Any Day Now, Any Day Now, We Shall Be Released
– por los indignados del mundo

In order to pursue
other opportunities

spend more quality time
with the family
dvd or butterfly collection

we have been

let go like a bow string
offered a package of canned laughter
made redundant as reason

retrenched, restructured
rightsized, rationalised
reshuffled, reconfigured

relieved of duties & dollars
dehired like a portaloo
excessed like Michael Hutchence
unassigned like an old hooker

uninstalled

you heard right, uninstalled

in a word fucked
over & released

yes, hallelujah
by gosh & golly
we have been
released

Ernst Stadler: Two Translations of Der Spruch

[Below are Ernst Stadler’s poem Der Spruch in the original German along with my own translation and an imitation in English by Stephen Berg. This is in response to some reader comments: Mike Horvitz’ request for a more literal translation of one of his favourite poems and Jim Devin’s request for some posting of the German originals. Readers can obviously make up their own minds as to the success or adequacy of both translations. There is more information on the early 20th century Expressionist Stadler in my previous translations of two, in my view better, poems of his on this blog: Early Spring on 27/06/2011 and Journey over the Cologne Rhine Bridge at Night on 26/07/2010]

Der Spruch

In einem alten Buche stiess ich auf ein Wort,
Das traf mich wie ein Schlag und brennt durch meine Tage fort:
Und wenn ich mich an trübe Lust vergebe,
Schein, Lug und Spiel zu mir anstatt des Wesens hebe,
Wenn ich gefällig mich mit raschem Sinn belüge,
Als wäre Dunkles klar, als wenn nicht Leben tausend wild verschlossene Tore trüge,
Und Worte wieder spreche, deren Weite nie ich ausgefühlt,
Und Dinge fasse, deren Sein mich niemals aufgewühlt,
Wenn mich willkommner Traum mit Sammethänden streicht,
Und Tag und Wirklichkeit von mir entweicht,
Der Welt entfremdet, fremd dem tiefsten Ich,
Dann steht das Wort mir auf: Mensch, werde wesentlich!

Here is my own translation which sticks fairly closely to the original except for some different lineation from line 6 onwards (which ends up giving the poem one more line) but does not attempt any imitation of the original’s rhyming couplets (which, along with the rhythm, makes up most of the poem’s charm in the original):

The Saying

In an old book I came upon a saying.
It hit me like a blow and burns through my days.
And when I give myself over to dull lust,
Indulge in appearance, lies, games, not essence,
When I lie to myself in quick, comfortable judgement
As if what’s dark were transparent, life not a thousand
Locked and burning gates, mouth words whose wideness
I have never measured, grab for things whose being
Has never moved my deep, when welcome dream
Caresses me with velvet hand, day, reality withdraws
From me, cut off from the world, cut off from deepest me,
Then, within, that saying arises:
Man, become what you really are!

And here is Stephen Berg’s fairly free imitation of the poem (in Edward Hirsch’s anthology Poet’s Choice, pp. 75-76), his greatest liberties being taken in stanzas two, three and seven which make up new metaphors not contained in the original:

The Saying

In an old book
I stumbled across a saying.
It was like a stranger
punching me in the face,

it won’t stop
gnawing at me.
When I walk around at night,
looking for a beautiful girl,

when a lie or a description
of life or somebody’s fake
way of being with people
occurs instead of reality,

when I betray myself with
an easy explanation
as if what’s dark is clear,
as if life doesn’t have thousands

of locked, burning gates,
when I use words without really
having known their strict openness
and put my hands around things

that don’t excite me,
when a dream hides my face with soft hands
and the day avoids me,
cut off from the world,

cut off from who I am deeply,
I freeze where I am
and see hanging in the air in front of me
STOP BEING A GHOST!

Information-gathering is like consuming mass-produced jelly. Knowledge is the effort of chewing your way through meat from an animal you have laboriously tracked through swamps and forests and then slaughtered yourself.

Because the Spectacle, capitalist consumer society, knows nothing but information consumption, the labour of gaining knowledge in this society is inherently subversive.

Information deals with fragments and bytes. Knowledge deals in wholes and holons. Wisdom’s currency is silence.

The mind can produce a computer but the computer, by definition, can never reproduce the mind and its explicate, the universe. It is ontologically different: it is defined in all its workings by its basic technical structure of 1/0, yes/no, either/or, i.e. by dualism. The structure of the mind/universe, like poetry, is yes-and-no and both/and, i.e. non-dual.

Reading on screen, you quickly skim and scan the surface of information as if the text were an image made of letters floating on the shallows. Reading on paper, you are drawn deeply into the text and, thoroughly immersed, lose yourself as you swim with strong strokes in the complex currents of meaning.

Digitalisation is both potentially democratising and the totalisation of the Spectacle – Capital’s reign of the image – into the very pores of everyday life. Work, i.e. capital accumulation, becomes 24/7.

A computer in every child’s bedroom, a wall-length 3D TV in every living room and the real world dissolves into distraction. This very much suits the powers that be.

Computer screens, like TV screens, inherently hate long arguments. As talking heads are ‘bad (boring) TV’, so reasoning is ‘bad cyberspace’. The medium is the problem, not its contents.

Reasoning takes time, patience, listening. Previously, democracy and reasoning were considered coterminous. This is no longer the case. Where the sound bite and PR media event rule democracy doesn’t.

Not exercised, the muscles of reasoning slacken and atrophy. The new muscles being exercised are those of scanning and shallow reading, twittering and sound biting, image projection and immersion. And, simultaneously, those of globalizing a One World consciousness.

Information technology and the internet are as ambivalent as capitalism, their matrix. Their potentials point towards the post-capitalist utopia of One Humanity, their actuality is crass commercialism and totalised state surveillance.

Only social and cultural revolution can liberate the democratic and anarchist potentials now nascent in anti-and post-capitalist cyber-phenomena like free software, open source, creative commons, wikis.

Fellow poet and naturalist Lorne Johnson has posted an interview with yours truly at his Wild Bundanoon blog. It’s about living here in Bundanoon and also contains a poem.

http://wildbundanoon.blogspot.com/

Edward Hopper, People in the Sun (1960)

[My translations of five poems by Wolf Wondratscheck: b. 1943; also creative prose, radio plays, essays; his four poetry books of the 1970s were almost pop phenomena in Germany, selling over a 100,000 copies]

Men and Women

The women I met needed men.
I met men who needed women.
But the women were alone
and the men were lonely.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it even worked without alcohol.
Sometimes a few laughed and loved each other
a while, a night or a year.
But in seventh heaven only Russians
and Americans.
I saw dead victors
and made-up losers,
those without hope, the despairing,
suicides.
I saw men and women.
I saw women waiting for love
and men waiting for women.
I saw men and women looking for people
with different genitals than those
of men and women.
I met men and women
who thought this difference old fashioned
and went back to puberty
with alien hormones in their bodies
and looked for other fairy tales than the one
going back to Paradise.
In all the polls tenderness comes out on top…
but tender women, tender men…
where could that lead?
And the men were tender now only with themselves
and the women remained women even in their heads
and naughty only in their minds,
an old story, older than
old love letters.

And the men ‒ are there any left?
And the women ‒ where are they?

What is it,
this animal,
made of men and women,
and unborn?

A few men talk.
A few women give birth.
The victims are born with a scream
and shunted off to live and die on
in the echoes of dismay.
It is the most beautiful war.
Brutal love and romantic violence
and happiness coldly crashes
into the sun.

I met men who needed women.
The women I met needed men.
Beginning and end repeat
like dead seasons.
After every love affair the next memory
and afterwards the forgetting
that never ends.

And at some point we’re all standing together
at a bar or a bus stop
or a window
and drinking
and waiting
and falling.

How I grew up

I didn’t think about things then.
When it rained I thought now it’s raining
all over the world. No wind and I thought
now the planes are falling down, and the apples.
Picking apples I saw my aunt’s arse
and thought now they’ll put you in the loony bin.
I sat in the woods, hated all flowers
and wanted to become old.
I only read books I didn’t understand.
I was no bigger than a cowboy’s hip
when I felt something and thought of love
and did it with my hand
for the first time.
It hurt.
Dreams made my nose bleed.
I made jokes, shat past the pot
and buggered up my Sunday shoes playing football.
That was the era there were still hunger artists.
Suddenly I wanted to die for no reason,
looked in my head for a pair of hands
to shake the hunger artist’s hand with;
even then I was a romantic,
sat in the woods, hated all flowers
and wanted to be a poet –

but nothing came of it.

Empty Beer Garden

Here you were already sitting
in other barbarian times
with a beer and a
world history.

Now it’s raining.

Tables and chairs are standing there
emitting eternity value.

A thunder storm is answering the sighs
of the contented.

The end of the world
is not coming to an end.

A stillness is entering the mountains
and monks walking over paths
as if over a river current.

I’m too old to be a boxing pro

Slowly it was getting evening
and slowly dark.

A girl called;
a girl, or as you would say,
another one of those.

She was AFRAID of going mad.
I don’t know, she said.
I don’t know either, I said.
We talked about the weather
and Zadek’s Shakespeare production, right,
and about the advantages of carrot juice.
I listened and got tired.
I thought of lonely, impotent, cold men
dreaming at night of other women
in some yard entrance somewhere
in their head,
they’re AFRAID of going mad too;
tenderness is like a climbing plant,
it’ll pull you down under.
I don’t know, she said.
The sky was cloudy,
no stars to be seen,
the men coming home from work
were already sleeping, separated from their wives
by more than sleep.
AFRAID? I waited for three hours
for Ali’s fight against Spinks and crept
into bed after Ali’s defeat,
tired and old like an ex-world champ.

I lay in bed
and outside it grew light,
it stayed dark.

Last Stop

I stood at the bus stop
and waited;
and when the bus came I got in
and waited again.
In front of me a girl was making out with her guy
and because I had nothing else to do I watched
her hanging around his neck and sometimes
looking back at me looking forward to her.
I stood in the bus,
rocked out the street with my legs
and thought of nothing at all;
at some point I got out, went home
and thought
‘there’s nothing makes a man lonelier
than the soft laugh at another guy’s ear.’

[my elegy in memory of Michael Wilson, paramedic killed on Christmas Eve in our bioregion. For readers overseas: the first line refers to the annual Sydney-Hobart yacht race; the MCG in the second line is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, site of the annual Boxing Day cricket match; the Shire in the third line is Sutherland Shire in Sydney's south]

The threads that bind

Ropes cast off on the harbour, Mexican
waves rippling the MCG, & Mick Wilson
no longer here. Paramedic from the Shire,
he gets the call on Christmas Eve. This

one’s got the chopper dragonfly-droning
over Carrington Falls, highland space
of the endangered grevillea we placed
near the creek, mauve anemone tentacles

lighting up the gloom. His three kids
edgy with the excitement of one more
sleep while a tourist stuck in a far ravine
clings to him, a saviour swinging steep

from a metal thread. Cradling the man,
he pushes off the ledge with all the fall
of birth, his body a shield breaking
its heart as it hits the opposite wall

& in the homes of hundreds saved
lights go out on tinselled trees.
Above kids’ beds webs of Indian
dream-catchers tremble. One more sleep.

Climate Chaos: Arctic Warming, Positive Feedback, Tipping Points

Below three condensed articles from the last six years I have gathered on arctic warming. These facts and connections are seldom mentioned by the powers that be and their media, preferring to concentrate instead on things like ice-free shipping routes, more mineral and oil exploration and the plight of polar bears. Because of the scientific uncertainties, and political pressures, even the IPCC tends to leave them out of their emissions scenarios.

Please draw your own conclusions as to the urgency of the need to pull the emergency brakes on all carbon emissions (and the social revolution needed in all countries to do so). One would hope that the global Occupy movements might soon begin to link their social and economic concerns with such survival issues. After tipping points, climate chaos or runaway global warming would mean not only the collapse of economies but also the deaths of billions.

2005

Ian Sample, ‘Warming hits ‘tipping point’ (in: The Guardian Weekly 19-25/8/2005, p. 1)

A vast expanse of Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warned last week.

An area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres – the size of France and Germany combined – has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia is the world’s largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is a scenario scientists have feared since first identifying ‘tipping points’… […] Climate scientists reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.

West Siberian peat bog could hold some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored in the ground around the world.

2009

Fred Pearce, ‘Meltdown’ (in: New Scientist 28/3/2009, pp. 32-36):

“I am shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago [in 2009], and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.” […] “Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It’s unprecedented.”

Discussions about the consequences of the vanishing ice usually focus on the opening up of new frontiers for shipping and mineral exploration, or on the plight of polar bears, which rely on sea ice for hunting. The bigger picture has got much less attention: a warmer Arctic will change the entire planet, and some of the potential consequences are nothing short of catastrophic.

Changes in ocean currents, for instance, could disrupt the Asian monsoon, and nearly two billion people rely on those rains to grow their food. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it is also possible that POSITIVE FEEDBACK from the release of methane from melting permafrost could lead to RUNAWAY WARMING.

The danger is that if too much methane is released, the world will get hotter NO MATTER HOW DRASTICALLY WE SLASH our greenhouse gas emissions. […] after remaining static for the past decade, methane levels have begun to rise again, and the source could be Arctic permafrost.

Edward Schuur of the University of Florida estimates that 100 billion tonnes of this carbon [locked away in the permafrost] could be released by thawing this century, based on standard scenarios. If that all emerged in the form of methane, it would have a warming effect equivalent to 270 years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels.

Put together, the latest research paints a disturbing picture. Since existing models do not include feedback effects such as the heat generated by decomposition [of organic matter in thawing permafrost], the permafrost could melt far faster than generally thought.

While shrinking sea ice in 2007 may have attracted all the headlines, some researchers say what is really scaring them is a simultaneous jump in methane levels.
Most worrying of all is the risk of a runaway greenhouse effect. The carbon stored in the far north has the potential to raise global temperatures by 10 degrees C or more. If global warming leads to the release of more greenhouse gases, these releases will cause yet more warming and still more carbon will escape to the atmosphere. Eventually the feedback process would continue even if we cut our greenhouse emissions to zero. At that point climate change would be out of control. […]

Nobody can be sure how likely all this is. Indeed, the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who compile its reports cannot even reach agreement on how to quantify the probabilities of such events. As a result, the ‘scary scenarios’ were barely mentioned in the last report.

2011

Steve Connor, ‘Shock as Retreat of Arctic Sea Ice Releases Deadly Greenhouse Gas’ (in: The Independent/UK 14/12/2011)

In late summer [2011], the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 10,000 square miles of sea off the East Siberian coast. Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, both seismic and acoustic, to monitor the “fountains” or plumes of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said. “I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them.”

“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said. “We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal.”

[a 2009 video to form a 'bike block' at the abysmal Copenhagen Climate conference by the Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination, still worth watching for its aesthetics and message]

[shots all taken at Kiama on the south coast two days ago]

[unpublished sonnet of mine on light, energy, mass, Einstein]

e equals mc squared

light hits our lake in nano-shrapnel of inter-galactic eye splinters
the word equals equals a is b, mass is energy light-enlightened
build the bomb mr president/don’t build/now you have it, ban it
terror equals a white summer wall even without human imprints

e as in essence/ spiritually wired essence of carboniferous capitalism
e as in ease as in fridges or louie da fly spreading disease with the greatest of
e’s what happened to eternal delight after & because of Blake
mass equals something heavy catholics used to feel lighter after

antipodean light anchors land & sea like sky theology’s wordy fable
lite as in ciggies, beer, angel wings, verse, commitments
light thoughts are heavier than the meditating gravity of the universe
at six your life darkened by the light switched on above the operating table

at the zurich patent office albert’s life seemed lightless, unshared
at hiroshima life melted into lightless mass under a mushroom of light squared