PASS AGES a poetics journal January, 1996 4 What I acknowledge is that this is a time of working things out, and working things out is not a happy term where printers and publishers are concerned with galley proof delays and publishing expenses, pushing toward publishing dates.... Everywhere--and where more than here?--the individual worker must get the work back into his personal responsibility, away from the middle man who conveys what he means. There are artists today who have other workers carry their "ideas" out. What is missing is the tale the hand itself tells in its way of working. F E A T U R E S + Andrew Schelling, NOTES ON FORM AND SAVAGE MIND for Robin Blaser [line 55] + H.D. Moe, CORRECTIONISM [line 664] + Heiner Mueller, OBITUARY translated by B. Friedlander [line 741] * * * * * * Notes on Form and Savage Mind for Robin Blaser Proem Every age burns incense to its gods. Right now the human realm clamors with prophecies. Priests of the Age of Information -- from new age Third Wave Speakers of the House to electronic energy-web anarchist computer hackers -- would have us believe we stand at some threshold of social evolution. Certainly the multinational corporations adhere to this new vision. But has civilization entered a new phase, the Information Age? Look around you. I'm going to start by making the assertion that as a species living in history, we've never left the Bronze Age. Maybe we've progressed into the Iron Age, but that is only a slightly more efficient extension of the age of bronze weapons and religious icons. For all the clever technologies, we continue to live in a period dominated by hard metals & rigid hierarchies. Let me give a quick structural identity to what we call Civilization -- an 8-10 thousand year timespan. It has seen the progressive invention of the war- economy State, the rise of organized churches, the establishment of military hierarchies, and the creation of internal police forces. Also the progressive separation of an educated urban elite from the local populaces & bio-regions which provide the sole source of material -- and a great deal of spiritual -- wealth. * My interests return again & again to any hold-outs, renegades, resistors of this difficult aberrant period in history. The folk who would retain -- alongside the new or _metallic_ casts of mind, a mode of thinking the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss termed the "Savage Mind." Levi-Strauss predicated this older way of thinking on close observation of the natural world, and a swift metaphorical imagination grounded in what later would be called natural history. For the modern world, he located hold-outs for this earlier way of thinking most particularly among the company of artists. Art, said Levi-Strauss, is a National Park for the mind. I I think some good tools were given us during the 19th century, primarily by naturalists, ethnologists, and other hip non-dogmatic observers of our green planet, which helped crack apart a few key assumptions of Bronze & Iron Age civilization. An older saner human view of the world -- never entirely absent but for millennia driven underground due to Bronze Age cultures finding it scary, weird, a bit too fast, loose & sexy, too unpredictable -- began to reassert itself -- a view that probably characterized the Paleolithic, and which provided the Neolithic its energetic "arts of civilization" (Levi Strauss's term): domestication of plants & animals, brewing, agriculture, pottery, weaving. You can find these tools in the writings of Darwin, Thoreau, and dozens of others who reintroduced to the human realm the "savage mind" -- simply by reverting to strict observation of the natural world -- and a recognition that Nature's keen shape-shifting laws govern the human animal too. Part of this return to old-time habits arose from an ethnographic sense of cultural relativity. If colonialism carried the seeds of its own demise, it came in the form of intelligent travelers who over the centuries studied firsthand the confounding diversity of cultures beyond Europe's borders, and learnt something subtle about civilized assumptions. In the subversive arts of ethnography & biodiversity, Marco Polo is a secret hero -- first steady-eyed & discriminating ethnographer writing in a European language after Herodotus. He brought back from Asia to thirteenth century Italy report of human possibilities way beyond what the "mind of Europe" was ready to take in. Outlandish peoples, multiple languages, local gods & spirits, colorful habits of dress & kinship, a diversity of plant and animal life. Emanuel Komroff's good edition of the _Travels_, which in Polo's day was known as a "Book of Marvels," recounts the story of Polo on his death bed. Marco's friends had clustered around -- all of them upstanding Christian businessmen of Venice grown prosperous on trade to the Levant. Concerned about their companion's soul after death, they urged Marco to retract the fabulous unchristian stories he'd recounted. His answer-- I have not told half of what I've seen. * Allegiance to the seeing eye as against the dogmatic mind came forcefully forward with naturalists & geologists of the 19th century. Darwin and others -- it seems to have dawned in several minds simultaneously -- began to gaze deeply into the natural world, freeing themselves from Christian theologies -- and saw what most aboriginal peoples had known. What a few yogic traditions, like Taoism, had kept in sight -- the swift mutability of the world, its species & creatures. No longer seen as eternal "forms" created by a rigid intelligence, species after Darwin became open, shapeshifting, creative events. In the poem implications were to arise -- what Robin Blaser describes in his work as "a principle of _randonee_ -- the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour." A dawning awareness -- not new but inestimably old -- that the cosmos, the universe, does not hide itself behind appearances, but works out its laws -- you could say expresses itself, its body, its speech -- through all that appears and changes -- weather patterns, land forms, flora and fauna, the tracks of instinct, windings of thought. Even this most elegant complicated human brain thinks best when it does not stray too far from "the phenomenal world." * the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. For a resident of this grand & intricate continent, North America, the writings of Thoreau stand as a literary equivalent of Darwin's vision. The _Journals_ in particular work out massively, counfoundingly, the principles of _randone_ -- in them Thoreau permitted his own "hunts, games & tours" to determine the structure of the writing. They are based as no other work of the period on what we now would call the random & the given -- indeterminacy -- chance encounters. Having no model for what he was writing, it must have come painfully upon him over many years that the _Journals_ had become -- not simply raw material from which to quarry passages for his books -- rather, the central project of his life. thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage -- than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life -- & are seen by the reader not to be far fetched -- It is more simple -- less artful. In a world that's cut its teeth on books like Pound's _Cantos_, or Stein's ruminations -- we can return and read the _Journals_ -- as specifically American response to a world reshaping itself moment by moment, epoch by epoch, along intricate pathways resembling Darwinian evolution-- a poem like a species no longer immutable. * Thoreau's belief, now become requisite for any creed a North American could hold -- that cosmos reveals itself in the form & flux of geological upheavals, in the tender intricacies of ecology & the evolution of species, in meteorological patterns of ocurrence & recurrence. Daily events of thought & news enter the field and alter it. If the governing principal is change -- then the poem's character is emergent, open, shifty -- it is organic, projective. This must be what Thoreau meant by _wild_, a term he tracked into distant lairs. Not for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. The notion of Paradise as it adorns the imagination, even the Christian's, certainly springs from memories of old walkers who brought back descriptions of high altitude forest and alpine spring wildflower meadows. The Greeks had their Elysian fields, the Aztecs something similar, hence both conceived poems as delicate wildflower blooms. Any field guide to the tundra will give you an accurate description. II To know the mind of a yogin or adept -- say a Zen _roshi_ or Vajrayana _Tulku_ -- the student takes on the master's discipline. The malleable human mind gathers its shape from the use it's put to. One should -- to know the mind of Thoreau & how he cocked a sceptical humorous eye at the world's mutability -- practice his discipline -- _the Journal_. An eyeblink and it is Basho, he listens to wind tear at the roof of his banana leaf hut. Outside a driving rain. Can you hear the ancestors speak through it? So -- to take to the Journal as primary form -- a way to understand the journey. A journey larger than the history of nations & philosophies -- larger even than the history of our own species. My naturalist friend Peter Warshall has been at work for a decade on a "four billion year history of aesthetics." * A profusion of plant & animal observations weave through Thoreau's 1851 _Journal_, and dominate the writings until the end of his life. In particular the taste of the scientific Latin terms Thoreau gives for each species encountered. Partly he's wrestling with Linnaeus & old human traditions of naming, but largely he has taken to recording names in order to understand events -- the way a newly encountered word or term only becomes yours once you write it into essay or poem. _Journal_ is the site of learning, the autodidactic's form. To write one's way into the world -- old practice -- this human act of naming. Swift large brains, come so grandly to bloom with language. Gertrude Stein calls poetry "a vocabulary entirely based on the noun....that is poetry really loving the name of anything." And Fenollosa-- Poetry agrees with science and not with logic. * Kshemendra, twelfth century poet, yogin, & raconteur from Kashmir, specifies the skills a poet should cultivate-- A poet should learn with his own eyes the shapes of leaves he should know about oceans & mountains not just from hearsay study the sun & moon & stars his mind should enter the seasons he should go among diverse peoples, in many places, learn their languages study their customs when they gather he should be able to make them laugh To this short list I would add-- animals & seasons their habits & rutting behavior rules of the local authorities. By local authorities I don't mean elected officials or representatives of the State. I mean what the Sanskrit speakers called _lokapalas_ -- guardians of the locale, we might say tutelary deities -- they hang on in the popular mind as mascots & emblems. To cherish the lokapalas cougar & coyote mule deer prairie dog & his predator feruginous hawk these the ones that dwell year round among us --or pull into the high country when summer sun opens forest & tundra winters drop down to the plains or go "underground" & still the metabolism Others arrive seasonally-- long range migratory folk-- to appease the lokapalas birds who breed at high latitudes come as guests to our brief but "insect-rich arctic summer" We may think them "ours," but more accurate to say "southern species" making the relatively brief foray north to breed. * Change, individuation, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, transmigration of form -- all pointing towards growth itself, not the grown thing, as the underlying reality in nature. The scholar of the late the late 20th century, schooled in biological studies and armed with sharp taxonomic skills, adds to Kshemendra's list and takes particular stock of metabolism -- a flux of shape, energy webs & food chains that despite their precision still move so far outside human understanding as to seem nearly indeterminate. III In the dream I work at the journal. Noting down thoughts -- that Nature is growth, change, metamorphosis, transmutation of form -- process the Chinese call _ch'i_, the Hindus _prana_ -- "the underlying principle" -- I watch words emerge on the page -- "growth itself, not the thing grown." The surrounding landscape is dry desert, hard & cracked, broken with volcanic rock. Prevalent vegetation is sagebrush -- artemisia -- grey-green leathery leaves replicated in the grey cast of sky. A ramp of cobblestones with masonry railings -- "dilapidated" -- meaning "stone by stone coming apart" -- remnant of some former civilization. Down an adjoining staircase of precarious loose stone, hence "picking" their way, come Anne & Ambrose. I look up from my journal, the dream reminds me I must not abandon _the human realm_. That the journal now gets written in dream -- I awoke & wrote down from memory what sleep had inscribed. Sanskrit _svapna_ means both sleep & dream. What was archaic India's approach to dream? For presocratic Greece Dodds quotes various sources -- saying not as we would, _I had a dream_ but _I saw a dream_. Sleep hews close to the underlying reality. As with nature, dream predicates shapeshifting & transformation. Only the dream's a bit quicker. "Dreams & their obligations," said the Teton Sioux. friend my horse flies like a bird as it runs some one told me a Wolf nation called me "father" * Massachusetts, 1630 -- introduction of the first bounty declared in the New World -- a shilling for every wolf carcass. By 1837 wolves had vanished from Connecticut. From New Hampshire by 1895, the Adirondacks by 1899. By 1909 gone from Maine. Wolf was once the most widely distributed land mammal on earth. * Thoreau on 26 June 1851 after a visit to a traveling "menagerie"-- I was struck by the gem-like changable greenish reflections from the eyes of the grizzley bear-- So glassy that you never saw the surface of the eye-- They quite demonic. Its claws though extremely large & long look weak & made for digging or pawing earth & leaves. It is unavoidable the idea of transmigration not merely a fancy of the poets -- but an instinct of the race. Transmigration an instinct? What writer of the 19th century paused to look into the dream? Thoreau writes that he hears the "frogs dreaming" night after night -- but he's just describing the sound, the booming of bullfrogs or higher pitched creak of the blue throats. If you lacked a habit for examining the dream, might you lack the resources to recall and record it? A twist here -- the conflict between dream and 19th century hard-nose rationalism -- as in the the 20th century between poetry and bourgeoise book-keeping practices. In the 17th century Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz wrote from her convent cell in Mexico City, that she recurrently solved problems in her dreams. * Unseen bird calls harshly a hundred yards off. The cottonwood leaves after a month of rain are tender amber, with a trace of the most elemental green. In the foothills below Arapahoe Pass "from about 9,500 feet down to the plains, is a rather exensive network of ancient trails, many of which followed the same routes as present day roads." --R.L. Ives Early human occupation of the Colorado headwaters region. Geographical Review, 1942. I revisit a few pages of Thoreau's Journal and find entered "After January 10, 1851" an account of his going "down cellar just now to get an armful of wood," where he heard "methought a commonplace suggestion -- but when as it were by accident -- I reverently attended to the hint -- I found that it was the voice of a God who had followed me down cellar to speak to me." The moment keeps its ordinariness -- unsensational -- the passage is not about a God but an act of attention-- How many communications may we not lose through inattention? I would fain keep a journal which should contain those thoughts & impressions which I am liable to forget that I have had Which would have, in one sense the greatest remoteness-- in another the greatest nearness, to me. A moment stolen by chance from inattention. On 19 August 1851 he observes-- The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise -- the humblest observer would see some stars shoot.-- A faithful description as by a disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind in 3 score years & 10 as when one reports the number & character of the vehicles which pass a certain point. A meteorological journal of the mind-- * May 13 In the dream I have collected up pages for our book of early Buddhist poetry. The sheets are small strips of bark or leaf -- "prepared palm leaves" ca. 80 BC, Sri Lanka. They fit the hand awkwardly -- a thick unmanageable bundle. Anne delivers to me her latest revisions on strips the belly color of a purple martin. Turning through them I see illustrations mostly, not text -- skeletal figures arranged in erotic positions, _Cittapati_ figures of the Tibetan sort -- others emerge in delicate washes of pastel -- flat landscapes, forlorn women, like certain miniatures of the Rajput hill schools -- some recall Attic Greece, ivory & cobalt blue, ladies with robes over their breasts -- I want to know how they got on the palm leaf -- did someone use a computer to devise them--? The oldest technology -- & the most recent -- for writing-- * The one dictum Natural Selection insists on: that genetic mutation & evolution proceed by what we call _chance operation_. The grand play of forms evolving through four billion years, transmigration of species from structure to structure, habit to habit, homeland to homeland. Form to form. No grand authority determines the shifts & feints, patterns on the farfalla's wing, stripes that lend distinction to a tiger's face -- eye color, fin shape -- we stand free of a single terrible dominant intelligence. And are given over to the playfulness of chance, the aleotoric gesture, curve of an eyebrow the poets of India likened to Kama's bow-- From Joseph Needham's _Science & Civilization in China_ -- a chapter heading-- _The Chinese Denial of a Celestial Lawgiver an Affirmation of Nature's Spontaneity & Freedom_ "Heaven has no form and yet the myriad things are brought to perfection "This may be called the untaught teaching, the wordless edict." IV The early Buddhists prized a meditation on the body, its impermanence. The practice -- to visualize its impending decay, the palpable rot & stink of it, vaporous, leaky, oozing with lesions, mutilated by worm or jackal or feral dog. It is a grim vigilance -- its recommended location the burial yard. One studies the corpse as it breaks open from heat & moisture, and holding up the mirror of Buddha's teaching regards it as one's own corpse -- an eyeblink distant in time. There is another meditation though -- both older & more modern, it reaches towards a higher level of insight -- which I would counsel. I find it displayed in the work of the best minds of the past 150 years applying themselves to a no less rigorous & anti-sentimental observation -- to stare past the revulsion of decay and glimpse a new order of living emerge from it. To observe one's own elements not "dead" but taken up by worm or ant, not fear but eternal delight -- buzzard or blue jay, blue grama or Doug fir, the flank of a deer gone into forest. In the intricate weave of protoplasm, the biotic webbing -- old myth sees a transmigration of souls but with cold hard looking we see it's not just the human realm, not just us on the journey -- all is change, mutation, migration of cellular nutrients-- metamorphosis, individuation, recall-- "It is unavoidable the idea of transmigration not merely a fancy of the poets-- but an instinct of the race" --Thoreau on 26 June 1851 Can the dream with its litter of barkless twig and owl pellet heal? The Mahayana Buddhist believes we have all been fellow travelers on a beginningless journey through such intricacies of rebirth, of cause & effect, & for so long, that each of us has taken on every form, every shape, every species. For that reason the Bodhisattva does not rest until every sentient creature is wakened, down to the smallest blade of grass. Old Buddha's documents mention the "deva eye" capable of seeing one's previous incarnations -- to peer through that lens I am certain would illuminate a Burgess Shale of life-forms. * Darwin, _The Origin of Species_ The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration-- It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the "plan of creation," "unity of being," &c. ...species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes... and the magnificent concluding sentence to his book-- There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. * Theologians of the 19th century had to contend with the unsettling but indisputable similarity between living creatures and now-extinct species, known through fossil remnants. Unable to accept the existence of intermediary species -- "missing links" in evolution -- they invoked a concept referred to by the Church as typology -- that earlier species "were purposefully designed by the Deity as prophecies of later, currently existing species." The Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, a fierce opponent of Darwin, clung to this view. Thoreau sided with Darwin on the issue of evolution. He also helped Agassiz collect the vast assortment of plant & animal specimens that formed a basis for the estimable Harvard College collections in natural history -- bringing turtles and other creatures from the ponds & rivers of Concord. Agassiz, questioned as to what was his greatest work, once replied-- I have taught men to observe. * One must talk about everything according to its nature, how it comes to be and how it grows. --Herakleitos ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ CORRECTIONISM Both within & without the democracy skin ( there being no walls biologically just mediums' membrane) facts, intuitions, inklings, hunches adjust to or are altered 'physically' via the sending & receiving organs of sense, the medium said messages travel through & the form of anything held together by ignorance & love. All communication depends upon the vibe-abyss-mode of the unknown. We, never capable of kenning the simplest 'reals' totally, which even at their most inert ( events interacting among, through, upon, with, independent of, events) or hericlitean, reveal a Kantian continuum for this or that to be to us at all, making it possible for us to puzzle unto wonderment every law. ( Philosophically, the irrefut- ability of the dream argument ontologically proves that knowledge is not all & the deeper out into vast intimacy we go, the more mysterious our verities become distancing upclose nearer than the mind.) ( It was Anais Nin who said " truth requires in its definition a respect for the sensitivity of each person") To a correctionist, objectivity balances, subjectivity unbalances, like footfalls' toppling recovery & heartbeats' chaos envelop, both poles, the crazy snake & the mountain, substratum life. Most of the time with our handles on reality we bungle through & cope, keeping open to the guiding raven foothold that will launch us, Watusie like, into odd details. Generally, Correctionism accepts the one to one correspondent theory of the universe pragmatically ( it works) since, under the 'joystick' of luck & determancy, epistemes ( alembics of knowledge & intelligence) all involve impossible nonsense. Our real ifs & accidental I-s gestalt, amalgamate a now once longgone path enfolded in topologies only the relational relativity of a living between plumbs as self. The world invents discovery, lost in its founding, begun by its end. Magpies of maybe dot the i's of our way. Yet, we combine imagination & knowledge, the kindling & the sources, into a solid dream. Auraing every ought, hope, instead of faith or belief - since we could only be wrong if measurement or zombiehood prevail, & the elan vital light of our natures with wisdom quicker than a photon. However, Correctionism neither opts for tribalism or virtual reality, seeing humankind pendulumed betwixed every difference making a differing difference & a dolphin - commingling of necessary interdependence. Overwhelmed by our expanded minimalism, a vast intimate specialization, a blooming, trumpeting infinite open growth of 'systemless metaphysics,' a parthenogenic ding en sich oberaulus technique, Correctionists reject the everyman as a Renaissance Mr. Ma gooo. We must put more & more of our units of knowledge ( & wits of nowing) on automatic pilot availability in order that we may grow skeletons (LA) alive with ourselves, symoetaneously encouraging the mind as a program, the genome gene project, virtual reality -people, to hunker down, lift off & nourish the pioneer mickymouse, since what is the most artiofficial is the most human. Correctionists look for & dig the slow abolition of all law. Organic social anarchy, life, the non-authoritarian coordinator, being the only benchmark or guidepost--- does a mother need rules to keep her children from danger? Every law has a point of unravelling or imperfection. Neither goody 2 shoes, nor underworld mystiques, as Correctionists, we cut between the living wood like drops of rain rising & mineralling the sap, burgeoning up an open tree, originally innocent & blessed! Now exposed to the experimental crucible of the abyss vibe & the flux mode, our breathing is not an opinion. We correct Correctionism & Correctionism corrects us. On a loop or negative-positive feedback (cybernetic sheparding) the body, obviously, effects/affects the mind, the mind, body, the emotions, the mind (also the stockmarket) the mind, the emotions, emotions, the body etc. & in , on & about all combinational permutations of any factor there is not one cause-effect or effect-cause direction. Not only ourselves , everything (event) is both causal & effected by the relational relativities at the spirit-edge of being what it is & what it is not. The being, according to Correctionism, has no way, essence, ding en sich (thing in itself) other than as a temporary space-time-continuum particle or geometry entertaining our memory or hedonic tone, here now once forever, a wave oscillating into vibe, character X, made up of her or his inner or outer environment. This quarks that, that quarks this. We & the polly-universe are neither original or copies, actually, really, en toto. (it's not unique to be unique) Like Picasso, we make, discover & reveal ourselves & the world thru 'discarded finds,' never to be known in their original ignorance. OBITUARY by Heiner Mueller She was dead. She lay in the kitchen on the stone floor, half on her belly, half on her side, the leg angled as if in sleep, her head near the door. I bent down, lifted her face from its side and said the word with which I addressed her when alone. I had the feeling I was in a play. I saw myself leaning against the door frame, half bored half amused to see a man squatting in his kitchen on the stone floor around 3 a.m., bent over his unconscious perhaps dead wife, her head lifted with his hand, speaking, as if to a doll, for no other public than myself. Her face was a grimace, the upper row of teeth askance in her gaping mouth, as if the jaw were dislocated. Raising her up I heard something like a groan, which seemed to come more from the bowels than mouth, in any case from afar. Many times before I had come home and taken her for dead, so that now, raising her up with dread (hope), the terrible noise sounded reassuring, an answer. Later the doctor explained: a kind of belch, generated by a change of position, a residue of breath pressed up by gas in the lungs. Or something like that. I carried her into the bedroom, she was heavier than usual, naked under her bathrobe. A denture fell from her mouth as I dumped her on the bed. It must have loosened in her agony. I knew now why her face had been distorted. I hadn't known she wore dentures. I walked back to the kitchen and turned off the gas, then, after glancing at her empty face, lifted the receiver, thinking (phone in hand) about my life with this corpse, the different deaths she had sought and bungled these past thirteen years, before the one successful night. An attempt with razor blade: she called me when the vein was ready, pointed to the blood. With rope, after locking the door, having left open a window (from hope or distraction) accessible by roof. With quicksilver from a thermometer broken for this purpose. With pills. With gas. From a window or balcony, but only when I was home. I called up a friend (I still didn't want to know she was dead, a matter for the authorities), then the emergency number. ARE YOU CRAZY EXTINGUISH THAT CIGARETTE RIGHT AWAY DEAD ARE YOU SURE YES FOR AT LEAST TWO HOURS ALCOHOL THE HEART HAVEN'T YOU NOTICED YOUR WIFE WHERE IS THE NOTE WHAT KIND OF NOTE HAS SHE LEFT BEHIND A LITTLE NOTE WHERE WERE YOU FROM WHEN TO WHEN TOMORROW NINE O'CLOCK ROOM TWENTY-THREE SUMMONS THE BODY WILL BE PICKED UP AUTOPSY NO PROBLEM NOTHING SHOWS. Waiting for the hearse, a dead woman in the next room. Irreversibility of time. Time of the murderer: erased present within parentheses of past and future. Entering the next room (three times) to glance at the corpse ONE MORE TIME (three times), she is naked under the blanket. Growing apathy about That Thing There with which these feelings of mine (pain grief desire) have nothing more to do. Draw the blanket over the body again (three times), which in the morning will be cut open, over the empty face. By the third time the first trace of poison: blue. Back to the waiting room (three times). First thought of my own death (there is no other), in the small house in Sachsen, in the tiny bedroom, three low stories up, I five or six years old, alone around midnight on the unavoidable chamber pot, moon in the window. HE WHO HELD THE CAT UNDER THE KNIVES OF HIS PLAYMATES WAS I/I THREW THE SEVENTH STONE AT THE SWALLOW'S NEST AND THE SEVENTH WAS THE ONE THAT STRUCK/I HEARD THE DOGS BARK IN THE VILLAGE WHEN THE MOON STOOD/WHITE AGAINST THE WINDOW THE ROOM ASLEEP/I WAS A HUNTER OF WOLVES HUNTED WITH WOLVES ALONE/BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP SOMETIMES I HEARD THE HORSES SCREAM IN THEIR STALLS. Feeling of the universe on a night march along the railway embankment in Mecklenburg, in boots too tight and a too-large uniform: the droning emptiness. CHICKENFACE. Somewhere along the way through the postwar he grabbed on, thin figure in flapping military coat dragged along the ground, cap too large on a too-small bird head, haversack knee high, a kid in field gray. Trotted beside me, dumb, I can't remember any more if he said a word, only if I'd walk quicker or even run (to shake him loose) would he press out little pitiful sounds between his grunting breaths. A couple of times I believed I'd lost him for good, he was only a speck on the plains behind me, then even less; but in the dark he would catch up, at latest when I woke (in barn or open air), lying beside me again, rolled up in his motheaten coat, his bird-head high as my knee; and if I succeeded in standing, slipping away before he could wake, I soon heard behind me his pitiful grunts. I cursed him. He stood before me, looking out with thanks from his swimming dog-eyes. Don't know any more if I spat. I couldn't hit him: one doesn't strike a chicken. I never wanted to kill a man so strongly. I stabbed him with his sidearm, he pulled it out of his coat in order to split his last tin of meat, I ate first so I wouldn't have to share his saliva, stuck the bayonet between his pointy shoulder blades, before he had his turn, saw without regret the blood shining on the grass. That was by a railway embankment, after I'd kicked him, to make him go the other way. I slew him with his field spade as he heaped up stones against the wind, which came over the plains where we had to spend the night. He didn't resist when I tore the spade from his hand, not once, seeing the blade come down, did he wrench out a cry. He must have been waiting for it. Only raised his hands over his head. I saw with relief, in the quickly falling darkness, how a mask of black blood extinguished his chickenface. On a sunny day in May I pushed him from a blasted bridge. I had let him go before me, he didn't look around, a shove in the back sufficed; the blast hole was 20 meters wide, the bridge high enough for a fatal fall, asphalt below. I observed his trajectory, the coat inflated like a sail, the side-rudder of his empty haversack, the fatal landing. Then I stepped over the blast hole: I needed only spread my arms wide to be carried on air like an angel. He has no place any more in my dreams, since I killed him (three times). DREAM Into an old house overgrown with trees, the walls burst and held by trees, I go up the stairs, over which a giant woman naked with mighty breasts, arms and legs spread wide, is trussed up with rope. (Perhaps too she holds in this position without fastenings: suspended.) Above me her enormous thighs, gaping like a pair of scissors, with every step I enter further, the wild black bush of her public hair, rawness of the lips. translated by B. Friedlander in memory Heiner Mueller d. 30 December 1995 tear * * * * * * * here passages invites writings on mergings between poetry & technology Editorial Advisors Belle Gironda Benjamin Friedlander Donald J. Byrd special thanks to Loss Pequen~o Glazier for his work on the Passages webpage, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/passages & _Small Press: An Annotated Guide_ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992) + the EPC Passages, as a "further trajectory..." is now being distributed via DIU-L. If you would like to subscribe, send a message which says SUBSCRIBE DIU-L to listserv@cnsibm.albany.edu You will be asked to confirm this request; detailed instructions are given Along with your subscription to Passages, you will receive the sporadically alive D(escriptions of an) I(maginary) U(niverse) Editor Chris Funkhouser http://www.albany.edu/~cf2785