I am finished!
Thus cried the poet; knife in his heart. JE SUIS FINIS! And we beat our chests and scratched our scalps. FINISHED. The new Socrates is dead. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Tata, as Eliot once wrote. Goodbye.
Fuck off, she's back.
Oh I feel so alive, all alive, every pore is fucking tingling. My God god, god! My eyes are so wide, female forms and oh, and oh, and oh, my eyes are so open. The rain, drip drip, the rain, the rain sings drip drip / pitter patter / drip drip and? The pen in my mouth, mouth, in my, broken, ink - like the blood from your fist, that time - pours from my mouth. I feel out, out and can't hold my head and and and. In the summer with the pigeons, ST Paul's in the autumn with the pigeons, Venice in spring, on the square, and I am the corn boy, the pigeon boy. That morning we'd eaten on a gondola, with a striped man, and we'd taken - two weeks before, in Florence, lamplit Florence, with my David, my love David - taken a horse and cart and when the price came up fathercomplained and the man, with his belly and his cigarette, asked how he was to 'give sugar to my horse, monsignor' and father assented and paid the man his many many coins, oh how many coins, oh how many stars and each falling. 'Each of us an oyster pearl, and each of us an oyster's world.' Or not like that, from before, before. Remember by the stream, in the forest, and you, 14, and I? And we, and oh? And where, where are we? In Italy? And on the river, and in the hills we felt free and I read to you late into the night, after. Finally, my eyes are closing and the ink is goinginginging ing but the head, its pain, is mine.
 |
| Rubinstein |
 |
| Horowitz |
They faired much better than Bachmann, Nabokov's piano playing Luzhin, whose story I shall read to you.
 |
| N. discussing 'Lolita' on CBC, circa 1959. |
'Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?'
V.N. or V.D.: 'I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office of in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever.'
- 1962, New York.
farewell to Raskolnikov
'The waiter pretended to be wiping off the table
I wanted to be a Napoleon
Raskolnikov said casually
but all I did was kill a louse
I decided to act
boldly with flair
to pave the way
to being somebody
the air in the luncheonette
was thick and rancid
I was sitting with a former law student
a glass of cloudy tea
on our table
on a plate was a stale
squashed napoleon
greenish cream oozed from the pastry
like dried-up pus
sprinkled with powdered sugar
I forgot about Raskolnikov
he forgot about me
we all have our own concerns
a black fly from out of nowhere
animated Raskolnikov
he set his tea aside
and started swatting with the newspaper
his article was in
I knew he was dying
to show me
or even read aloud his essay
the first publication of a young writer
and a scholar in a hazy
far-off future
I remember this strange special
feeling I now shared
with Roskolnikov the exaltation
my name in print!
youth has its privileges
Forgive me but it was ridiculous
of course you wanted to act
with flair hence an axe
not a fingernail
for if Napoleon had wanted
to kill a louse, he would have used his fingernail
or that of one of his marshalls
you mock me he said
I know the whole thing was
amateurish and shabby
to tell you the truth I did it
out of boredom
I killed in my sleep
I killed a louse in my sleep
but the axe was real
I fired a cannon
at a louse
that's the kind of Schiller I am
Raskolnikov fell into thought
then got up and left
without shaking hands
I was left alone with the napoleon
paid for the tea
and left
Raskolnikov
was standing in front of the luncheonette
which way are you headed I asked
"me? the other way" he said
casually shrugging his shoulders
he waled with his head down
turned right on Sienna Street
soon after
I heard laughter and yelling
whistling and the tinkling of bells
I looked back
Raskolnikov was kneeling in the middle of the road
in a puddle of mud and snow
and horse "chestnuts"
the new top hat Sonya bought for him
he left on the cobblestone
he kissed the pavement three times made the sign of the cross
the crossed himself... applause followed
some rascal knelt alongside Raskolnikov
I tried to help him up but he pushed me away
gently and rose from his knees
took me by the arm
and said confidentially
"here one must be
as inconspicuous as possible...
Details, details
above all
It's always the details that
give you away..."
you go right and I go left
or the other way around.... adieu
mon plaistir... till we meet again!
We never did meet again'
Tadeusz Rozewicz
Growing up
(A comic rhyme)
(A comic rhyme)
‘Many, many lives have
I had near
And many girls have
I held dear.’
I had near
And many girls have
I held dear.’
So sang the boatman
Boatman dressed in red.
Who moved us swiftly
Swiftly as we fled.
Boatman dressed in red.
Who moved us swiftly
Swiftly as we fled.
From where we fled,
We need not say.
We need not say.
Yet we shall:
White-pink apple blossom
Encased in a bilious bullying fur.
A feline ghost – light white
‘In the mountains you feel free’
(Come, come, run along with me,
Climb, climb, this high-tall tree.)
Neat glasses, spiced with scorn, are served by waiters upon an emerald lawn:
A Roberts is singing in the shade.
Encased in a bilious bullying fur.
A feline ghost – light white
‘In the mountains you feel free’
(Come, come, run along with me,
Climb, climb, this high-tall tree.)
Neat glasses, spiced with scorn, are served by waiters upon an emerald lawn:
A Roberts is singing in the shade.
 |
| Max Stirner, by Engels |
For the moment, he is still drinking beer,
Soon he will be drinking blood as though it were water.
When others cry savagely "down with the kings"
Stirner immediately supplements "down with the laws also."
Stirner full of dignity proclaims;
You bend your willpower and you dare to call yourselves free.
You become accustomed to slavery
Down with dogmatism, down with law.'
- Friedrich Engels
Marx and Engels, less success than Gilbert and Sullivan.
' ... old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille pilling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness...'
Albert Camus, The Plague
A gentleman is giving an address to a well dressed crowd:
'THIS IS A STATEMENT OF INTENT
I know realise that I am not, have not been, and shall never be.
FLEE. FLEE. FLEE. FLEE. FLEE.
'Listen to tea-dances and drink Scotch,
You can relax on my golden watch!'
And thus the cockroaches came into the land
And they were upon the holy
And the holy were beneath the cockroaches
AND NO MATTER HOW YOU STAMPED...
'In Singapore, with my love
On the shining Chinese dance floor
Oh Singapore, sing some more.'
Nailed to the door of a church.
WE THE PEOPLE
They the people.
Faces made of pearls,
Pearly lights in pearly faces
Pearls that were his eyes -
No longer. Simply... Simply
No longer.'
He sits, exhausted and sweating. He is angry because his speech was, at times, drowned out by music hall songs. Snatches of Brighton sunshine, if you will.
'It was very much like the chastity belt they showed in the Musée Cluny, which the crusaders were said to have put on their wives, a very wide silver belt with a hanging appendage that covered the sex and locked it up for the duration of their crusades. Someone told me the delightful story of a crusader who had put a chastity belt on his wife and left the key in care of his best friend in case of his death. He had barely ridden away a few miles when he saw his friend riding furiously after him, calling out: 'You gave me the wrong key!''
Anais Nin, Delta of Venus
Today I skipped and hopped (over stones, thorns and yelping dogs) toward a daffodil patch to pick and pick and pick; I shall now quote extensively from Ted Hughes:
‘Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
'A custom of the house'.'
Ted Hughes - Daffodils
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