Diese Maschine hat nie eine Schlangengrube im Magen gespürt, wie es ist, dort hineinzufallen, fern von rettendem Seil und Korb, jenseits helfender Hände, weiss nicht, wie es sein kann, aufzuwachen und zu wünschen, tot zu sein.
is a small (or large) machine made out of words. Williman Carlos Williams (quote found in a personal communication from Jeffrey Gardiner)
Diese Maschine hat nie Schmerz gefühlt,
schlief nie in einem zu weichen Bett und träumte von Morden, die vor Jahrhunderten begangen wurden, trank nie zuviel Rotwein und barte Seelenvolles vor Trinkfreunden auf, von allem redend ausser von Liebe.
Im unendlichen Kleinen sind gekrümmte Masse nützlicher als starre.
Das kann auch für das Ungeheure gelten.
Ein aufrichtig gekrümmtes Lied.
Das Lied als Mass.
Das Lied als Instrument.
Das Lied als Gefährt.
P übersetzt so ein Lied.
This machine has never felt pain.
Never slept in a too-soft bed dreaming of murders committed centuries ago, never drunk too much red wine and bared its soul to its drinking companion, talking of everything but love.
This machine has never
felt the pit of snakes in its stomach drop down past the reach of rope and basket, past the help of hands, has not known what it might be like to wake up wishing it were dead.
This machine has never worn
a too-big straw hat to keep out the sun on an October afternoon, never laughed so much its belly ached, never sat sipping tusli tea from a borrowed glass under a winter moon, listening to an old Hindi song sung by a young South Indian voice…
I: an English letter which stands for myself,
I: solid, a solitaire, a one letter word.
EGO: a Latin triple, two vowels appearing like elephants ears and the G: somehow open and not open.
ICH: again a triple, a German: a solid statue seems to offer itself as a construction supporting the C: the openness towards what is coming next. The H serves as a rocket, catapulting the C into other dimensions.
I: solid like a skyscraper, tender and rank like Pounds New York,
I: one tower of the World Trade Center, no longer proud and solid, but vulnerable and suffering from recycling its dignity.
I: fragile not since September 11, but since Turings paper of 1936/37, challenging Descartes`Ego, by programming:
I = blank or – , i.e. possibly nothing.
9.
I’m on morpheme today.
*
A word so fierce it refutes the break.
The dusk is mine.
Child of sleep, raiser of ghouls, take the hurt.
*
No sense in rupture.
*
Morphing one into the other
Crystalline analgesic anaesthetic
The numbing narcotic of loss.
I = shit (Dieter Roth)
I = something that matches (misst) itself with the gods not unluckily (Friedrich Hölderlin)
I = ?
8.
The naming of Hannibal’s elephants.
*
They strode out of the Atlas,
flat-headed, fan-eared,
fighting with tusk and trunk,
smelling bad enough to drive the horses mad.
Historians, naturalists, archaeologists fussing
over a single Carthaginian coin.
Snow, and black
trumpeting rock.
*
Names invincible enough.
Names with war in their throats
and a dying hunger.
Spearheads entering flesh.
Mountains being scaled.
*
Only one survived.
Surus, the Syrian.
Indian elephant reaches Carthage from Syria via Egypt.
Names the colour of flint.
*
Their mouths turned blue.
In their brains the names still whirred,
thirty-seven bar one,
whispered by poets
in the form of birds that fell.
The gasp of the last big secret.
7.
I could call you Q, she said.
Like Q for quill, or Quasimodo.
Almost like you, that name.
Or that other, that supplier of miraculous gadgets.
“Nice to know old Q can still surprise you…”
There’s a line worth having, second only to
“If he’s Q, does that make you R?”
*
Renaming him rapidly,
she falls from consonant to vowel,
a white-water rafter
kayaking from fear to exhilaration at the speed of a sudden shout.
*
Between Q, and A, no questions, nor answers.
Just this summoning, simple
as only one syllable can be.