

*bhleg- , *bhel-

 

We say that colors

touches the soul itself

We speak of warmth and coldness

Of clarity or obscurity of colors.

Contrasting these former sensations as

Yellow and blue

Investing symbolism in colors as if they were emblems

Yellow – aggression, orange – agitated, red - obsession

Black the void, death and the virtual

 

Red unites sexual desire with the skin

Thus attending the body from outside

Like a god

 

Blue is the harlequin

By the ancient meaning often

Yellow, the deep swarthy black and even white

 

But orange is the way

Gold would appear and taste

If it were a fruit

 

When green feels pain it turns yellow

Oh Chloe my lost love

My heart could not bear the jealousy

 

But isn’t there some kind of dance macabre

in all this refined symbolism?

Dead language dancing

Rattling over the graves of thought and act.

Why just not say instead:

Color LIVES color IS?

 

Some people would affirm

When asked

If they have met death –

And I mean in person.

They do not seem to form some special

Class of human types, however.

Now, I am amazed,

I must admit, but they all

Seem to converge on one fact

That death is shy.

This as nothing to do with his ways to appear,

It is not fear of day light,

Or some underground inclination.

They even say “discreet”, “quiet”, or

“Subdued” as if he were a cough.

They confirm that his face is rather ordinary

And that he does not smoke.

He even denies a drink

But never with the pretense “that he is working”.

His cloth is ordinary too

And his voice leaves no impression

He is only remembered by that

Which he is ascribed to do.

Unanimously they confirm that he seems kind

Almost polite, even concerned, caring,

And all in all rather sad.

But one, one only, told me

Another story of his impressions.

To this I feel obliged not so much

For the sake of objectivity

As for the sake of certainty

Which is the genuine stuff

Compared with truth.

 

One fine morning in May

This person, X, had this experience

With Mr. Death.

 

He had come from the place called nowadays

The Globe-Flower, you probably know it

Following Harlowe Street heading into City.

It is not long ago, so traffic was just as heavy

As it is now in the streets.

It was Monday, he told.

He had to go into a hotel

To relieve his bollows

And there in the men’s room

Stood the most beautiful, fullbodied lady

And pissed in the basin

Holding her monkey

As if she had been a man.

 

Our friend left the room in a hurry

And found another place

But back on the street again

He happened to be walking just behind her

Swinging her marvelous hips

Over long elegant legs.

Shoulders straight back, bosom flung forward,

Swaying its ripe weight

While the chestnotbrown flowergoldbundle of her

glowing hair

Waved in the wind.

Uncovering the finest, ivorywhite neck

Delicate as the stem of a flower from Paradise.

X. felt a hardly controllable desire

Strange to his usual ways – as he said.

 

Then even more alienated in relation to his

Normal mind and manners

He went up to her

Plainly stating his impression

And asking her to join him for a drink.

 

Her voice was warm and soft as she agreed.

In the restaurant she bent over the table for some reason

 Or other and since he did not move his hand

He felt the nipple and the filled firmness

Of her breast.

An electric shock rose from his genitals

And went fiercely back again.

He immediately got an erection.

“Shall we go to the toilet”, he heard himself say.

And there, in the toilet,

She slowly undressed –

They had chosen the bigger handicap-room

And when she finally took off her panties

He saw a voluminous penis.

Then she smiled and took off her hair,

Her hands’ gloves of skin,

Her breasts,

Her face.

And there stood he,

Mr. Death,

Taking a brown trenchcoat from his bag

And a rather shabby pair of trousers.

He smiled with great kindness

Saying, that he was sorry,

But perhaps all this was due to the fact

That he did not understand carnal desire himself?

A transvestite,

Why should death not be a perfect one

Of these human types?

Why on earth not?

His manners had not changed,

He was still shy and polite,

His voice was mellow,

A bit anonymous,

With a quiet smile

He said go by to X

Outside the hotel and went slowly

Head a bit bent

In the opposite direction

Of Harlowe Street.

If X ever met him again

I shall not be able to tell.

 

I do not know how much you owe others

- I think purely in money-terms here –

By my sheets do not even balance in the positive.

So, it is a notion with long-term relish and intense relief

To imagine the state of being out of debt

Including to be unencumbered.

All the confused stuff of symbolic debt

Fear of castration and subtle musing on circumcision

Come close to nonsense

reminding one to untamed “skindapsos” not well-behaved aporia.

Alternatively, the concept of original sin gives sense

The tablet of history displays the truth

If any dish ever incorporated

The freshness and succulence

Of this phantasm:

Man is evil.

Homo homini lupus est.

 

The most terrible is the fact

That this evil is unnecessary in the light of evolution

There simply is no functionalism

Killing was never demanded by any reason

Among fiends nor foes

Freedom just origins in PIE *prijos "dear, beloved"

which in Germanic and Celtic comprised "friend"

it is conjectured to have related

to the free members of one's clan

perhaps as opposed to slaves

who knows?

Freedom is cultured

Contemplative, even when done in common,

But why kill the stranger  

There are just small communities

Becoming gruesome as they grew into nations

But what is a nation but a community among friends?

Why prove friendship’s worth by creating the class of excluded

The “antípalos”, the “xénos”

The barbarian

Half animal, half thing,

Who with a face

does not belong?

 

Where is the necessity?

And hence, even not any reason for evil

In our genes and in our souls

It is pure arbitrariness

Genuine capriciousness

In other words

It is the result of choice

Yours and mine.

 

The Old Testament had this knowledge

In its fables of Cain and infinitely it

Meanders through the texts

The flagellation of repeating what

Everybody knows

The self-tormenting search for a counter-example

Which is not

Or?

 

After all, He came in the end.

Transfixed and transfigured to the cross

“Stauróno”

And “kremáo” too,

The symbolic sense which Freud preposterously

Called “the murder of the father”

Because he hypnotized himself by this Moses

Who Michelangelo cut out of the marble in the shape of

An overgrown, immature and complacent, though tormented

old narcissist

uniting wantonness and power at their orgasm-peak:

To feel certain of one’s own mission.   

The cross, however,

did not become THE symbol

Until the Middle Ages

Before that, it was the fish

His sign in the stars

According to some Western calendars.

 

I think it was Luther’s greatest achievement

To have phrased this so distinctly

In the Augsburgean Credo

Edited by Melanchthon in 1530

Finished as Confessio Augustana from 1540

- please, remember that Luther was an Augustinian monk –

That God makes himself the debtor of his own guilt

That he uses the old Roman jurisdiction

The right of the creditor to use the body of the debtor

Who cannot pay

As he likes

Impaling himself on the dead wood

Of our miscarried memories

Of unrealized and un-confessed crimes

 

This blaming himself for our trespasses

Is not an excuse for Genesis

Nor a penance for an abortive plan of evolution

Of civilization and culture

For failing providence

And apparent scandalous lack of caring for the individual

A genuine mercy

To hang oneself in the capacity of one’s most dear son

- Or perhaps even to chose this disguise, to fly in this slough -

On the wood of death

To suffer, to die, *-raeq

Not just the king’s duty

To give his slough to another

The “hydos”,

When the moon passes the constellation of Orion

No ritual, no incarnated tradition

But free choice.

This katallagé comprised

Us too

You and me

Feel it

Estimate it truly

Believe it

That it must become true

- there once was ONE friend –

That you are FREE.

 

However, please, remember

That in a world pervaded by

Gods demanding sacrifice

And ascribed barters’ minds

And petty commodity-dealers’ ways,

The thought of the radically opposite

Even this very figure of thought

As pure ideation or conceptualizing

As mental imagery

Cannot be devised nor figured out

Created or invented

It can only happen

For real.

 

The mountain keeps the secrets of the sea

It was so often said that

The secret is on the surface

This is the secret

That means the ocean is mere surface

Upon surface upwards downwards.

Then the mountains lie

But why should they?

Let man keep the prerogative

Of deception

After all depth is not a concept

No idea, nor projection

It is far more than full belief

It is practice.

(Song at the ceremony of solemnly promising never to drink soft drinks)

 

 

It’s mine, it’s thine,

It’s abyss number nine,

Please, come and join the festival

Of burned-down pine

 

The sky falls down

Even the fishes drown

The greatest mountains burst

The raising oceans rage with thirst

For dry land, houses, human flesh

I had to leave my evening dress

My Porche and my Picasso

Our au pair girl and our Eskimo

 

It’s mine, it’s thine,

It’s abyss number nine,

Please, come and join the festival

For marvelous decline

 

Giant meteors rain

All science is in vain

There is no secret tunnel

And no ascending funnel

There is no last safe road

no Noah and his boat

There’s no smart option of escape

It is once again the saurian and the ape

 

 It’s mine, it’s thine,

It’s abyss number nine,

Please, Come and join the festival

We won’t recline

 

There is in the air

Sweet music everywhere

Wild rhythms, romantic and rock

It gives no sense but just a shock

We shall be dead

And have no burying bed

Since the old mother earth is gone

And we are done

 

It’s mine, it’s thine,

It’s abyss number nine,

Oh, Come and join the festival

BUT BRING MORE WINE 

 

AND DO NOT FORGET THE WHISKY! OR I’LL ……

 

Some would say: freedom is

Not to want what you desire.

Or am I wrong?

Is it not to desire that

Which you want?

I prefer the first version

Because to want is convention

Desire was never an object of manipulation.

Oh, the construction of the perfect breasts

The perfect vagina

The perfect bottom

But the flesh

The reality of desire, the flesh,

Is wanting.

Look at the new female skeletons

Accessible by sight and penis

From behind

The face was always disturbing

Unless we spoke of love

Which was neither desire nor want

But shear fantasy.

What on the earth shall we do

Without secrets of full thighs and bottoms

And well-ripened breasts swaying,

Leaning forward drawn to the earth

by their own weight?

Oh flesh, I shall sing of you

Even more beautiful when only

the eyes react to your abundance

and the snake cannot awaken at any call.

Orange-peel-skin, especially beautiful in young women

as if the mind had matured too

like wine and the eyes would betray more

than greedy innocence.

When the hair on the womb is still kept

Opposing the appearance of

Scheming children.

Carnal desire fooled us

Because it was delivered as a package

Of obligatory wants

It made us just like the rest

However sexually different we tried to be.

If a man will know what he really desired

He shall not consult his memory

But that which has not happened yet.

Ask your body what it wants

The answer shall never be satisfaction.

To mix up freedom with satisfaction

Is a terrible fault

What the body wants

Is the pause

The time to turn to itself

 Neither driven by thought nor desire

Since wants always belong to the others

And the body is mine

I guess what we find is distraction

The right to be distracted

By a slight pain

By a cloud

By a voice

By silence.

 

All these years he suffered severe stress

Inflicted on him by his own ambition

But also by a sort of strange

Neutral desire for precision

His heart’s eternal jumping

Enlarged it, until it lay as a sack in the chest

Waiting for the assembly of the first thrombus.

Strange, the diagnosis quickly

Made him feel relieved,

Free

To have a verdict

Freedom takes on many an appearance

Like diabetes

Called the harlequin of disease

Which he by the way also acquired.

He waited for the stroke

Prayed for a heart attack

Yet there are verdicts never executed

But in spite of this

Which should have prepared him

For the carpe diem

He could not grasp the moment

And began to nurture an older man’s

Wild desire for women’s flesh.

This is ridiculous

Like Yates after his prostate-operation

Vanity is like stupidity and complacence

In particular blatant in old men

To exchange fear with desire

As if everybody did not know

That here is a just slight, slight difference

And like the master Rilke

Debases himself indirectly quoting

A far greater master, Immanuel Kant, and

Spoiling the first Duinerser Elegie with

“Denn das Schöne is nich als

Des Schrecklichen Anfang”,

Beg me a pardon

How stupid can it be?

If such were true, my friend,

We would pass from the beauty of a spoiled heart

To the “aischros” of the moment of death.

But death is tedious, boring,

Uninteresting,

Noisy, this demonstrative competition with breath

Always lost like a racing game with a flat tire.

Listen to Bach when he states the obvious truth

That faith is the capacity to escape the fear

Of the angst for death

In his marvelous Choralbuch

However, beauty is in the trivial fact

When it turns its face against us

As if it were its back.

Death is Being-let-go

So closely allied to the errant cause

That it just happens.

 

At some time

Usually at the peak of his career

The master detective

Has to clear up the murder on himself,

Whether before or after this incidence,

It depends.

There might not always be a motive

Nor any plausible reason why

Such things just happen

Like death occurs

This is a difficult case

But after all simple

Death is usually the same

And murder is a way meeting death.

This is obvious

Because inspector Morse was not

Inspector Morse

But a British actor

Impersonating him

And he knew who killed him.

 

The master of thinking

Meister Eckehart –

He changed my aspirations

When I read him before I was twenty –

“Why worry about God

He is standing outside the door

Always”

And now more than forty years

Have elapsed and I have not

Let him in.

I ask myself why

And cannot answer.

I know he is there

Still, for certain,

And I think he has a key

To the infinite realm of my mind

Since I am the door and the lock

Why don’t I call for him?

Oh, many people, I guess

Are caught in the same predicament.

It were foolish to believe

That this was a question of faith

Not at all

It is in a way rather pragmatic

But also a question of courage

And attention

People like us do not bother in the end

Since,

And I say “since”,

His patience shall last to the last day.

Can one think of a betrayal,

Yes, I believe so.

I am a lock

I know who has the key

But I won´t be opened.

Why?

Liquor simulates it,

The opening,

But the door stocks.

There are so many wrong keys.

Eros, fame, oh, you know them.

But love, agape,

Everything can be simulated

Even orgasms of the mind

But he cannot be fooled

Even not by love.

So this is why we don’t open the door,

I presume,

Because love bars the entrance

In all its fabulous disguises,

Even the pretext of loving him.

After all, giving up love

Is to give up oneself

And this is much.

(In honor of Rainer Maria Rilke)

 

When he came he found

The door half-open

She must have seen him coming.

He rushed to the sleeping room

But did not find her

Then to the living-room

To the library

But not until he opened the door

To the kitchen he saw her

Standing naked the beautiful bottom

Leaning against the working top.

In the settling sun her body

Was like amber alive

Warm flesh trying to break out of its form.

The body

This shrine for desire

So dearly bought by human suffering

This ultra-intimate

Yet borrowed property

This disposable armor

Of a material too precious to win or work up

This gift above all gifts

To give and to receive

In spite of this closeness to the sacred

Just, after all, a pretense for souls

Some tiny niche in the mind

Just gear, props, histrionics,

Inevitable failed transubstantiation.

 

As he approached her 

They both smiled softly

For a while unmoving face to face

Exploring each other’s pupils

Then their lips met

And as he gently lead her to the big table

She eagerly stretched herself out upon it

Opening her thighs to lovers’ usual ritual.

After what seemed to honor mutual satisfaction

They sat down smoking

She naked still

Absorbing his adoring glances.

It was not until the very last suck,

Accidentally they smoked in the same rhythm, 

That one of them noticed the one

Who had been standing for long in the doorway

Leaning to the door-casing

His face burning with darkness

Observing them gently

Though with what was probably solemnity

Standing silently determined without tension

Without the slightest impatience.

They were both watching him

Without a word

Amazingly unsurprised however

A bit anxious, I presume,

When he prepared himself

Very calmly

To fetch the one

He had been sent for.

 

If you were a song

I would know you by heart

But conceal it

 

If you were rain

And we embraced

I would dissolve in your hair

But I would return into the weather

 

It you were a trace

And I followed it and found

I would not feign disappointment

But just restlessness

 

If you bore me a child

My heart would shiver of happiness

But I would never

Recognize my own face in its

 

If you really loved me

I would joke

And pretend for fun

You did it for my money

And my “fame”

 

Because if you really

Love me

I shall not darken your bright love

With mine

 

Even, if you saw me as I am

I shall attempt to stay with you

But spare you the pain

Of asking me to leave

 

In spite I shall wait

Endless hours in a hermitage

Well knowing of your

Never-coming

 

But people now-a-days

Never love

Never resign

Never wait

 

And how should I claim

to be an exception

even if I prayed the words

to speak on behalf of me

 

Oh sacred words

Vehicles of deception

Yet always true.

True as love only is.

To the moment.

 

This thought must have passed by

Most different minds many times

But I sense somehow

That few payed attention to it

Or is the truth that it shun us?

Though I cannot say why.

People in the business,

The professionals, the amateurs, the greedy dealers

And some part of a difficult to identify public

Pays much notice to the great Cremona-makers

The master builders of stringed instruments

Of course primarily violins, Stradivarius, Guarneri,

Bertolottti. Maggini, Amati, Bergonzi, Guadagnini,

Gagliani, Tononi, Storioni, Montagnana, Goffriller, Santo Seraphin,

Stainer, Albani, Schorn, Geissenhof, Thier, Gabrielli  and Techler

Vuillaume, Lupot, Pressenda, Giuseppe Rocca, not to forget Carl Becker.

- you can hear that I know a little about this stuff –

They fetch prices hardly to believe these days

In the great auction houses

Especially now that focus of investment has changed.

Quite a few recent makers have become well- known now,

And a few apparently forgotten, their prices rise to the sky

 Take Giovanni Rota, you shall be amazed

Even the younger Italians rise to between 20-200.000 pounds,

The supreme French makers triumph in this matter too

And the still living are able to sell for 50.000 pounds at times

Van Zandt and Samuel Zygmuntowicz not even of Italian breed

As far as I know, at least.

 

He, however, was unknown.

“Forgotten” is a wrong term,

Because no one knew nor remembered him.

He was anonymous, a real unknown

One wonders whether he really had another profession?

It might be possible, logically by all means,

But by great effort empirically too

To collect his production,

Because, and this might sound strange,

If you have seen one of his unlabelled products

(or provided, often, with false labels, of course,

Especially “Antonio Stradivarius faciebat”, some wearing

The name of ”Giovanni Battista Guadagnini”, the yellow one-brown varnished,

And one red specimen carrying the label of “Carlo Bergonzi” –

During the years they made much ravage in the world of dealers, after all)

You shall never forget its perfection

Beyond anything ever made or seen,

And should you have heard the sound

Something shall have happened to you,

Something unforgettable … words fail me …

And everyone else.

Many, among them I, have had the chance

To compare one of his violins with one of the finest Strads

They all agreed that the latter appeared like the work

Of a drunken amateur

Compared to his.

Just the same with the difference of sound.

Even il Canone performed like a trencher

When the best of all violinists ever.

Leonid Kogan,

Once had the chance to play both within the same hour of day.

 

Now it so happens by pure chance

That I

Own one of his instruments

A golden-brown violin

Its age, I estimate, between

150 and 350 years.

It is as if such primitive attempts at identification

Normally so easily done by a not especially trained person

Are lost upon it, too.

But even far back in the mind vaguely

Secretly, un-confessed to one self

to consider its value

Would be to betray him,

I am sure.

 

One day when I took the fairy

For the short trip

Too short not to stay in the car

I daydreamed looking at the sky

Through the front page

And as a storm came up

A hand was blown through the air above me

But so much else is blown in the wind nowadays

So why pay attention,

A left hand, a right hand, does it matter?

It was not until I was going to start the car then

And drive ashore 

That I could not help to notice

That my right hand was lacking.

Strange, though, that I hadn’t had

The faintest notion of it before?

 

Animals accepts death

One says

Because they are their body

They have no quarrel with the flesh.

Humans most often struggle

Not realizing

Why is it so hard?

When mind is flesh

So much more than any body

What is there left to understand

Except the soft fact

That voice is blood

The blood of the earth blown

And that the phantasm of matter

Is matter,

The almost devoured corpse of the word.

 

I cut in my pallate

Unable to see where I cut

But only using the blade

And finally the scissors as prolonged membra

In order to escape the gallery of mirrors

Prostheteon

Prostrated, prosthesis

But only to remove the

Bombastic tumour

 

The cancer and the knife

 

What did I learn?

 

Nothing

Which I did not know beforehand

That death happens

That body happens

That death happens with the body and

That body happens with death

 

 

There are no secrets

Only bodies eventing and

Events bodying

The rest is

Flesh and

Silence

 

And there is no mirror

Which turns a reality

Falsely projected into its own mirror

All Velasques’ mirroring mirrors

Mirrored for truth’s sake

But only infinite

Mirages

Reflections of

Moving singing invitating

Flesh

Disguised as bodies

Eventing in the mirror of eventing.

 

For us who belong to the people

Who believe that no Cartago nor

Any road to Damascus were offered them

A sad consanguinity need not be seen

As a common curse.

Sadness has its marvels

Like even desperation

While insanity is still temptation.

 So were are the bleak people

Living in the bleak house

The house in which it always rains

But this does not imply fog

Serene rain exists

Clear rain with a limpid message

Of the saving force of monotony

The secret of the mantra

To hide in an atmosphere

Which is always the same

And by mimicry

In the end adopting it

Then waiting must stop

Desire hope and even

Wanting having and in the end knowing.

Rain-readers

Drop-interpreters

Adorers of the abolishment

Of difference.

Finally the rain will be the one

Who watches

And not you

 

A pastiche of one of Keats´ not that beautiful poems

 

Oh what can ail the

Knight of souls

Mender of broken minds

Of clipped and stricken spirits

Searching in forgotten granaries

Finding only your own concepts

In this autumn of social relations

No more than a cruel squirrel.

Finding tired fairies

And long-dead elves

Under stones

Almost impossible to lift

Never the marvellous.

A severe case of myopia

Removed the freedom of your glance.

An evil loitering in the end

A merciless “nemein”

Wild for possessing

the mind’s flesh.

 

Pretending to look for secret treasures

Drilling in a bright and banal surface

Impenetrable made of words

And death well-tempered

For this time of year

The drill rotates itself down into splotches

Of gray nonsense.

 

And finally

Feigning to have reached

The elfin grot

He finds nothing but

That which he was taught to expect:

The withered ghosts

of a childhood

No one ever had.

To ignore distance is a capital sin

Superbia

Pride is too soft, wanton too close to vanity

Superbia is cruel, brutal, and for the sake of power

Neglects even its performer.

So, let us never meet by the interference of planes

Longing must be endured

Hope postponed

Impatience tamed

By the Orient Express.

The old Balkan

Rumors from Trieste before the war

Of Jewish intellectuals and Irish writers

Smells of coffee with ginger in

Cinnamon women

Once were stomachs and thighs beneath bosoms

We are becoming a bosom-less culture

Betraying bosoms for breasts.

Metaxis, not methexis still,

And yet, the bailing of the eternal ideas for the things,

No, parouisia, sheer dining

Migrant members of the ambrosia-club,

And then long after the wine and the brandy

The wagon-lit.

Could any mistress match the silence

The eye-ball-caress of the newspapers and

the sweet kisses of the fat, oval Simon Artz cigarettes 

The Bourbon’s burn

and the so constant smooth movement of the

abdomen of the wheels?

From such travels I still remember something

Like birds’ steps during the night on the roof of the cars

When Longing proceeds to another cabin.

 

Our beautiful gold-winged bird

Has left us for the jungle

Hiding in the its deep

Untraceable.

Oh, my beloved harpy,

My siren, my sphinx, my female centaur

Wearing your breasts high in the wind,

To Zephyr,

Only Boreas tamed you

I could not.

You snatched my fresh meat

Stole my white horses

You lovely-haired

Wild lion-maned woman

Driven me to suicide

And not only being the cause of my punishment in Inferno

But joyously carrying it out.

You virgin-eagle

Your heart is a mixture of the predator’s

And Florence Nightingale’s.

But thou monster cannot sing.

 

Days have gone by

And I still miss you more

When do you return from the mountains

When do you feel mercy enough

To meet me on my way to Tartaros

To torture me with your smile?

 

You body remains with me

As a proprioceptive curse

Oh, remembering’s sweet pain

Long lost desire returns

To my loins

Like the spring to the northern hemisphere

Of the planet Body.

 

Peregrinus, in the languages of old,

”to walk across the acres”.

Once, one went across the acres of

the infinite worlds existing in every second,

some not more different than the twinkling of an eye from ours,

others different beyond imagination.

He went silently through their

impenetrable walls of time and space

in order to sacrifice himself

in some suburb of some universe,

He, the lord of the Multiverse,

To be born and crucified in our world.

Like a stone falling in the smooth

surface of the pond of infinity.

Eventum tantum.

Rings would spread as echoes through the Multiverse.

For ever silence returns Never.

 

Dear friend

Would you be able to live without recognition?

Many a man are forced to do

But could you give it up?

This is an experiment of thought

a while worth.

No respect, not even contempt,

But totally unnoticed

An anonymous anonymity?

Hard to imagine

Because it means to be totally forgotten

But does it mean to live without hope?

Quite another hope it would be

Not the hope of another

Of community or a fate

But of silence, of being unseen

Unremembered, not being

In the social sense.

Is this freedom?

My dog longs to piss its tracks,

“Alfred was here”

But I am not allowed to place any marks?

I must not imagine myself

In human company

I must walk along the beach

And no one would notice an old man’s

Trousers rolled and nobody

Can ask “Who placed those footprints”.

I cannot even be called a fool.

Incognito, being without context?

But the event?

There must be events in such a life

Ask for them,

They are empty

Like the event on the first day of creation

To experience this empty centre of the event

Would definitely be worth it all

The pain, the loss of identity.

But what will you get?

Oh, my friend, knowledge,

Pure unpolluted knowledge.

Of what you ask?

Why should I answer?

Try?

To my friend Th., who once love a Mexican woman of rare beauty

 

Shit and roses

Death and dung

They relate to silence

As this song

 

I shall walk on the water

The Atlantic would do

To embrace you only

You only you

 

I should take on a bird’s slough

Transgress the skies

Suffer no-man’s temperature

For one look in your eyes

 

I would dance on the spires

Dive ten thousand miles

If I could read the next morning

Of your kiss in my files

 

I would tear open my body

I would take out my heart

If I could just be certain

That it could be a part

 

Oh, only one tiny

One small piece of your skin

So I could follow your blood flow

Just from within

 

Oh could I share you

With the breeze on your cheek

With this spoiled sunshine

What more could I seek

 

Even the secretary shook her head

And the chief of department

In the sacred inner office confirmed it in words

Officials are seldom wrong

“You can understand, I am sure,

Mr. Lawson that is has a demoralizing effect

To go on incessantly

Apparently never wanting a break

Nor needing one

It is at least necessary to feign some fatigue

Or restlessness, even lack of satisfaction.

Some dissatisfaction cherishes leadership, you know.”

Bur Mr. Lawson insisted on some verdict,

Claiming that there does not exist any pauses in hell …

To what realistic mind could such make sense?

And consequently he was discharged.

 

However, who would believe that hell is comforting

So pauses should not just be something invented by man

Or demanded by his body

But a privilege.

Can we be sure of that?

After all we still ask:

“What do you DO during your pause”

And the answer can hardly be

“I pause!”

One must break off from something

But how do you break off from a flow?

Flow is the ideal nowadays.

Yet, doesn’t make sense without stasis

As privation presupposes possession.

 

“Now we need a drink!”

Mr. Lawson never needed one

Not even in the blue hour

He sat in the silence of days and nights

Being unoccupied

Now

And still did not want a pause

Which might be just “new” experience, to laugh, some drama,

A conversation

Or just a dog

What do I know.

 

Some people do not yield to time

They just do not obey it

- a mistake to believe that they simply do not notice it –

They keep it at a distance

By being it.

 

“To strum”, Capt. Francis Grose,

"A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," 1796

Have it: “to have carnal knowledge of a woman,

also to play badly on the harpsichord or any other stringed instrument.”

To love a woman

Is that like playing an instrument?

I do not know

Some would say so

But how do you play on

your own instrument

the self?

I presume that this relation

Is not carnal

Or is it?

The body of mind making love

To the mind’s body.

Bodying oneself

To caress your mind

By your inner body

To caress your internal body

With the mind

Lead it to an orgasm

And pretending

In love’s solemn ritual

Which we owe every whore

That mind is not a harlot.

 

But isn’t the orgasm of mind

Always pretended

And don’t we pay for that

With our body?

 

Few has been granted the opportunity

To buy Gabriel five big draft beers

Lager

On a pavement café

Opposite the central station in Arhus

Or anywhere else, I presume

In the first real summer sun –

 I have.

 

Few have been granted to listen to him,

Accepting his request to join my table

Even if he looked poor, not shabby

But bewildered

Oh, I know autism and psychotics so intimately

So well

And here I misjudged

As usual, I nearly added

But first feeling suspicion,

Ridiculous

The fearsome man’s attitude

then pity

the pretended courageous one

With his mental and social state (of mind?),

 

Then realizing

Slowly

that his disconnected way of discourse

seemingly perplex

so hard to decipher

madness has its codes too

but his had none that I could detect

However, I later found out

That it covered another syntax

Another semantics

And that his stuttering

Were drops of eternity falling

From the mouth of *Dyeu-

Like gold ducats

On the pavement

From the sack of Puss-in-Boot

(please forget the cognate “pussy” just for now)

Muffled

In the black velvet of concepts

Like a Medici dagger

Following its inevitable path

Through the chain mail of my thoughts

Forward into my throbbing old heart.

 

There IS a language beneath language

 

How long, I ask you

Shall the lack of simultaneity between

Experience and sense

Not to speak of recognition

last?

 

Some lack of self-command

Of impatience

Would be proper here

Eventually

Don’t you agree?

Since meaning left us

And significance hesitates

In cases such as mine

 

Must waiting not

sometimes at least

Open the valve of anger

The pillow of rashness and desire

Which glues it to its chair

And betray hypomoné?

 

There is a play

After all

In which Godot

Only missed the train the first time.

 

I left him some more money

Because my train would not wait any longer

But having mounted the top

Of the gentle steps to the station’s entrance

By impulsion I turned around

Just as he opened his arms

And hundreds of white eagles

Took off like

A jubilate choir

Into the blue sky above Aarhus.

 

Hossianah!

And now

Too late of course

I remember what baffled me at first:

The overwhelming beauty

Of his face.

 

It was washed ashore upon the beach

This dark accumulation of sucked matter

 visible from a considerable distance

And as we approached it in the summer morning

- it is difficult not to do so –

our uneasiness almost overcome

We all saw almost immediately

That is was a drowned thought

Even if it was not in particular huge

For a thought of this kind.

It changed color all the time

Shimmering from verdigris

To blue becoming darker or more light

Receiving orange, red, and violet like a rainbow

Or gold-bronze indefinitely metallic shine

Like a bluebottle, a blowfly

Feeding on rotten flesh

And perished mind.

Though, like an enormous unknown precious stone, too.

Almost unaware we rallied round it

Creating a sacred middle hand in hand

An untrodden, innocent and inaccessible 

Middle, a meson

A post-empty place

Repeating a secret, infinite and never absorbed knowledge

Of this thought without a subject

The perennial thought of the event.

(To my friend the painter Hornsleth, in honor of his brilliant ideas)

 

Are we able to stop time?

At least we could fight it

By a shooting star falling from our dreams into the bottomless sea.

To fire a star able to resist the pressure

And filled with traces of memory

Meant to hibernate inside time

A hostage of the virtual

But also of that which we could still have been.

Technological Christus Victor

A sacrifice to our own destruction of Nature

An atonement with an angry mother god – this time –

The blood of man

A descent to the icy hell

Waiting 500 years for ascension.

To ally with evolution by encapsulating in it

In order to be found finally

As traces of a lost time

As memories of the future

Which only

That is the ultimate gift

Can be the generosity of the creature to the creatures

And then one day the miracle has come

A star of steel and ice

Soaring to the hemisphere

From the ocean’s bottom

The message to the multiverses

That life has been here.

 

The best divers have a delicate skin

The eyeballs’ touchiness in every inch

The colder waters of the North are preferred by them

Since, even during summer, their armor

Glows through the chilliness of currents.

Dead bodies do not float, nor do limbs or bones

But songs do overflow, they drift.

Thus there once was a diver who sang to the depth

And what can it all be about, my friend,

But singing in the darkness of the deep waters

Having enough breath, but never knowing

How far yet

To the bottom?

Anyhow, words shall soar to the surface

All by themselves

Like pieces of wonderful wreckage

From a treasure vessel

Waiting to be found.

 

In “Timaeus” 64 D Plato writes about the nature of pleasure and pain.
He plays with the thought of an affection which is mild
and gradual being imperceptible, claiming that the
affection which, in its entirety, takes place with
ease is eminently perceptible, since it does neither
involve plain nor pleasure, and is beyond force.
Thus the affections of the visual stream itself
becomes in the daylight a body substantially
one with our own having the most intense and
clear perceptions concerning every objects that affects it.

 

What a vision of vision

That there should be an un-perfumed sight

That the organic glass of the eye-ball should

Lack any mouches volantes

An object watched outside the laboratory

Being in un-artificial circumstances

Yet, untouched by winds, moist,

And the smell of humans,

Without the sound of their voices,

Their unrest around us

A sight, which apparently fulfills

The function of the senses

By gently abolishing their natural inclinations,

An everyday observation without by-effects and aber-dabeis.

Oh, please tell me about it!

 

Flavor however, both refers to smell and taste

What does that mean?

Can the senses be bewildered by nature?

Are the phenomenologist philosophers actually wrong

And intentionality a lovesickness

With perfumed sails

Performing as topgallant ones

Salty distended to the point of bursting by

The furious storms in far oceans?

Is both being biased and unbiased

Mere illusion

Because the sight itself was provided with

Fragrances sweet from the beginning

And the food always speaking to you

Like colors acting out mimicry

In the black spot-rooms of your eyes?

Do words have a natural taste

Do even thoughts have their flavor?

Who shall know?

 

Then even the camera lies

Because the picture stinks

And celluloid is infected by the

Motives.

Infatuation, not intentionality

Though, and that is the wonder,

There is no desire, no interests, no motives

The wholly sea of things

Their chair sailing upwards the Nile

Nothing but event

Events cleansed of everything

But happening, occurring, becoming

The drama was deceit

And nothing

Nothing but ice, winter is the vision

Meters beyond Celsius

And the body of sight

The anaesthetized stream of sight

The easy and painless movements of worlds

Buried beneath glaciers

Is the real realm of seeing

And the queen’s throne

Lacks luster

Even the flames of light

The fire

Cannot be caught.

 

But doesn’t Plato speak about thaw

And about affections returning

To their proper places

To their natural conditions.

He speaks about the spring of thought

About the May-Body’s fragrance sweet flavors. 

(a slight piece of a paraphrase)

 

The grave

No one, my love, do there embrace,

This place might after all not be that terrible

To us living in the restlessness and noise

From mass media and metropoles.

 Since silence deserted us and

The gentle worm of contemplation

Slipped unnoticed out of our backs

 

The grave

Refugees from our own bodies

Improved and repaired

Embellished and dishonestly perfected

By pressing needles with silicone through

The sacred curtain of the skin

Wearing faked features refigured with replicas of bones

We seek shelter in our own corpse.

 

I wonder how they proceed in the morgue

With bodies now corpses?

Do they empty the breasts and bottoms,

The lips and the face

Like bathing rings from malodorous air

A lifetime’s absorption of greasy lover-hands

Or like water beds from water

Condensed coital repetitions?

Or do they leave it all untouched

The jellies and the antiseptic liquids?

During all circumstances the decay incorporated

In worms and mites

The stubborn work at the microlevel

Shall eventually do the job in the coffin.

I guess insects tolerate this stuff

And microorganisms too,

But if they do not

The islands of silicone shall swim

In the ocean of putrefaction around them

Like heraldic shields on a lost battlefield.

Wasted symbols of the vain bravery of sex.

 

The corpse could always

This possibility stays

Be given over to fire

But fire must be honored by dead bodies

Like a well prepared meal honors devouring.

Fire takes no considerations

Of persons

Of bodily merits,

Even false teeth

Artificial joints of steel and plastic,

Plastic in prolonged penises

And pacemakers shall melt too 

From solidarity with forgotten Rolex-watches,

And the magician’s secret chip

Which made him able to open doors

At a distance and

Order objects to hover in the air,

It had its time.

However, porcelain parts might survive

but eyes of glass

shall perish too

Or like diamonds and rubies

turn black.

 

Fire being akin

Yet eventing from outside

To the heart’s glow which once

Transpired through the skin.

 

If the ocean could sing

If water had voice

If waves were violins

And the soft and great forces of

Wind winds themselves

I know their choice of tune

Oh, I know

The cantata “Zion hört die Wächter singen”

Von Philip Nicolai gemacht

Meistersinger “zu Hamburg”

And from another force of nature

Another miracle or wonder

Johann Sebastian Bach

Adapted and beautified

As far as this was possible due to the inherent

Superiority of Nicolai’s great achievement.

 

Music, John Dryden wrote,

Would transform everything to such a degree

That the dead shall live, the living die,

 When music shall untune the sky.

Perhaps we should think otherwise?

There is no death

There is no difference between life and death

Because the sea

Coming long before our time

Already chose the tune

Disguised in shades of blue, green and gray

Borrowed as weather changes

From the bright shining sky.

 

Do you remember how

Ernst Bloch in his first masterpiece

“Spuren” refers how Odysseus and his men

Himself tied to the mast

The crews’ ears stuffed with all kinds of material

To evade the Sirens’ song from

Drawing them to disaster and death on the coast

While passing them by

In full majesty

Orfeus standing in the stem

With his lyre singing

None of his crew with ears protected

In triumph sailed

On the laughing sea

Humming his tune too?

 

Oh, ocean,

Your song light years beyond desire

And solemnity

Singing for the sake of song only

And we must learn to be and act

In the same way

As if the passage itself

Was the goal we aimed at.

 

I wonder

Are shadows leaves too?

Sacred to the winds

Even to Boreas

Leaving only the shape

Being petals of the invisible corollas

Of phenomena

Although shading them

Unable not to stamp by their ability

To co-event light and matter

Lifting a lobe of the secret of color.

Masters of watercolor and acryl

Are the shadows

Tempera is all to crude

Oil scares them.

Children and dogs acknowledge their capacity

Of phantasm

Grasping for the shadows

Mistaken darkness for matter

But they get wiser

I on the other hand

Still deny

Because I know that someone

Ages ago was left

With one single leaf of shadow

Dizzy from the delicate hue

Of its ultramarine palpability

The sky incorporated

Taken the great Now with it

Like a soft drink

Prepared by Muses long gone

Or living still

By juices from unknown plants

Which taste like summer and almost invisible purple

Somewhere in the land of merciful shades

Behind the horizon.

I said “the sky incorporated”

But this was in this moment

Of the bliss of flora being un-fulfilled

Both by mimicry and mimesis

No Pleroma

Only the present of farewell

From eternity

Receding for ever into

Never.

 

They asked me to think of somebody dear to me

And I thought of you.

I admit that my love has been unstable

I did not appreciate your faithfulness

Nor in any way reciprocate

Although I wished to from all my heart

 - I conjecture when looking back.

I must confess that I hardly know you

And I cannot claim that I tried honestly.

Sometimes I even doubted your love

Or even imagined you were gone

In bad hours of my life or

was it as banal as delectatio morosa

just pleasure taken in destructive imagination

even without desiring it?

But I always did regret and this regret

This guilt this shame darkened our relationship

And the charis which draw me towards you.

I admit I still feel it, even stronger now, 

But you forgave that too, I know.

Some people argue terribly and believe love is that way

Because they embrace immediately after, with passion,

Or it is just a way to survey, another phantasm of being two?

But we never spoke to each other this way,

This is good at least our dialogue was always kind,

Although not what me concerns honest.

And now, when we are going to depart

And cannot be together here, where it were really needed

I feel a deep sorrow.

Do you know me?

I always believed so, but recently I came to think

If I could be wrong, since I never knew you.

 

They asked me to tell about one moment

In which I felt really close to you

Why can’t I tell about one single time when we were really united

Except for childhood, me running up some stair

To our summer house

In this belonged wonder land

And you following but this single time

 Not like a shadow.

And I, am selfish, cruel, and stupid, and love myself,

Without love and hence, cannot love you.

 

They asked to write one line for you

To put it in an envelop

And tie this envelope to a white balloon

And finally open a window in the roof

But I, our self, I ego, ipse,

cannot reach you, my soul,

Every gesture towards you seems to push you farther away,

And yet I reach for you

What is the watchword?

“I love you”?

Who would believe that among the angels

When I myself cannot take it seriously?

Scared to mix up philauto with

Epimeleia heautou or even autophilia.

So, I chose to write this poem as a sort of amendment

Trying a last time to sense your presence.

And wishing that reading is among your gifts

- of course it might be – but you know perhaps my hand writing too well

And is already

Occupied elsewhere.

And I shall be the last to blame you.

 

Now, my love, my soul,

Soon we shall depart

I shall go into the black earth

The matter of the idiom

You into the realm from where you came

 you will embark from the shore

On the vast blue ocean

That transforms hardly noticeable into the sky.

The Shadow

 

I woke up in the morning

And I finally sensed through the mist of my lies

What I could not admit to have seen for so long

The shadow that grows in your eyes

 

I walked into the shadow

There was no regret, no anger, no hate

What else could I do who had known for so long?

But to hope for shadow as shade?

 

I went into the shadow

Stalked away into your glance as a blind

A man from the desert in search of shelter

In the soft shadowland of your mind

 

I sought in the shadow

I sought in the mountains, the plane

Leave I did everything behind

But my years, my hope and my pain

 

I found the shade in the shadow

I dwelled at a sea with no shore

And I found a serene darkness

Deeper than darkness, an abyss, no door

 

And I sat down by the abyss

By the bottomless dark in your heart

From the shadow and shade of your darkness

I shall never and ever depart

 

I shall stay by the abyss

Come my love, hold me tight

Every word has its own sun

Let us wait, let us wait, for the light

 

There is a thought,

Or better,

There is a discursive string

(because this does not raise the question of

The criterion of understanding)

Which can be likened to

Though it far surpasses

What physicians call “The Big Bang”.

 

This is the “thought” that

The master of the infinite multiverses

What Luria called “ein sof”,

- Hebraic, though being a way to deal with the

Greek word “sophia” -

Paraphrased later by Böhme and Schelling

In their best metaphysical thinking,

The “non aliud non aliud est quam non aliud”

As Cusanus approached this infinite powerful Master

Some full of being

Strong by mercy and omnipotent by knowledge

- as the Genius Philip Nicolai wrote in 1599

Almost 150 years after Cusanus died -

In his version of negative theology.

This is the “thought” that the Lord of lords

Crucified himself

On our Gaia.

 

Consequently, Jesus is no incarnation,

No mask of his, no incognito, no incorporation,

No appearance, no man – as Doketism taught once –

No second nature,

But only the Master himself

 and hence, evidently,

Jesus and Christ is the same

an event

THE event.

 

A man,

Stupid as we are,

Gapes at Big Bangs

And the becoming of universes –

Where is the sense of proportion

Nowadays?