Berlin to Tokyo and then home, wherever that is

[blp]

Later, after the second little death,
I went East
To the sun we’d kicked across the arc
Jiz to Jizo
Baby, how do you wok this gizmo?
Erdbeer, Middle, ein bisschen krank.
A red balloon emerging from the head
Like when Kenzaburo Oe’s son was born
My Japanese pupil said,
‘The hat is to make the god more like mother
Because this is a god for babies’
And I knew what was coming
‘But these are babies who could not be born’

A dream of the womb
An empty, sanguine thought balloon
Infinitely forgiving
I left a little plastic frog that was supposed to expand in water
And never would now
And doubled up

Andreas called from the gallery
We’re putting it together
This and other mistakes

Why did I say we?

Object for observation
Object to be badly made
Object to be discarded
Object to be destroyed

I love my baby because my baby does good sculptures

But which part of us was ever we?

We are not enough with the world
This cloud, this helpless, unsustainable freedom

My pupil: ‘You are not man. You are child.’

We had a bath in the kitchen, then went out for caipirinhas

You do not seem to be affected by the movements of history here
A city you could move about in as if no one owned it
Or teleology itself had cut the moorings.

It’s a trick, I thought
And the next morning she woke up feeling ein bisschen krank
Then she began to treat me like a little boy

This death, some death, a death of sorts
An unnatural death, speaking as scientifically as I can
Of a sexless, cellular organism
The skin stretched back from your teeth
Eyes rolled back in your head
The cells of your dermis, the rooms of your dreams
I am jealous of your cup of tea. The roots of your hair
The hips and thighs of your clothes spread out on the bed
There is nothing to say
No thing to say. You biting your own hair
Little microbes from your skin, water, tiny particles of salt
Dust making snot between our bellies

We are not enough with the world
The world is not enough with us
Not enough with the totality of facts
Fresh fist, naked fist,
The fishy smell
A dish of cold, oily bouillon
The cells clustering
Albumen, sugar, fat, salt
I can’t seem to do a thing today
A good thing. I can’t seem to do
A good thing today
Today is no good, she tells the phone
Because I have to go to the doctor’s
I have to
go
And have something removed from the back of my mind

The back part of Peter and Lucy’s building
Had been taken over by some big consultancy
Then they couldn’t afford the rent anyway
And were glad to move away into Prenslauerberg
Because the S-bahn trains from Alex went right past the flat
Putting them off their breakfast
And making the cats nervous

Object as idea
Object and peformance
Object for performance
Object for free play

We are not enough with the world
There is not enough here for us to make a day
There is not enough here for us today
Not enough here with which to play
No transactions, no negotiations
(I hope it doesn’t seem as if I’m being greedy

Even though I am)

Afterwards, a messy, coagulating blob on parallel lines
The embryo sat dripping on the wooden floorboards and seemed to glow
Releasing a constant flow of salty effluent
Crying perhaps, though the thing had not yet developed eyes
In the evening, one of the cats ate it
Leaving the floor stained with blackening blood and mucal dripping
We went out to dinner with Suzanne
And talked about which of our friends were depressives
And which were just depressed
The bedclothes had become blankets of flesh
And she pressed a woollen speck between her fingers
And a red bubble emerged from her head and mine
The empty blood drenched dream
Of easy, pleasurable art making
We stumbled around the darkened city
And went to Erdbeer
For a long, consoling drink
Of haemoglobin
(Strawberry daiquiris)
But it didn’t console us at all

We are not enough with the world
It makes the world angry. It will find us
Even here, where division has been rubbed out
To make a free-form cloud of random particles
(In practice, this time, reunification)
Where sunlight briefly glanced in crazy shards
Across a landscape of post-structural indeterminacy
We were wrong not to stoop to read the tomb’s inscription
Here too am I, I am here too, I am still here
In Arcadia. Death. The corollary of all that brilliant sex
Speaking scientifically. And not as an amoeba
We are not free.
We are still subject to the facts of life
To the totality

And also, one day, to consolation
Having done something wrong, but unavoidable
Having had to make a choice between two wrongs
From the kind eyes of an unstintingly forgiving mother
Mizuko, kind river of children god
Who will take our little issue to its breast and love it
With all the other little ones who never were
And take away their fear of non-existence
(it isn’t true, but what it represents is)
Beside the ever flowing amniotic waterfall
Below the round, red circle of the sun
From the empty stillness at the centre of its running

[EmmyB]

wow! Art and confusing creativity. i like your stuff, its never boring.

[blp]

Thanks! Nice to see this one resurrected. Especially with a 'wow'.

[white camellia]

Exactly, never boring stuff from you.

Well, maybe this incident was a test of the relationship, or it was what it was, like what was repeated:

We are not enough with the world
The world is not enough with us
Not enough with the totality of facts

We are not enough with the world
There is not enough here for us to make a day
There is not enough here for us today
Not enough here with which to play

We are not enough with the world
It makes the world angry. It will find us
Even here, where division has been rubbed out
To make a free-form cloud of random particles

I like this generalization. It sounds like that a mind is condemned to the facts of life.

What a wretch. This stanza is almost perfect:
This death, some death, a death of sorts
An unnatural death, speaking as scientifically as I can
Of a sexless, cellular organism
The skin stretched back from your teeth
Eyes rolled back in your head
The cells of your dermis, the rooms of your dreams
I am jealous of your cup of tea. The roots of your hair
The hips and thighs of your clothes spread out on the bed
There is nothing to say
No thing to say. You biting your own hair
Little microbes from your skin, water, tiny particles of salt
Dust making snot between our bellies

However, a novel version of this material might work better.

[blp]

This is my favourite of my poems ever. It's hard to imagine doing it as a novel, but then again...I mention Kenzaburo Oe at the beginning and it could actually work similarly to a novel by him. He does self loathing very well and I was feeling a lot of that around all this.

[SleepyWitch]

hey blp, i love your poem, although I'm not sure what it's about :) (dunno why i never read any of your stuff before)

some things i liked:

- "We are not enough with the world
It makes the world angry. It will find us"

that's a very clever reversal of The world is too much with us.
simple but clever, especially since nobody seems to have come up with it before!

- "We had a bath in the kitchen, then went out for caipirinhas

You do not seem to be affected by the movements of history here
A city you could move about in as if no one owned it
Or teleology itself had cut the moorings.

It’s a trick, I thought
And the next morning she woke up feeling ein bisschen krank
Then she began to treat me like a little boy"

i like the way you switch/fade over between different themes, voices, languages..
it's also interesting how you hint at things at the beginning and take them up again later.. how the different themes interweave

[blp]

Thank you, SleepyWitch. Very glad you like it. Well spotted, the Wordsworth reversal - a little niggle at romanticism.

[Adolescent09]

I don't know what it is with me but I absolutely detest this line:
Jiz to Jizo
Baby, how do you wok this gizmo?

Everything else was pretty near flawless. Wonderful originality, blp.

It sounds like gibberish you'd see out of QT's Pulp Fiction. Fabulous gibberish that is. I love originality.

[blp]

Yes, fair point on that line. I was having similar thoughts about it the other day.

[Moira]

[QUOTE=blp;101918]



You do not seem to be affected by the movements of history here
A city you could move about in as if no one owned it
Or teleology itself had cut the moorings.

........................

I can’t seem to do a thing today
A good thing. I can’t seem to do
A good thing today
Today is no good, she tells the phone
Because I have to go to the doctor’s
I have to
go
And have something removed from the back of my mind


I liked these parts very much.
Impressive blp.

Take care

[blp]

Thank you.

[Isagel]

I find some parts of this poem remarkably good. Still I get lost sometimes and start to skim read. If that is a problem with the poem or with me is for you to decide. I think that some references, or some things that tie the thought process together might be to personal to grasp for an outside observer creating a distance between me and the poem. There might also be some things that you can edit away to make the rest stand out more.

TS Eliot needed heavy editing before he was published so you are in good company, should you choose.

[blp]

Thanks, Isagel. In the poem's defense, it's very long and text online is notoriously difficult to concentrate on. Of course you're right that it's very personal and, probably because of that, I find it hard to let go of any of it - except those awkward lines at the beginning Adolescent disliked.

I have to admit, it's barely been edited at all from first draft. I expected to have to cut and rewrite like crazy as that's always my experience with prose, but when I was done with this, I couldn't find anything I didn't like.

If the poem wasn't mine, I'd feel a lot more comfortable about saying this, but maybe try reading it again. I frequently get lost and lose the thread the first time I read something, then find that lots crystallises second or third time around.

[Bluemauvey]

What a very beautiful and moving piece. All life is in there and runs through it like a ribbon in and a ribbon out. It's leaking with life; at the bulging seams.

Cracking.

[Isagel]

I´ll make a paper copy and see if it makes the poem more justice. And since I forgot to tell you, I guess I have another standard for you then I have for most people. You really make poetry, poetry that stays and that makes a difference in my mind. Thought you should know that. And there is of course a vast difference between works we do that are a part of coping with something and poetry that is not. My opinions are just my opinions. I have realised that when I write I need to take away some things that are full of meaning for me, but not for others to make what I write create feelings in the reader. But of course there is a fine line between editing and taking away the things that makes a poem unique. If you think every line is needed, they are. If you want to I can tell you what I think are the best part, and the parts I do not think work so well, and why I think so. I like that kind of critique since then I know what worked the way I wanted it to, and what didn´t. If this is the kind of poem where you do not want that, I won´t.

[blp]

What a very beautiful and moving piece. All life is in there and runs through it like a ribbon in and a ribbon out. It's leaking with life; at the bulging seams.

Cracking.


Music to my ears, obviously. Thanks, Bluemauvey.

And obviously a lot of what you say is great to hear too, Isagel, but yes I'd be interested to hear what you're less sure of here too. I'd be surprised if it'll change anything, but I'd definitely be interested.

[Bluemauvey]

Music to my ears, obviously. Thanks, Bluemauvey.

Ooh, but it's ugly too though. Good ugly.

I have just re-read it and I like it even more. But I've always hated the phrase 'little death'...even though it's my cat's name.

Poetry? Not sure it has to be when it's this good. :)

[blp]

Do you mean your cat is called Petit Mort?

[Bluemauvey]

Do you mean your cat is called Petit Mort?

You appear to have mistaken me for a French.

[white camellia]

:D

language is not the marker of identity all the while.

[Bluemauvey]

:D

language is not the marker of identity all the while.

And yet it speaks beyond its function and in doing so clearly defines us to those who may have considered us obscured.

That bloody lingo...always telling tales. ;)

[blp]

No, I thought you were saying your cat's name was a sort of pun.

[Bluemauvey]

No, I thought you were saying your cat's name was a sort of pun.

Well, not a pun exactly. Just that he is little, and he brings death so...more literal. We could hardly have called him orgasm could we, lol! (although my wife did say she wanted two). Now that's a pun.

(Hears Uncle Lar's stentorian tones from above..."keep it clean!". ;)

[Pensive]

It is brilliant. I don't usually like poems written in free verse, but this one looks very good. I will say there are parts I am having difficulty to understand, probably because of some cultural references. Anyway, keep on doing the good work!

My favourite parts:


We are not enough with the world
This cloud, this helpless, unsustainable freedom


We are not enough with the world
It makes the world angry. It will find us

[blp]

Thanks very much, Pensive.

Some structured verse, in appreciation of your appreciation:

I'm flattered you like it
in spite of your preferences.
Yes, there probably are
a few awkward references!

[Pensive]

Thanks very much, Pensive.

Some structured verse, in appreciation of your appreciation:

I'm flattered you like it
in spite of your preferences.
Yes, there probably are
a few awkward references!

Heh, this is nice! :D

[ShoutGrace]

I think that this is a good poem, blp. There is a lot here. The first line is arresting, for a number of different reasons. The two ideas of death and the “brilliant art” that shouldn't have led there but did, present throughout the poem, are contained in it (in the way I read it, anyways). Bluemauvey kind of aroused the idea of that pun in his comment - is that how you intended it in the poem?



Yes, fair point on that line. I was having similar thoughts about it the other day.

I too dislike that line. Both it and the rhyme of this section:


There is not enough here for us to make a day
There is not enough here for us today
Not enough here with which to play

seem out of place with the rest of it.

I found this part very interesting:


We are not free.
We are still subject to the facts of life
To the totality

It reminded me of a little bit I read about Sartre's concept of freedom:

“The essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.”

It led me there because I can't tell much about how the speaker in the poem feels in regards to responsibility (besides that part). I'm not saying that's anything important, but it's one of the things I think of in this poem for some reason.


Having done something wrong, but unavoidable
Having had to make a choice between two wrongs

But this is in reference to consolation (the previous line) and forgiveness (2 lines down). The speaker feeling forced into an “unavoidable” wrong, and then afterwards looking mostly for consolation (at least in this poem).


We are not enough with the world
This cloud, this helpless, unsustainable freedom

Freedom to choose between two wrongs is a helpless, sad thing, I think.


I have to
go
And have something removed from the back of my mind

That I found to be absolutely chilling.


The back part of Peter and Lucy’s building
Had been taken over by some big consultancy
Then they couldn’t afford the rent anyway
And were glad to move away into Prenslauerberg
Because the S-bahn trains from Alex went right past the flat
Putting them off their breakfast
And making the cats nervous


And here is the prosaic interlude which highlights, I think, the way the subject of the poem has changed the speaker, and how problems, inconveniences, and issues in life are all relative. How strange it must be to consider trains making cats nervous.


I think that some references, or some things that tie the thought process together might be to personal to grasp for an outside observer creating a distance between me and the poem.

I certainly agree about the distance in the poem, but on a first reading it made the effect more powerful for me. As if it's coming down without regard for the sensibilities or common understanding of the reader.

I incidentally enjoyed looking up the following two references:


Here too am I, I am here too, I am still here
In Arcadia

I personally went this direction with Arcadia:


The Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego which is usually interpreted to mean "I am also in Arcadia" or "I am even in Arcadia" is an example of memento mori, a cautionary reminder of the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death.

And Kenzaburo Oe (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1994/oe-bio.html). Wow. I had never heard of him.



“Crisis struck Oe's life and literature with the birth of his first son, Hikari. Hikari was born with a cranial deformity resulting in his becoming a mentally- handicapped person. Traumatic as the experience was for Oe, the crisis granted him a new lease on both his life and his literature. Overcoming the agony and determined to coexist with the child, Oe wrote A Personal Matter (1964), his penning of his pain in accepting the brain-damaged child into his life, and of how he arrived at his resolve to live with him. Through the catalytic medium of humanism, he conjoined his own fate of having to accept a handicapped child into the family with that of the stance one ought to take in contemporary society, and wrote Hiroshima Notes (1965), a long essay which describes the realities and thoughts of the A-bomb victims.”



What do you think of the poem at present? Do you consider it to be one of your best?

[blp]

Hi Shoutgrace. Wow, such a history this one's had, ignored completely at first, then successively dug up by three successive lit netters. I said before that it was my favourite of my poems and, yes, that's still true, to answer your last question first. I suppose that's partly because it's about something so personally affecting, but it also does several other things that are very important to me, weaving very matter of fact, everyday reality and, in particular, speech, into something hallucinatory and mythic that also relates to questions about art in relation to socio-political reality to whit. the strange little bubble of freedom created in Berlin by the fall of the wall, but also, by implication, the less free remainder of the world. Someobody wrote a piece in the Guardian recently about how she'd decided to go out and finish her second novel in Berlin, but ended up getting nothing done, instead spending the whole time going out for coffees and small beers and watching the promenade. Very similar to how I felt there. It was very shocking to me after years of being in London and really hating it. Obviously one could moralise about this woman and say she just needed to pull her socks up and get on with it, but I think it goes further than that. It really seems to be an Island of Lotus Eaters. My artist ex-girlfriend there, though she's now managed to build a career for herself, definitely spent more time going out for coffees than going to her studio at the time. There's a video of Mike Kelley interviewing Laurie Anderson and they talk about the place having a similar effect even before the wall came down, agreeing that it had been a lifeline for them in the eighties, but that, in the end, they'd always had to come home or they'd 'lose their edge'. And this isn't a matter of commercial pressure. London's a much harder place to be than Berlin, but I, at least, am not more motivated to make art by the need to earn a living (who's ever going to pay me for this stuff anyway?), just by the need to make life bearable to myself. This is a slightly depressing conclusion to come to: adversity, the mother of art. I don't want to stop the art. Now it turns out I actually need all the stuff I hate. Oh well, it's probably not quite that simple.

Going through your other questions in order:

Yes, well, the pun's a bit clunky, but yes, it's orgasm then abortion, another kind of little death, with the sun kicked across the arc a nod to the end of To His Coy Mistress and to the land of the rising sun. When I got the train from Narita Airport into Shinjuku, the setting sun really was a great red ball, just like on the flag. Almost enough to make you think, 'OK, so that really is what the sun is like here.' :D

The 'Jiz to Jizo' line is awful isn't it? As it stands, it's now 'JAL to Jizo', but maybe I could get rid of it completely. I don't know. I sort of like the beginning as a cross between an overture and an orchestra tuning up or a machine creaking into life, but maybe that's just me.

The rhymes you refer to have never bothered me. I sort of know that they're 'bad', but they always seemed to me to fit and to work as someone sort of playing despite saying he can't, trying different configurations to arrive at the right way of formulating what he's on about.

The question of responsibility is ever-present here I think and I think you're quite right to mention Sartre. I certainly wasn't thinking of him specifically, but his utterly responsible tussling with the question of freedom is a perfect antidote to the Berlin hipster notion of freedom, which basically doesn't know what to do with itself. It may even be that the bohemian citizenry there, rather than living some perfumed dream, are just oppressed by precisely that sense of being responsible for too much.

Funnily enough, though, I had a different philosopher in mind: Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico Philosophicus begins: 'The world is the totality of facts'. Facts, facts of life. The implication is that, in enjoying our 'freedom', we weren't quite as careful as we should have been. :rolleyes:

As for the 'consolation', well, we're talking about an early term termination here. I don't know how explicit I can be about this without getting into a political discussion, but I've always been pro-choice and this is what my partner chose. We hadn't been together long, we were both broke and we lived in different cities and if we'd used a condom the question would never have arisen. Rationally, I don't really think what we did was wrong, but it felt terrible and they way I talked about it at the time, rather insensitively to my partner, I probably almost sounded like I was in the anti camp (phrases like 'killing a baby'. Uugh, was that me?)

When I went to Tokyo and chanced about this shrine to Mizuko Jizo, I was struck by the fact that this was religion taking a very different attitude to abortion from that of its opponents in America. Obviously 'babies who could not be born' could refer to miscarriages too, but it seemed clear abortion was part of the picture, especially from the fact that the God had been, as my pupil put it, a 'secret god' for many years, with shrines in out of the way places in nature. There seemed an acceptance in this that pregnancies would always be terminated and this would seem imperative to the people who did it (the practice always continues in places where it's prohibited) and that there needed to be some address to the loss entailed. I was very moved by this and it was the first thing that gave me any sense of release after these events.

I don't know if this makes it any less chilling, but the thing removed from the back of the mind is the desire for a child.

The lines on the other people moving flat - I like your reading, but it's also about Berlin slowly changing.

I'm glad you like the sense of being dropped into all of this. I don't know if I can quite say why, but that seems very much what I would have wanted the reaction to be. I guess it's partly that it heightens the sense of reality not to know precisely what's going on right away.

Also glad you enjoyed the references. The latin phrase I got from Poussin's painting of the same name (http://altreligion.about.com/library/graphics/etinarcadia.jpg).

Kenzaburo Oe certainly deserves as wide an audience as possible, though he's not always easy to take. I was reading his novel The Silent Cry on the tube (subway) the other day and quite suddenly read something that literally nearly made me vomit. The book your quote mentions, A Personal Matter is just superb and shouldn't present a risk of nausea, though the stuff about the son is pretty rough. In another book, Rouse Up, Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age (title's a Blake quote) he describes the son's deformity as, specifically, a sort of red balloon emerging from the back of the head.