Friday, August 15, 2008

Room 999
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FOR IT IS SILENCE THAT BAUMGARTNER AND

I

DO


EVERLASTING SEEK





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INSTRUCTIONS FOR BLOG
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PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGES


USUALLY THEY WILL OPEN RIGHT UP LIKE GREAT FLOWERS



OF THE ETERNAL MORNING



AND REVEAL GREAT VISIONS



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READ MY IMAGES

and

IMAGISE MY WRITINGS



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FOR IT IS SILENCE THAT BAUMGARTNER AND

I

DO


EVERLASTING SEEK





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SEE


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SEE THE WHOLE HERE AS TENDING TOWARDS BEING


.........................................O N E T E X T




WITH ....................................................................................................



NOTHING UNINCLUDED

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THINK MAYBE OF THE IMAGES AND THE COLOUR AND THE SHAPES

TO BE "WORDS"

THAT PROBE THE SEMANTIC DEPTHS OF OUR SECRET MINDS

PERHAPS ENCRYPTED IN SOME ULTIMATE LANGUAGE

WHOSE DEPTH OF SEMANTIC POWER IS ITS VERY "INCOMPREHENSIBILTY"

OR THE MATHEMATICS OF ITS DEEP AND BEAUTIFUL SILENCE



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FOR IT IS SILENCE THAT BAUMGARTNER AND

I


DO


EVERLASTING SEEK





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IS IT ALL SO DEEPLY PLOTTED OR PLANNED?



NO -


MUCH IS EXTEMPORE - EVEN DONE TO "GET THE TEXT SPACED ETC" AND


I

LOVE

....................COLOUR AND SHAPE


I LOVE THE MYSTERY OF WORDS AND LANGUAGE


BUT MUCH (NOT TOO MUCH) IS ALSO ARTIFICE

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An example of cleverness or "artifice" from a previous Blog Post:



o000000000000OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO000000000000o

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL


Reading after the first line of oos there is E (repeated)

This derives from the book "Disobedience" by Alice Notley as does the line of oos,wws and lls

that is it spells "Owl" which bird is very important to Notley in that and previous books and this

I found about in an interview with her.


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FOR IT IS SILENCE THAT BAUMGARTNER AND



I


DO



EVERLASTING SEEK





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BUT A LOT OF EYELIGHT IS NOT SO "CONSTRUCTED" ?


I make room for what I call "the random", for play, for accident and process.


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Friday, August 08, 2008

Room 880.1


Hospital 17



we beat strange

we beat strange

we beat strange

the sky is above us





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25/ 1/ 04

Hospital 23


It’s incredible how bone “melds together” in the way perhaps metals meld when welded: bone is to some extent calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate deposited in the collagen and united and compacted and moved and connected into the Haversian structures. The body like a great machine – a metropolis – rebuilds itself, as those bombed or bulldozed rebuild, as the people gain heart and grit and strike back: the Palestinians strike to the Israelis’ very heart, the Iraqis counterattack against the imperialist invaders: the Vietnamese fought, the French, the Greeks.

No one knows why John Mulgan committed suicide just after the war, in a hotel, in Cairo, alone, with poison. Man is indeed alone: perhaps not always.

But I am alive and not in a romantic or terrible war, my real war is with myself and my hate is, if I have any, abstract. I am alive but “laid up”. My repair or my recovery is almost some sort of statement…but then who am I?

Once I told Leicester Kyle how I couldn’t relax at poetry readings unless I was drunk and he said “Why can’t you just BE?” Point taken. Leicester is me mate! The Old man of the Woods, now the old discoverer of a new snail! A giant snail! What if your giant snail starts to eat New Zealand, Leicester? What if it is molecularly transtoned by those green bastards and eats everything in the world up! Leicester Kyle, the writer of many books of poetry, one dedicated to me. Shut up head!

Where was I? Oh, here is the entry: at 11 am today, after reading an encyclopaedia entry on bones, I told my helper (who is a medical student, and concurred) how marvellously complex, how mysterious the body is. But then everybody knows that.



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Room 880

He told me of the First World War, the horror of it, and the effect on his mind of seeing the cemeteries in Belgium or wherever the dead are laid. “The dead”, he said.

The rows and rows of the dead. And the crosses. The endless crosses. The crosses in endless rows or diagonals, like white bones. The dead, the unending dead, the rows and rows and rows of all those dead. All that life. All that once life. The dead. I couldn’t bear it. The dead, the dead, the dead, the dead. The waste, the absolute waste: the total futility, the loss.” He had some coffee. I was glad he could speak this immensity to me. I was young, and it was what I wanted to hear. Yes, there had to have been some better way.


He leaned closer. Perhaps there wasn’t much hope in him.


The crosses, the rows and rows, the ordered dead: the endlessly dead; the white, the crosses, the dead, the dazzling, the white rows.”




Room 780.1

Comment on Room 780




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The Greatest Poet of the 20th Century


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{Clearly the above "statement" - (both in regard to their being a greatest poet and that Douglas was that ) - is dubious - but I wanted thus to signal my enthusiasm and intense appreciation of, and the significance of, for this - in some ways - "neglected" poet - }


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Room 780 – part of the infinite set of rooms that make up the houses of


EYELIGHT


was “framed” by a reference to Keith Douglas, who, had he lived longer, may have come to be considered the greatest poet of the 20th Century.


In my perspective he was, is.


(I owe my “acquaintance” with him to Scott Hamilton of the (political, poetic, cricket, music, Kiwiana, geography, Maoritanga, and life Blog: ‘Reading the Maps’).


The Steffi.Vergissmeinnicht “comment” is from the poem given below. While he was, in a kind of detached way, “anti-war” – Douglas also loved war – at least battle – and was fascinated by the military.


His poems a have a strange, near surreal clarity, lucidity, and (fro me) agonising beauty: derived from Douglas’s unremitting realistic observation and his powerful imagination, and deep sense of language, that contrast his work with the “horrors” they are depicting.


He knew of course of the great First WW poets such as Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, but his “look” at war was quite different. He saw all sides of war: he has the vision of a great poetic genius, and his vision may seem cold and strange, and he did not lack deep feelings about the awful nature of war, but he felt for all involved in war, but he knew also the way men and women can be in war or situations of war and yet continue in this state with a certain abstract indifference...or seeming (or seeing?) indifference. If we didn’t indeed have this de-subjectification or “indifference and abstraction”, we could not only not think, we would probably also not be able to operate, in fact with too much sensitivity, too much non-objectivity, we would go mad.


Go mad and become "God's spies" - if for however brief a time


He was complex in this respect.



I have also shown images of Robert Creeley and my son (as well as other images such as one of a dead man killed in Palestine or Iraq or somewhere) – both Creeley and my son had or have an eye missing so their connections to EYELIGHT are thus explicated to some degree, but there is more. I will get back to that (Creeley was in the WW2 combat, but more in the back lines in ambulances etc).


Douglas thus frames this room, but so does the real or imagined Steffi – the soldier’s girl (perhaps the young German’s first love?), in the poem below…


....in addition the ‘forget me not’ is directed or turned toward myself!


It is also applicable to us all... {for indeed we beat strange.........


– the existential angst etc



Here is the poem (which has been much anthologized since Ted Hughes brought strong attention to Douglas) that frames Room 780 – perhaps not Douglas’s best, it has yet, an eerie power…

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Vergissmeinnicht


by Keith Douglas


Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.






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There is something of the Elizabethan “metaphysical poets’” intensity of image here – and it is also notable the great interest that Creeley had in those writers (such as Donne et al).


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Here is a brief biographical comment on Douglas:


Keith Douglas was born in Kent, and educated at Oxford University under the tutorship of poet Edward Blunden, before enlisting with the British Army when World War II broke out. He is the most famous English poet of that war, although he began publishing his work at the age of 16. His verse is precise, unsentimental and at times chilling, in its treatment of desire and sexuality as well as in its pervasive obsession with death and the relation of death to writing. Douglas was killed in Normandy, having also written about his involvement in the war in North Africa, his slim but intensely powerful corpus concluded at an early age. His work began to receive the acclaim it deserves only when Ted Hughes, a great admirer, edited and introduced a collection in 1964 (Selected Poems). See also the more recent Complete Poems (ed. Desmond Graham; 1978).

(from the Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature, )


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