The Walking Wounded: Weimar Cinema

The silent ones, the survivors,

With catatonic stares...

Red taboo is on their hands.

Memory is working them over

Brutally, thoroughly.

Too many ghosts walk among the living,

Reminding ,accusing.

Tics and tremors and convulsions

Quake the sobbing days

And every shadowed street is no man’s land.

All these corpses-

Do you call it murder or fate?

Dr Caligari stalks the asylum,

A charlatan-messiah

Who can hypnotize the absent

Back to life.

Use all your science, all your intuition,

This world will leave you guessing anyway.


F.W.Murnau sits reading letters

From his dead love

And Nosferatu’s shadow creeps across the wall.

The séance of cinema

Commences in the dark.

Fever dream documentary

Records the voodoo rat scampering

And vanishing through the moon’s trenches.

Murnau,his mind like a Balkan castle,

Stands observing a painting

By Caspar David Friedrich,

The solitary figure with back to the viewer,

Absorbed in a vast emptiness.


It is the age of the dybbuk,

Somnambulists’ paradise.

The envious dead wreak their frustration on the living,

Warriors lie impotent in their marital beds.

Slowly, implacably, the Venus fly trap closes.


As archaeologists uncover the ruins of Babylon

And reconstruct the Tower of Babel,

Fritz Lang- pirate’s eyepatch covering

The lethal glare of a heathen god-

Sketches designs for Metropolis,

The revolutionary mob rushing onward

To pull down the citadel.

Chinese Calligraphy

The Xuan paper sucks the black ink deep inside,

Each magic square drawn

From the heart’s grimoire,

Black and white harmonies

Balanced on a rabbit’s hair brushtip.

Dots and strokes

Dance to secret rhythms;

Water and air are married

In the flow of the hand.

One comes to love the spaces between characters

More than the characters themselves.


Lei Jianfu of the Song Dynasty

Learned how to move his brush

By listening to the sound of running water

And letting his hand swim

With the waves.


Su Shi said that to write

Was like playing a game of chess

With the strokes.

Cosmetic Surgery

Disfigured.Imperfect.

Intervene in destiny

And change it before it’s too late,

Before you lose everything-

Love and money and success.

Look in the mirror-

Where the voodoo begins.

The cutter has come

To make blood flow,

To correct the damage nature has done.

Does he love or does he hate?

Do his hands heal or attack?


Beauty’s dispute takes the soul for prey.

Bodies are just bits and pieces-

Who owns them,in the end?

A doctored smile in a magazine

Is suddenly discarded, crumpled, in the bin.


All the bumps and scars and anomalies

Of my weird geography

Terrorize my waking dreams.

Between ugliness and splendour

Is a mere fraction.

This body is nothing

But the image of what it might become.

I am an impersonator,

Never off the stage.


More real is the photograph,

The beloved monster

I serve and emulate.

The inescapable spectre.

All those mug shots on the police station wall.

All those movie star pin-ups.


What will emerge

From this face-cocoon?

Another mask.

New life,bruised and swollen.

The scalpel’s kiss

Tells me I am loved.


Laid out again on the operating table,

I wait for the cold hands to manipulate me

And annihilate the unwanted;

The morphine of anguish

Puts me under once more;

Sailing like a pharaoh on his solar barque

Through the underworld,

To meet my birth-star,

I struggle up again,reborn, victorious;

I turn to face the mirror,

And try to interpret

The stranger

Risen like a volcanic island

From chaotic seas.

Consumers

“The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population

Owns 40 per cent of the planet’s wealth.

The richest 10 per cent own over 85 per cent of the world’s assets,

With over half the world’s population

Owning barely 1 per cent of the global wealth.

This is a world in which over 800 million people

Go to bed hungry every night.”

I register the statistics then go back to my business,

The routine art of transformation,

My thoughts as luxurious and superfluous as billionaires’ yachts,

My suburban life a private Caribbean island

Designed to my own blueprint.


Spaces,lifestyles,relationships,identities,bodies,

All mutate in my hands,

As my dying flesh dreams of ever vaster sensations,

Ever greater proof of itself, of God.

Maintain, repair,improve your body, your life:

Turn yourself into a deluxe product.

A life on credit,

Overstretched.


The zero game of freedom

Snares me in machines.

Seduce me, manipulate me,

Turn me inside-out.

We are the wasters, the destroyers,

Used up as we abuse.

Excess is our damnable pleasure,

Puritan libertines.


From ecstasy to anomie,

I plot the graph.

My unimaginable death reinvents itself

As games,art,religion and war.

On with the tournament,

The carnival of fools!

Everywhere I turn I see masks and costumes:

On the streets and in the shopping centres,


I take my fantasies for a stroll,

Random memories striking like asteroids,

Battering me into a derelict Mars.

Arts become industries,

Objects become photographs,

Reality’s hallucination is screened on my solitude,

Rich in false intensity.

How could I survive without these fictions?

Under the surveillance cameras’ eyes,

I toy with self-control,

Observing without being observed,

Excited and blasé.

History means nothing to me now

And I still prefer the Old Testament to the New.

I will never be part of the Universal;

I do not have heroes any more.


Schizophrenic, can you join the dots

And call it truth? A child’s drawing,

With stick-people and massive suns.

Mysterious oppressive fragments of time

Fall from your fingers,-

Did you break your toys again?

Everything breaks down in the end;

Disappointment sets in early.

I can’t understand the world but I know it hurts.


I like to look at objects from a distance,

Without judgment or taste.

Depth and perspective are superfluous now.

The most beautiful people are actually circus freaks.

Take me to the fair, take me to the theatre,

Show me the monsters,

Let me live again!

The dandies are in charge now,

If anyone is.

The Love Hotel

One after the other, they enter the love hotel:

An old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,

Ready for a quick commercial exchange;

A middle-aged couple darting inside, guiltily hiding their faces;

A teenage couple sauntering in as if it were a fast food restaurant.

Every illusion is doubled in the rational society,

Hallucination of capital and form.

Is this the “floating world”? Or just a reference in a book?

City-collage, metropolis of scattered symbols,

We go through the kata,

Medieval futurists and conservative anarchists,

Looking for strongpoints to be.

I am a backstreets man,

Making knight’s moves to swerve into other dimensions,

Drifting with aleatory pleasure,

Negotiating convoluted entrances and exits.

The street slows and focuses

As the maze leads you in

To the Shinto shrine,the moated castle,

Through decisions and dilemmas

Of pleasure and prayer.

Out here is the edge,

An infinity of edges,

And whatever paths you find around them.

This is my riverbank,my trading post,my graveyard,

Asylum for a vagrant soul,

Exploring its own rituals and forces.

Confusion is my district:

Mapping it is my profession.

Choose your room and enter:

The forbidden chamber of fairytales,

A fantasy, but no happy-ever-after,

A sense of incompletion, not closure.

Now you will play and masquerade

For secret deities, as if to ease unease

And neutralise dread.

Please pay close attention to the instructions

As to correct use of toys and equipment,;

And vacate the room at the allotted time,

So as to allow the professional cleaning team

To prepare it for the next customers.

The Bukovina Frescoes

Thirty-six battles King Stephen the Great

Fought against the Ottoman Empire,

Winning all but two,

And after each victory he built churches

Among the wooded vales.

His bastard son Petru Rares, ruling after him,

Commissioned artists to fresco their walls,

Small Gothic churches in brilliant colours,

Covered all over with paintings

To catechize the illiterate.

Teams of four or five-

Men whose names are now forgotten-

Would even out the rough stone walls

With mortar,then smooth on a fine layer

Of lime plaster mixed with straw,

And then they had just a few hours

To paint with quick sure hands,as one ,

Before the plaster dried out.

So they laid on pigments mixed

From rare clays,semiprecious stones

And minerals, that soaked in and fixed.

In the Last Judgment,heaven-homing souls

Wear embroidered Bukovinian cloths;

Announcing angels sound shepherd's horns;

And King David plays a cobza,

Calm, beatific figures are being burned alive,

Dragged behind horses,

Thrown over castle walls,

Strangled, boiled and beheaded.

By tormentors dressed as Turks.

Molotov's Library

In a grand Moscow apartment,late into the night,

Amid Persian carpets,Chinese jades

And sentimental gilt-framed genre paintings of peasants,

The round-headed imperturbable killer

Sits, reading and annotating books,

Diligently cataloguing thousands of works,

From his rich eclectic private library,

Studying his beloved Chekhov with particular passion,

And opening signed first editions by authors

Whom one day soon he will send to the Gulag.

There is always another title he must have:

He reads constantly, methodically, slowly,

Making endless notes in the margins,

With the same pen that signs death warrants,

Careful to limit his poetry-reading

Lest the love of dreams and beauty seduce him

Away from the discipline of fact and prose,

And the perfect society to come.

“The best filing clerk in Russia”,Lenin dubbed him,

And still the jibe hurts;his enemies will not laugh long,

He will outmanoeuvre and outlast them all;

Until they,too, are reduced to footnotes.

Piero's Province

The quiet church, the stillness and the cool,

And the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes,

My eye being cleverly conducted

Through the packed composition

By the angle of a horse’s head,

The tilt of a shield,a speartip...

All this order I struggle to encompass.

Outside, in the piazza, a young couple

Stroll past,kissing, eyes closed in kef;

They stumble yet stay upright.


On a hotel veranda in Sansepolcro,

As twilight seeps through,

I see Renaissance paintings emerge

From the landscape,and fade back-

Geometryand chaos in continual battle,-

And remember the pregnant Madonna,

Young beauty,eyes downcast,

So timid and sombre her mien,

Her fingertips lightly brushing

Her swollen belly,bearing her destiny

With exquisite resignation.

Qualia

The properties of objects, the nature of the given-

Sensations and perceptions I am,I am,

Private detective sniffing out the clues...

How can I tell you what red is?

It is all so implausible, the real.

Before the melody ends I can sense its wave,

The square root of minus one.

I only know what I think I know.


What does hurting? It is,was,will be,that’s all.

Changes,all changes,the day,the hour, the minute-

Oh so clumsily I express my expressions,-

Where is the information?

The maps are full of errors.

There are no ifs or buts,no maybes

Here in Maybeland.

I must maintain philosophical equilibrium.

I must keep to principles, whatever they are.


You cannot explain all this away.

You cannot explain me away.

That grey squirrel in the branches outside

Is the square root of minus one.

The Forest Philosopher

As Nietzsche -in the sudden clarity of madness-

Threw his arms around a horse’s neck

And would not let go,

So must he cling to the world.

Walking, talking and dressing

Like some country bumpkin,

The philosopher-king,

From his simple hut on a Black Forest hillside,

Gazed out across the valley to the Alps beyond.

His tools were all around him,

As he walked the wooded paths,

Through glades and clearings,

And skied downslope in winter.

Alone with his books and the nightstorms,

A Pre-Socratic, crabbed and hungry

For the sources, the roots of things,,

He built,like a voyageur his canoe,

A mountaindweller’s dialect all his own.

He must remember what the world had forgotten,

Work like a woodcutter at his task

And give no quarter to fools.

Forking and reforking, the path

Led through dark firs,on Death Mountain,

Where a sad and sovereign intellect,

Refusing the world’s interference,

Could run to its own cruel limits

Pretending that knowledge was love.

Celts and Romans

Rain dripping from a leaf is the history of the island.

A good place to pick a fight and win a useful war: so the Roman emperors calculate, delightedly sticking pins in maps and juggling the exotic names of tribes.

The eagle-bearer of the tenth legion takes shape under Caesar’s pen, a vivid cartoon; that boar-tusked name Casivellaunus- a handy chimera-struts onstage with barbarian flourish, stinking of uninhabitable forests and revolting customs.

Words-gold coins engraved with wild boars and horses-weapon the hand-to-mouth storytellers.

Facts: hillforts to be taken by storm, by the discipline of imagination.The victorious shall reside in fancy villas,painted with mythological frescoes, enjoying imported wines and costly delicacies.

Cunobelinus poses for his coins,in imitation of Augustus,clean-shaven and laurel-wreathed in Roman tunic,flattering his foreign patrons and absorbing their power, as his chariots race across country to force rival tribes to their knees.

Black Russian

The ice.Always the ice.The dark mother.

So little grain from the brief season.

The peasants suspicious and grumbling,

Hating the merchants’ rapacity.

What might come riding out of the plains,

Tatars from the east, Germans from the west?

The backward, the resentful, the disillusioned

Have a special wisdom.

Why must there always be a false utopia

To yearn for, to leap at- and fail?

Perhaps contradictions need not be resolved.

Let them be, let them breed, and be free.

Empire and chaos hold sway

Over the serfs, always crumbling back

Into the dirt,as thunderclouds mass

In the steppe heavens,and hunters

Kiss their lucky charms,setting out.

Whatever they may say, the people

Favour the black horse over the white.

This struggle,futile and fatiguing,leading

Through catastrophe,again and again,

Will never be abandoned,for the damned

Are romantics and believers to the end.

The Potter's Wheel

I throw my life upon the wheel,

Not at the centre of anything,

But part of the movement,

The rhythm and the noise...

The wheel is gathering momentum

And the clay domes in my hands;

You can feel every change

Right in the fingertips.

Again and again on the treadle,

As the shape grows,

Catching ambient sound

In its hollow,

Resonating like a seashell.

Hunched and twisted,

I suffer the torments

When the euphoria is gone.

Here, there is no thinking,

Only doing,

All I am is what my hands know,

What they remember.

Fascination

So beautiful is the illusion

Why should one wish for the real ?

Elements forever in commotion,

Repelling or attracting,

Have no choice but to create.

Where parallels join,beyond the horizon,

Infinite triangles irradiate.

And,in the cathedral,

Caught in the rose window’s tractor beam,

You automatically start walking

Eastwards,into sunrise,

Anchored yet free…

Fire,earth,air and water

Combine in the glass,

Colours changing ceaselessly ;

This world which you must leave

Is fascination.

Alfred Wegener

Pangaea breaking up

a raindrop forming

ice crystal halo arcs appearing opposite the sun

a man

crossing hundreds of miles

of Greenland snow and ice

You maintain equilibrium

by isostasy

feeling the ground

move beneath your feet

blue-eyed Viking raider of the sky

Savaged by critics and enemies

listening totheir sarcastic tirades

he sits silently

without responding

smoking his pipe

They found him dead

lying on a reindeer skin

inside his tent

on the Greenland icecap

face calm and peaceful

almost smiling

and over him his friends

raised an ice mausoleum

Japanese Aesthetics

From nothingness to nothingness

the waves the waves

the simple weathered things I love

imperfect

impermanent

incomplete

that which comes and goes I cherish

discernible only to a cultivated eye

a quiet mind

What makes these tears start

out of nowhere?

Year after year

the karateka practises the kata

until suddenly one day

the unnatural becomes natural

the rehearsed becomes spontaneous

The ikebana artist

cuts a flower

precisely in order to make it live

to return it to itself

The Nō actor

slides his raised-toe foot along the stage

then abruptly cuts off the movement

lowering his toes to the floor-

a pause between inhalation and exhalation-

and at the exact same instant

his other foot slides forward

The poet’s brush

strikes a cut

between two images

in a haiku

walling in a rock garden

of white gravel and black stones

where the only motion

is shadows cast by sun and moon

The Singing Fish of Sri Lanka

To the shores of Serendib a lonely sailor

With words and worlds to trade...

Gondwanaland:my mind!

A dancer’s movement-

Just the slightest gesture of a hand-

Sets worlds spinning , in space.

A firewalker’s balance

Holds the planets in orbit.


From here to Paradise,they say,is just forty miles;

One can hear the sound of its fountains.

Broken orange pekoe fumes rich malty coppery tones

As I lift the chipped cup.

Like a colossal stone Buddha

I lie down on my side to sleep,

Ready for my next unenlightened incarnation.


On April full moon nights the fish are said to sing

Off the coast of Batti;

One must stick an oar into the water

And hold the other end to one’s ear.

From the Reign of Shah Abbas

The world’s embassies and caravans converge on alchemical Isfahan.A style and a kingdom united;one purpose in politics and art.

Shah Abbas’s sabre:a broad single-edged damascus blade,with walrus ivory hilt,and watered steel mounts adorned with gold inlay;signed in the cartouche “Abbas the slave of the Lord of Holiness”,with the lion-sun motif.

Conversant with all mechanical crafts, the Shah loved making scimitars,arquebuses and saddles. Encouraged by “The Mirror of Princes” he had read as a boy,he proudly emulated the workshops of Timur and Uzan Hasan.

Inside the Shaykh Lutfullah Mosque:walls and dome on fire with blue,yellow,white and turquoise tiles,all intricate arabesques,cartouches and geometric designs;light on light,light within light,luminescence self-reflecting into infinity, the wordless serene.

A golden album page of calligraphy (breathed onto the paper by an assassinated poet), and carpets of silk and gold;such crafts are prized by the wise.

Golden dome,golden minaret,golden portal of the Imam Riza Shrine at Mashhad,illuminated in the malachite night:time and again the Shah came here to worship, kiss the holy ground and weep and pray, giving thanks for victories won and beseeching Allah for fresh conquests.

An elegant brass ewer, incised with palmette arabesques, intertwining vines and cypresses, blossoms and trefoils, the long slender neck and the bulbous body,-all the feminine volume of the earth is shaped into function.

A watercolour portrait of Shah Abbas as an old man,being served wine by an adolescent boy,almost embracing,-he, great king and conqueror,who had killed or blinded his own sons, still craved affection from young men.

Victor Segalen

The discovery of difference

Requires intensive practice;

Apprehension is refined by its limits.

The human is always and everywhere

Primitive and exotic.

One colonises sadly,sure to be one day overthrown.


In nightmares he could see the uniform hordes

Marching in sexless lifeless lock step,

Democratic serfs, sophisticated cretins.

He built his own Forbidden City,

Bridges, temples and pavilions aligned

With the heavens and earth.


Hiking in the Breton forest,

He fell, badly injured,to lay for days,alone,

And when his dead body was found

A copy of Hamlet lay open beside him.

The Madeleines of Georges de la Tour

The light, the candlelight and the shadow,

The shadow and the light,the shadow,

The candlelight.

Night is the time for secrets,

Revealed and unrevealed.

Do not mistake these glimpses

For irrefutable insights,

Do not speak of epiphanies,

Do not speak.

I love only the silent, the silent and grave.

Do not speak of redemption,

No, do not speak.


She turns to the mirror,

Finding a reflection and a flame.

To see what no-one else can see,

What no-one else has seen,

What may or may not even be there,

Such is the secret.

I love only the sorrowful and resigned.

I love the speechless witness.