Driving at night. A particular place, no particular reason. Driving through the night? Time disjointed from stuttering movement. Car and road soaked in disconnected time. Driving through a night? Driving in the day. Driving through the day? Driving night through day. Possibly some unnoticed bifurcations of possibility.
Talking for hours in the kitchen. Sometimes something is said. Smoking cigarettes for hours in a timeless kitchen. Intermittently experiencing sparsely flickering time. Sitting in the window in the kitchen, pressing soles against the wall. As if s/he could feel those 600 trillion neutrinos passing through her body every second.
Am still reading Peter Handke’s Das Gewicht der Welt (The Weight of the World), a book of observations about life, well about people mainly (and quite a few about children specifically). It’s funny though how some of them border on the bathetic, while depending on which mood you read them in, they can also seem simply very beautiful or accurate. Incidentally, the same goes for Himmel Uber Berlin (of which Handke (co?)wrote the script), which although one of my favourite movies , can also seem way too sentimental/saccharine depending on what state of mind you watch it in. The first line below is by Handke (in my free translation), the rest are mine.
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The interviewer says of ‘The Lonely’, ‘Tell me the story of loneliness!’ The interviewee remains silent.
The interviewer does not repeat her question or ask another. Silence strings the scene together.
The audience hears the buzzing of an amp, muffled as if a giant pillow fills the studio.
The sole child in the audience thinks with a discomfort approaching regret about the fly he pulled some legs off of that morning.
A woman in the audience strains to feign an unfeigned ‘radiating presence’ as she notices the camera swing in her direction.
‘Scandalously unkempt child’, she scowls a moment later, suspiciously eyeing a boy’s wide-open eyes and long, secretly dirtied fingernails.
A husband asks a wife, ‘What did I miss?’. She hisses, with affective indignation, ‘Shh, the writer is talking about silence now!’
Pines and needles.
Will you look at me please?!
We smile and float.
There’s a direction?
Maybe I don’t want to
name it. Chasms of gush
Oh. Ok sure bubble gum
music with dials, let’s
dance. The room is for two
the colours swarm barely
perceptibly, as if the most normal
thing. We dance in slow motion
to match the wallpaper
In this sadness I am city lights.
The streetlamp does not reflect
the scene, it is in the night
the night is in the scene.
In this sadness the moon emits
a trail of mist yet is a perfect circle
and papercut-edge.
In this sadness glass tears
run down photoshopped skin
and the electric night.
That, friends and everyone, is the cover of the first issue of Cleaves. Cleaves is a project initiated by Harry Godwin in England and consists of contributions from many cities, more info at the Cleaves blog.
Many thanks to Harry for the wonderful idea and the energy time he put in to organize it all. And many thanks to the poets for contributing. Am looking forward to the next one, and to enjoying this first issue and hope you all do too.
Check out this amazing cover by Monika Cichoń created for the Berlin section
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And why not here is the little intro I wrote for Cleaves Berlin:
It is to be learnt –
this cleaving and this burning
writes Hart Crane in ‘Legend’. And what is this cleaving? Cleaves is a word that sutures two opposing meanings. It can mean to adhere closely; stick; cling; but as a transitive verb also to split, divide, pierce or penetrate.
A fitting name for a magazine that collects poets from poetry communities around the world. Initiated by Harry Godwin, in England, issues of Cleaves have simultaneously been compiled in many different countries. Cleaves therefore not only brings together, but also divides, in the sense that it brings together contributions from vast geographical distances, while precisely emphasizing their local qualities.
This first issue of Cleaves’ Berlin edition will celebrate the synthesis of disjunction that is inherent in the journal’s name by collecting poems under the loose theme of another name that carries a similar paradox; namely, ‘heart/love’. The double label ‘heart’ + ‘love’ denotes the variety of perspectives from which the cardiac is (loosely) explored – from the lyrical to the empirical.
Neil Addison writes poems of gritty lyricism, defiant resignation and/or resigned defiance in the face of inevitability. His chapbook The Everyday of Irma Kite (2009) was published by Arthur Shilling Press. His blog is flyingpigfoldingchair.blogspot.com
Bjarte Alvestad creates assemblages of poetry and photography of which both elements play off and add nuance to the other. His work celebrates the recurrence of life in everything, even in emptiness, with strange and wonderful connections. His blog can be found at, halfpastsamurai.blogspot.com
Michalis Pichler is an artist who has photographed many spots on the streets of Berlin that contained objects with hearts. By transcribing any and all of the text found on these objects he has created a series of conceptual poems that reflect the heart as it subsists among us as lost or discarded detritus, but often with highly personalized, or personal meaning. For more see: buypichler.com
The cover art is by Monika Cichon, more of whom you can find at monikacichon.com, and monikacichon.blogspot.com
a naked line
finally the perfect meal
a formula for the absurd
successfully welcoming chance
the whispers of practicing wisdom
the vine creeps a line through the seasons
the atheist stands with an angel
the people feel warm sand like a time-lapse
the child-like quiet of movement through chaos
one does not know of another
and the story is put on repeat
there was something i had to clean up
my children remember my shame
a name in a crumpled-up sheet
a confluence pulled to her feet
beginning with finished ascent
a name like now like a continuing book
a moment the texture of sea
the swirl of trapeze of the words
the swoosh of the ice cream in tin
on the screen of an old living room view
Blubble and notion of solitude
harm of a hopefully full
never such period business
blubble this craic
delight for instance
for an instant of
shocked-over infant
baby with lady
to each their disease
the starving is over
the maiden begins
i have no pretension!
i tighten my bowtie
unleavened unseasoned
a prayer out of paper
a comfortable mask
she folds with the bedsheets
he dances his bones out
the dry of mid-august
the fly in the swelter
the heat like steamed ice
a tightening jaw in
the night where she draws
the where of the time
and the when of the space
the evil among us
the child says goodnight
And more from ‘Himmel Uber Berlin’:
Endlich verrückt endlich nicht mehr allein
Endlich verrückt
Endlich verrückt endlich ruhig
Endlich verrückt endlich erlöst
Finally crazy finally no longer alone
Finally crazy
Finally crazy finally calm
finally crazy finally free
Which brings to mind a sentence that was hung in my old kitchen, ‘Verruckt sein ist einfach, aber der weg dahin ist so schwer.’: ‘Being crazy is easy, but getting there is so difficult.’
Reading here about Peter Handke’s Weight of the world a combination of personal rumination and professional notes for writing. Have wanted to read Handke since learning that he co-wrote the script for ‘Himmel Uber Berlin’ (mailed it to Wenders in parts I believe, when filming had already started). There is a beautiful poem that is read in parts throughout the movie, ‘Lied Vom Kindsein’ (‘Song of Childhood / Being Child / Child Being’).
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In Weight of the World Handke writes a story that reminds me of another story by the phenomenally successful Swedish author Stig Dagerman (until he committed suicide at 35), in which a person locks her(?)self in a room and asks to be let out. This story by Handke is sort of the opposite and sort of very similar:
“”A gentleman wants to be alone. (Already there’s no one in the room.) He rings for his servant and says in response to the knock: ‘Don’t come in.’ At last he is alone.”"
Now leafing through Sculpting in Time Tarkofsky’s book on time in cinema, and he quotes Dostoyevsky:
Stavrogin: . . . in the Apocalypse the angel swears that there’ll
be no more time.
Kirillov: I know. It’s quite true, it’s said very clearly and
exactly. When the whole of man has achieved
happiness, there won’t be any time, because it won’t
be needed. It’s perfectly true.
Stavrogin: Where will they put it then?
Kirillov. They won’t put it anywhere. Time isn’t a thing, it’s
an idea. It’ll die out in the mind.
— F. Dostoyevsky, The Possessed
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Zizek also talks about time in Tarkovsky, when he discusses ‘Stalker’ (at 3.25).
‘Time is not just a neutral light medium in which things happen, we feel the density of time itself. Things that we see are more markers of time.’
In this film [Andrei Rublev] it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it. People often say, ‘Use your fathers’ experience!’, but that’s too easy, we each must go through our own experiences. But once we’ve got it we no longer have time to use it. And the new generations rightly refuse to listen to it. They want to live it, but then they also die. This is the law of life, its real meaning, that we cannot impose our experience on other people, or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience do we understand life.
Rublev, the monk, lived a complex life; he studied with Radonevsky at the Holy Trinity, but he lived at variance with his teaching. He got to see the world through his master’s eyes only at the ned of his own life, which he had lived his own way.
From ‘A Poet of the Cinema’
‘I know the sadness of copy shops’ (‘Ik ken de droefenis van copyrettes’, by Dutch poet Menno Wigman)
and
‘I know the inexorable sadness of pencils’, by critics Bonita Rhoads and Vadim Erent, in Avant-Post (edited by Louis Armand)
(notice how when critics vs poet the critics (already two to one) fall back on the use of an adjective).
By Adam Bertocci (found at That Shakespearean Rag)
WALTER
I speak of this other man, Sir Geoffrey of Lebowski. Is not thy name, sir, Geoffrey of Lebowski? To be or not Lebowski, that is the question; I see we still did meet each other’s man. Shall we not make amends? A gentleman of high sentence ought to be of unsequestered location, possessed of resources fit to restore a thousand rugs from vile offence. He’s not well married that lets his wife a borrower be, such that men gravely offended bespoil another man’s rug. Be I wrong?
THE KNAVE
No, but verily—
WALTER
Be I wrong?
THE KNAVE
Yea, but verily—
WALTER
That rug, in faith, tied the room together, did it not?
THE KNAVE
By my heart, a goodly rug.
DONALD
And in most miserable tide did this rogue besmirch it.
WALTER
Prithee, Donald! Thou too eagerly hold’st the mirror up to nature.
THE KNAVE
My mind races; I might endeavour to seek this gentleman Lebowski.
DONALD
His name is Lebowski? Verily, ope thine ear; that is thy name, Knave!
THE KNAVE
On good authority; and his nobleness must oblige. His wife taketh up quarrel and borrows, and they bespoil my rug.
WALTER
Marry, sir, my heartstrings do you tug;
They urinate upon thy damnèd rug.
[Exeunt severally]
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‘Or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.’
It is unfortunately not downloadable, so you have to stream it. It’s ten minutes from 35 – 45.
He talks about how he got sentenced to poetry (as Leonard Cohen said ‘Poetry is not a choice it’s a verdict.’),
about appreciating ‘difficult’ poetry through its sound. And half-jokingly quoting Oscar Wilde here, ‘”take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.” Ashbery, ‘Take care of the sound and the sense will take care of itself.’
about meeting his future companions Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; about the origin of the term New York School;
about not having been Poet Laureate, ‘It would’ve been a lot of work’;
‘I like listening to what people say on the street, where you overhear some remarkable things, i’ve never had a distinct sense of what it’s like for me to be talking that why I guess my poems get overtaken by other people talking with and at each other … I likew the vagaries and excess of American speech as well as its occasional precision. There is something very touching for me the way we try to communicate important things to each other, usually fail and come back to the original subject matter, maybe..’
about being published / canonized by the Library of America, ‘I’ll just work from within to reform the establishment.’
