When I was a scholar of the golden age and the Days of Weimar were golden in the streets nothing was more relevant than the golden State in the minds of sleep, after life finally achieved its politics. I wonder why I bother about these things that changed while anthropologists gave free hurricanes and turbulent weather, eternal horrors of the god primordial fantasies shared all, and the electric universe revealed the age of Saturn a theology again and called it gold. Of course here's what it really was.
Before our golden age the solar sun of Saturn filled the sky. There was no sunlight or rain, and mist came up from the ground. Not stuff we've seen in jpegs sure, our iron age not gold.
We correlate the experiments.
Putting out the sun became a thing, and that's the truth. Good thing the News has already appeared.
L3 on Patrol. |
Time brings Weimar out of smoke recurred, I can't do anything about them brainwash children--Weimar America said, turned within. The days of Noah leap. What analogy seventy five postwar German years make?
They flip me wi' the skillet,
they caught me wi' the pan.
Like, "unhappy, pained, gentle creatures Americans represent the heart of another Germany, those leftists do not understand what happens to them…the whiteness and stillness of their eyes drained of pigment…
Slip to de kitchen, slip up de lead,
Slip ma pockets full short'nin' bread.
How closely I press upon a secret! A Marxist key to the globe! Why am I always attracted by these desolate souls?" (Stephen Spender, Journals, 1939-1983, 30).
Well I'll tell you why!
Because the Globe is a pie crust in the crumb of being.
"Three naked: the new, bronzed German, / the communist clerk, and myself, being English" (Spender. Poems, XIV in 1929) caught me wi' de gal makin' short'nin bread. This splendid coracle, "All for one and one for all." HBO in haunting speech: "I’m haunted by these images, / I’m haunted by their emptiness," Spender says (Poems, XVI)
Spender goes a decade before, but sees "The prisoners / Turned massive with their vaults and dark with dark" (Poems, XX) where "all things are naked and opened unto the eyes" as Saint Stephen would have said. He could have written a book of Psalms, "I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint…I may count all my bones." (Psalm 22.14). But the Weimar does not believe the porcelain words. The "slanting iron hair pattern no stigmata" (Poems, XXXI). The machine of war in the war of three worlds, apocalypse heaven, earth and hell. Choose at least one. That’s what you get when their knees are tight on your arms and they hold you down, for while Chomsky thinks its Hitler from the right, the forces keep marching, left, right, left, right. Except they have phones. It's not Hitler coming, or Weimar back from Danube with Marlene Dietrich in song, it's hyperinflation or Balkanization. It's the man who brings war. Who is able to make war with him? (Revelation 13.4). Four angels loose from the Euphrates.
Electrosmog out of order, out of time, a poem moved by dilemmas for its own sake, no easy kinship with the desolate sweep. I get out Spender’s Poems of 1933 as an oracle, inscribed "For Horst Keller, a souvenir of Oxford London Berlin from Stephen Spender / March 11, 1933." Spender tells his Journal "I met [Horst] on the Hook of Holland boat once, shortly before Hitler’s rise to power," twelve days after the Reichstag fire (27 Feb 1933). Hitler's "rise" ended in March 1933 after the Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act of 1933. President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933 after elections and intrigues. Then Hitler used The Enabling Act to constitutionally exercise dictatorial power without legal objection.
Which do you prefer, prewar Germany or prewar you?
The oracle "throws up strange shapes, broad curves / And parallels clean like the steel of guns" (Spender. Poems, XXVI).
"That program of the antique Satan / Bristling with guns on the indented page" (Poems, XXXIII).
To everybody empowered by the need to remember addresses and time no more, electronic designs are "more beautiful and soft than any moth / With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path" (Poems, XXVII).
Who are these pained creatures?
Sir Stephen says, Watch the hawk with an indifferent eye, that almost won War on the sun until the hands, wings, are found (Poems, 1933, 11).
Hurry up Horst!
Keller dismissed is "always just as gentle, just as isolated [with] a restlessness that never ceased..." but the poor ghosts, as he puts, for the oracle stands for American hearts, "peculiar whiteness, drained of pigment," "most of these poets and writers...delivered their sad advice on the literary life which I was now just about to enter, like ghosts in purgatory, conscious of the relative failure of their illusions" (World On Worlds, 89).
As if appointing a board of directors Auden had assigned Spender to be the poet at Oxford. Isherwood got to be the novelist, but they were grasping at escape from Weimar and fell to Dylan Thomas, drunk all the time, or Faulkner drunk, or Edith Sitwell in some depth psychology of esoteric Jung. The lords of lit dismiss its past and victims of the present as Americans dismiss the past, as Spender does "the sustained gentle sense of unhappiness" (31).
It’s not just England naked in the world.
England is America without the water to cross. England echoes America, America China, India, Ukraine, Egypt, Japan.
Fast forward to the Colorado late at night, the edge of a lunar eclipse, Halloween with fires, rooftops call on civilization to surrender to what it does not believe, bizarre Earth burrowers, mole prophets.
So much signifying Horst Keller naked. On one he is the American dismissed for lack of depth--for all poets and critics scourge each another, and on the other hand he is the counterpart of bullying Spender himself received, "My parents kept me from children who were rough…their knees tight on my arms. / I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys" (Poems XII).
Pound called Yeats' The Tower putrid.
Hemingway called Spender squeamish, and why not, he was as cloistered in his cell phone world as Oops, you?
Spender and Keller prophesy how we live in our Weimar before the fall, "coracles with faces painted on" (Spender, Poems, III).
Cited:
Poems. Stephen Spender (Faber, 1933).
Glossary: