[back up with regular postings next Monday]

[Closing Night; Donata Wenders]

Grünbein has a repeated use of bathtubs and drains for metaphors in his poems. From his first collection:

Bathtubs

What adorable objects bathtubs are, enameled
.........and sleek and altogether
..............unapproachable with their

heroic curves of wrought-iron
.........old ladies still frisky
..............after the menopause.

Typical chattels (when did
.........one of these ever get up
..............and go) and nevertheless

continually replenished, all the dirt
.........dissolved and swilled
..............into the sewage system

is forced through that narrow
.........stopper hole in the base. Real sui-
..............cide machines on their

stumpy legs, warm-water-beds
.........with just enough room for a sing-
..............le copulating couple

in so many apartments, something like
.........an oasis of nostalgic
..............bubbles.

And from a more recent collection, in a poem titled "In Front of an Old X-Ray":

The bodies are gone. A posthumous tidiness reigns
In the empty apartment, spring-cleaned from the mirrors
To the stains in the bath. At the bottom of the tub
Curls one single hair, last surviving trace of a species
That cleans up after itself and washes after mating.
How peaceful are the windowsills with their dead flies--
But even here terror likes to call.

And from "Europe After the Last Rains":

A river, but what's a river when the city sinks
before its waves, reflecting back the blaze.
A murky sky, all ablink with dead fishes,
an emergency exit, the door with seven seals--
a plug for the nearest open sea?

As mentioned in my original post, I find Grünbein's 1994 publication "Falten und Fallen" ("Folds and Traps") to be the strongest book represented in the collection. The entirety works as one long poem composed of individual poems, all written in a replicated formal style. For content, there is an emphasis upon the individual reclaiming life, separate from political and economic systems-- a view one would expect from someone originally born in East Germany-- but also extended further into an acceptance of our physical and emotional realms. Some selections:

And then the surroundings, the hiding places
..Of separate lives, so single,
Driven by lack, by want, in love with winning
..That you forget how you got here,
Among these camouflaged houses that witnessed
..All the ancient and recent trades along
The arterial routes into the countryside.
..Better to follow the bodies
In their Brownian motion, politely
..Obeying Phoenician protocols,
Instead of the forbidden aromas, obsecene
..Oaths, and this crooning available
On one or two frequencies since Orpheus.

--

To be invisible, moving silently
..In space, an ethereal body,
Turning doorknobs as though remote-controlled,
..Gliding upstairs and down,
Hanging out the window as though dangling
..On the spider's web of a block and tackle, an Ariel
Without orders and under no one's paternal eye,
..At home in tenebrous cinemas,
In bank vaults, ship's cabins, and luxury suites,
..A stowaway, lacking for nothing
Behind the billowing curtains, unaffected
..By the light, by the ship's manifest:
In a world of murder and mayhem-- run for it.

--

Did we know what makes the world go round?
..That love tends to isolate
Seemed clear enough. Everyone kept it for himself,
..His personal thorn, till the blood
Soaked through at the worst possible moment.
..It was rare for anyone to remain uninjured.
More commonly, the pain transferred itself
..To the other party. To be left
Was the worst evil, to be insentient in spring,
..Stand like an amputee under the busted
Ferris wheel... The way the wind carried us
..Into the treetops from which
We were later to fall with blissful cries.

Apparently German is a particularly difficult language to translate into English, and is an aspect that is noted in the reviews for Ashes for Breakfast. The translation was provided by German born poet, Michael Hofmann, and I think The Independent has the most enlightening comments, and which also shed some light on Grünbein's views on poetry:

"Translator" seems like a dirty word here, given that "poetry in translation" is, according to Robert Frost, an oxymoron - the former being precisely what gets lost in the latter. In fact, it makes more sense to think of this book as a collaboration than a translation. In his foreword, Hofmann points out that he sees Grünbein as an equal, not a master: his work is "not the product of steel rulers and midnight oil", but "poems that want to be poems". Hofmann cheekily extends his artistic licence: Grünbein's self-defining lyrical sequence "Porträt des jungen Künstlers als Grenzhund", becomes "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)". The collie is nowhere to be found in the German - not that Hofmann would care.

There's much to commend this recklessness - in fact, one is left wishing that Hofmann had taken his approach a step further. Grünbein loves to jump from one register to another - one moment he is the street poet of Berlin, the next he comes over all marble and ancient philosophy. In English, Grünbein in public-intellectual-mode is as much of a mouthful as in the German - but the more colloquial passages never quite seem to get off their teutonic stilts. At times, Hofmann's phrases ring with the triumphalism of the accomplished bilinguist rather than with their proper music. In "Robinson in the City", a "malodorous hole" in the ground yawns at the human spectator. "Stinky", I think, would have done the job just as well.

This is not to say that Ashes for Breakfast isn't an overall success. When the teeth of Hofmann's vocabulary grip into the material of Grünbein's ideas, these poems can develop an irresistible emotional pull.

Durs Grünbein was born in former East Germany in 1962 and has become known as one of the main poetic voices from the now unified state. Previously his works had not been available with English translations but Ashes for Breakfast, a selection from all of his publications, was released in 2005. Grünbein’s poetry is both light, with questioning whimsy and a humorous skepticism, but with a contrasting backdrop that reminds the readers of the 20th century traumas remaining embedded within the historical fabric of Europe. In that, a comparison can be made with the poems written by the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, the late Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, and Charles Simic. I would also throw in the American poet and novelist, Jim Harrison, as Grünbein share’s Harrison’s inclination to level the realities of human life with smiling graciousness and stoical acceptance.

It is interesting to note how Grünbein’s poetry develops as he has books that were published both prior and after the German unification. His first, Mornings in the Grayzone (1988), reflects the bland austerity that was endemic to Europe’s communist countries. Yet, through poetry and art, Grünbein was able to find hopeful beauty through the wonder of the day to day. The first poem in the selection noting, albeit wryly, the orange sauce from a crushed can of sardines and the litter of propane bottles, their lone existence keeping “whatever this morning promises/ by way of beauty.” He relays a vision that sought out the truthful simplicities that can substantiate a person’s quality of life, “there is was again/ that haiku-unerringness.”, and this as a defiance to the politics of the time:

Two small clouds
moved off
in a westerly direction,
the city dyed the heavens
gray overhead and
I said I had enjoyed
wandering over the garbage
heaps with you.

The next publication was in 1991 and I suspect that the poems were written both before and after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, as there is an echo of its existence,


“...umpteen years of service with a view of barbed wire fence,
Trotting back and forth upcountry and down, only a dog could endure,”


but without a pervasion which would identify it as something unsurmountable. An experience in the past and which he now understands how it had been dealt with,

“But I remained stoical, eyeing my terrain.
When I stood to attention on all fours,
With my dynamited pelt, the ground earthed me.”

An emphasis upon the individual responsibility of defining one’s life through one’s own means, “No underdog-victim twaddle, please.”, began in the first publication and is subsequently validated in the rest of his poetry.

Grünbein’s next publication, Folds and Traps (1994), was the most enjoyable - incredible - selection for me. Written through a formal series of 13 lined poems, Grünbein focuses not upon the history of Germany, but the grubby realities that must be faced by any flesh dwelling human. Love, death, time, existence, desire, isolation, memories.... to name a few. What’s interesting with these poems is that there is no promised land glory identified with the East-West unification. In fact, it is hardly mentioned, if at all. And in actuality, instead, Grünbein has the intrusion of commerce and modern technology emerge in his poetry, demonstrating the replacement of an oppressive government with an astringent culture of capitalism.

The next two books, After the Satires (1939) and Configured Night (2002), further develop these ideas, “Isn’t all money the property/ In any case of the bank? Oh, to be a child again, grubbing in real feces.”, but while also broadening his range to include the generational history of 20th century Europe. There remains the emphasis upon personal action, for one’s own sake, but also for the morality of mankind as well. From, 'On Talking in One’s Sleep':

The damage has been done. Now you’ll see.
What holds a life together is a window in a calendar.
Even the man from Omaha– no Apollo he– will tell you
You must change it. A lot of crying goes on here.

When reading the selections from these books, ranging from 1988 to 2002, what also remains consistent is Grünbein’s valuing of the useless over the productive, wanting the reader to realize the fullness that awaits in the boring, the surprising wonderment of the non-eventful, the simplicity upon which all life is truly based. From, 'On Currency':


People change, cities change, but the mole beside your navel stays put.
And woe if you don’t perform your reverences, kissing a hand here, inclining
Your supple torso there– to this life, so useless, so rich.

"They are selling the midnight papers..."
--Jack Spicer

Every street has alleys and within the alleys
There are criminals and policemen.
I said, "Tonight
The moon is like a dead gangster."
I heard him giggle like a hound. "The moon,"
He said, "is spooky. We should lie upon our backs
And howl."
And so we walked, uneasy, wondering
If there were justice anywhere
Within this midnight city,
Or how, without a hat, one could distinguish
A vice-squad member from a glass of beer,
Or whether if one met them walking hand in hand
Once could tell Bugsy Siegel from Virginia Woolf.
They are selling the midnight papers,
The moon is wearing brass knuckles.

The chemistry between Bacall and Bogart is anything but the cold-edged atmosphere of noir, and is the contrasting element that allows the film adaptation of The Big Sleep to be so great. Something that a film can do that a book can't.

[Night Shadows; Edward Hopper, 1921]

......................BLUE

It sings they say, and so it does: something like the note
that fractures glass or gets so far below
the range of human hearing that it jolts your heart;

and the glass it breaks is blue, and that’s a blue note for sure
from the guy on the alto sax in the basement dive,
which is where they’re bound to meet up in the classic noir,

the private eye, the girl with a shadowy past, the old-style cop,
and it’s nigh-on certain she’ll have to take a bullet
or we’ll see her in prison blue as they lead her to the drop.

The fragments of glass were part of it too, that’s plain,
though no one noticed, just as they failed to spot
how the crucifix in her bedroom made sense of the subtle stain

on her cocktail dress. And in this, the director’s cut,
the dive is deeper, the saxophone sadder, the cop
bent as a dog’s hind leg, the girl a scheming slut,

and the gumshoe comes in late with the one and only clue
that would finally set things straight, though its true
meaning is hidden from him, and lost on you.

--from Abstracts, David Harsnet (via Poetry Foundation)

While Chandler creates a unique vision of Los Angeles, one that includes urban, rural and suburban (“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”) locals, he generally doesn’t do so much by the way of ongoing visual description and instead, through character action and emotional tone. Although, here is an exception, and demonstrates just how vividly imaginative Chandler can get with his writing.

...I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilded elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer– if the postal inspectors didn’t catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.

An old man dozed in the elevator, on a ramshackle stool, with a burst-out cushion under him. His mouth was open, his veined temples glistened in the week light. He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.

Reminds me more of magical realism or a J. D. Ballard story than noir! More Blade Runner than 1930's California.

Chandler provides almost nothing on Phillip Marlowe’s background or personal life. However, you never perceive him as just a fly on the wall either, as his involvement with his case is too driven to be kept down to an observatory level only. There’s something eating him, but you don’t know what or why, which is what makes it all the more intriguing:

Then her lips moved very slowly and carefully, as if they were artificial lips and had to be manipulated with springs.

She called me a filthy name.

I didn't mind that. I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it everything was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were had all my memories.

I couldn't stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that.

A self made man, a blessing and a curse.

There are two different ways a person can read Raymond Chandler’s classic, The Big Sleep. The first would be to follow the convoluted plot and characters to begin determining who was scheming who, what person knew what and where, how one character may or may not have known what another one was up to, and so on, with the ins and outs for all of these best kept track of with a flow chart in the back of the book. Seemingly chaotic when in the middle of it all, but reduced to a few implicating surprises when reaching the final mystery at the end of the novel.

Another way to approach The Big Sleep is to sink into the lewdly saturated atmosphere of suspicion which Chandler brought to his vision of 1930's Los Angeles, even the more wicked after being edged over with the rail-hard emotions that become clamped onto lives centered upon crime and money, or, in the case of Chandler’s hard boiled protagonist, Philip Marlowe, P.I.., when derived from an unfaltering quest for truth, even if only for its own sake and for the individual isolate only. Its a quality in Marlowe which becomes almost heroically noble and on par with both the Greek philosophers and their dramatic tragedies when such an intent continues unshakeably despite an increasing threat of personal danger. In other words, Marlowe’s the man.

It is the second reason that I finally decided to read all of Chandler’s masterpiece (previously I had always just picked it up to read random pages). Synopses and character lists are readily available enough on the internet enough if you have difficulties keeping track of the necessary details to follow the plot (as I do), and probably should be relied upon if you prefer focusing upon Chandler’s imaginative use of language. The basic guide to good prose is “show, don’t tell” and this is where Chandler consistently nails it spot on throughout the whole book. As an example, Marlow’s personal processing of the events he finds himself embroiled within is revealed just as much within the rhythm of the sentences and thoughts as what is actually verbalized through the writing. Another example being that Chandler’s word selection at times is so unexpectedly dynamic, the scenes develop a vivid immediacy that equates with the best of our film makers, something that can only be done in a book when the writing abrupts your expectations by replacing the usual tired language with phrases filled with magnetic attitudes and aberrance:

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"

"The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness."

"I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets."

"Fate stage managed the whole thing."

"It seemed a little to pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact."

"The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom."

I suppose something needs to be said about what the book is about. An elderly paraplegic billionaire hires Marlowe to find out why he is being blackmailed, a something nefarious that is tied to the wayward paths of his twenty-something daughters. And that's enough because the monster only grows from there.

I daydream, far from my cozy
Self-awareness as a man.
I don't know who my soul is,
Nor does it know who I am.

Understand it? It would take time.
Explain it? Don't know if I can.

And in this misunderstanding
Between who I am and what is I
There's a whole other meaning
Lying between earth and sky.

In that gap is born the universe
With suns and stars past counting.
It has profound meaning,
Which I know. It's outside me.

--Fernando Pessoa (himself), 31 March 1934

From the Youtube channel where I found this: "Fantasmagorie is the title of a 1908 short animated film by French filmmaker Émile Cohl, consisting of drawn cartoon strips . The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animators hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look.

Cohl made Fantasmagorie from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film ever made. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a "stream of consciousness" style. It borrowed from J. Stuart Blackton in using a "chalk-line effect" (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist's hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton's "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces"). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the "fantasmograph", a mid-nineteenth century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls."

Actions beautiful days terrible sleeps
Vegetation Couplings eternal music
Movements Adorations divine grief
Worlds which resemble each other and resemble us
I have drunk you without quenching my thirst

But I have known since then the flavour of the universe

I am drunk from having swallowed all the universe
On the quay where I saw the darkness flowing
.....and the barges sleeping

Listen to me I am the gullet of Paris
And I shall drink the universe again if I want

Listen to my songs of universal drunkenness

And the September night drew slowly to a close
The red fires of the bridges dissolved in the Seine
The stars died and day was barely visible

--from "Vintage Month", Guillaume Apollinaire

Apollinaire actually ended up suffering from a fairly severe head wound in World War I, which he seemed to embrace as another opportunity for life experience, wearing his bandages almost as if donning a crown. While my personal views on war almost entirely fall negative, Apollinaire expressed a vigorous spirit that is not easily dismissed. As referenced in yesterday's post, he was a man that preferred the safety of danger and therefore seemed to thrive within the extreme ends of life. From a poetic viewpoint, his self-abondonement tendencies were always complexly tempered by a degree of melanchoic despair.

Sadness of a Star

Minerva stepped out calmly from my head
And I will be forever crowned with blood
There is reason within and sky above my skull
Where Goddess you were buckling on your arms

Of my misfortunes this is not the worst
This almost mortal wound became a star
The secret sorrow which is my despair
Is more than any other soul could hide

I bear with me a suffering of fire
Just as a glow-worm bears his body's flame
As in a soldier's heart France is on fire
Just as rich pollen fills the lilly's heart

Always
--Guillaume Apollinaire

.............Always
We are going forth without ever advancing
And from planet to planet

From nebula to nebula
The Don Juan of a thousand and three comets
Without even rising from the earth
Look for new forces
And take phantoms seriously

And so many of the universe forget themselves
Who are the great forgetters
Who will know just how to make us forget such and
...such a part of the world
Where is Christopher Columbus to who is owed the
...forgetting of a continent
.....................To lose
But to lose genuinely
In order to make room for discovery
...........................................To lose
Life in order to find Victory

And from the introduction to the Selected Writings by Roger Shattuck:

I have called him a "hero-poet"-- hero because he had the courage to follow the beckonings of his irrepressible imagination in both his work and his life. Courage leads us to consider two complementary aspirations which compose one way of regarding all human endeavour: the quest for safety and the quest for danger. Neither is an ultimate value, for neither is satisfying alone. Moses set out to lead the Jews to the safety of the Promised Land, yet the accompanying dangers have made this an epic story alone. Christ, stating that salvation is found only by first putting everything one had in jeapordy, made a supreme paradox of the two aspirations. But there are less equivocal manisfestations of the two currents than these. Icarus and Columbus and their bold progeny have always sought the unpredictable award of danger....

Apollinaire cultivated danger to find safety which alone could satisfy him, and even this intermittently won safety is too challenging and too immense for many of us to see it as anything but dangerous.

[Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire; Giorgio de Chirico, 1914]

Of the French symbolist and surrealist poets, it is Guillaume Apollinaire whom I keep returning to the most. Which might be the case for many other people as well as his poetry is both exciting in its innovative techniques, borrowing from the stylistic approaches which the Cubists brought into their paintings, while at the same time keeping the writing enriched with an accepting spirit towards life and the historic events during his lifetime. Jorge Luis Borges having this to say:

"Although he lived his days among the baladins of Cubism and Futurism, he was not a modern man. He was somewhat less complex and more happy, more ancient, and stronger. (He was so unmodern that modernity seemed picturesque, and perhaps even moving, to him.) He was the "winged and sacred thing" of Platonic dialogue; he was a man of elemental and, therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor."

There is a spirit contained within Apollinaire’s writing that is immediately identifiable. One that is both humorous and playful, but with a delicate maudlin tinge. Also, a poetry that is aware of the contexts of a person’s life while equally understanding, even praising, the role of subjective interpretation. Sound like Walt Whitman? It should. In The Musician of Saint-Mary the influence is quite noticeable:


I do not sing of this world nor of the other stars
I sing all the possibilities of myself beyond this world and the stars
I sing the joy of wandering and the pleasure of dying thus


Apollinaire’s writing does fall into more absurd notions than Whitman, even rebelliously so, but it has the same embodying completeness towards all aspects of life, and if sung, then an intended praised. Nowhere is this clearer than with Apollinaire’s writing while fighting in World War I. Rather than focusing upon the horrors of war, Apollinaire framed his poetic understanding of war in a larger timeframe, which allowed him to see the persistence of life over the momentary aspects of destruction. Along with this, the inherent right each of has to interpret life through the imagination. From The Marvels of War:


It is also the daily apotheosis of all my Berenices whose flowing hair
….turned into comets’ tails
These twice gilded dancers belong to all times and all races
They quickly bear children who only have time to die
How beautiful those rockets are
But it would be more beautiful if there were even more
If there were millions of them which would have a full and relevant
….meaning like the letters of a book
However it is as lovely as life itself emerged from creatures about to die


Naïve? I don’t think so as his life was just as much on the line as any other soldier’s. What Apollinaire was able to do in his life was, through writing, tap into the longstanding continuity of mankind and creation, a relationship that has no limitations and capable of incorporating us into an existence that is much larger than our meagers selves.

Some stills from the 2002 film, Heaven, directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowritten by the late Polish filmaker, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Heaven works equally as a suspense thriller, a probing character drama and an inquiry towards how love can allow us to reclaim ourselves and better understand our place in the world.

It has been a while since I pulled something completely out of left field on this blog, which is equally important. Hope you are all enjoying your weekend!

................................It was all going
To be scattered anyway, as far from one’s wish
As the root of the tree from the center of the earth
From which it nonetheless issued in time to
Inform us of happy blossoms and tomorrow’s
Festival of the vines. Just being under them
Sometimes makes you wonder how much you know
And then you wake up and you know, but not
how much. In intervals in the twilight notes from an
Untuned mandolin seem to coexist with their
Question and the no less urgent reply. Come
To look at us but not too near or its familiarity
Will vanish in a thunderclap and the beggar-girl,
String-haired and incomprehensibly weeping, will
Be all that is left of the golden age, our
Golden age, and no longer will the swarms
Issue forth at dawn to return in a rain of mild
Powder at night removing us from our boring and
Unsatisfactory honesty with tales of colored cities,
Of how the mist built there, and what were the
Directions the lepers were taking
To avoid these eyes, the old eyes of love.

–from 'April Galleons', John Ashbery

[Automat; Edward Hopper, 1927]

An interesting first paragraph for The Actual:

It's easy enough to see what people think they're doing. Nor is what they really are up to hard for common sense to make out. The usual repertories of stratagems, deceits, personality rackets, ringing the changes on criminal cunning, are hardly worth examining. Years have gone by since I last found interest in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and its once fresh story-behind-the-story. That a slip of the tongue will lead you back to the mischevious id needs no more proving. I grant that Freud was one of the most ingenious men who ever lived, but I have no more use for his system than I have for Paley's watch-- a metaphor for the universe, wound up in the beginning, then ticking away for billions of years. As long as a single thing is there to suppose, somebody (in this case an eighteenth-century English clergyman) will be sure to suppose it.

From my readings of Bellow so far, this presentation of ideas is much more open ended and loosely assembled than what can be found in his earlier books, as more of an exploration than a contention, as well as being in need of components found elsewhere in the book for the ideas to be expanded upon. A form of writing that I enjoy as it gets the mind fully integrated with the text, and probably more appropriate for a novella or short story as brevity can allow details to become more noticeable.