I came across George many years ago, and was quite thrilled. A self-taught artist who gained huge acceptance and affection. He achieved wonderful, off-the-wall effects.
See my earlier post on the man and his art.
https://wordpress.com/post/michael9murray.wordpress.com/10678
Syrian refugee child – vulnerable, small, and more at risk for being a young girl.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-68784762
Ah, but there we stop, because this is a puppet, an enormous puppet.
And isn’t she just wonderful !
This is a non-partisan post.
What constitutes a political poem ?
A current dominant argument is that everything written for public readership has a political position, whether explicit or implicit… or flexing between.
This is our current need. It may not always be so. Nor may it have been so in past moments.
In a self-identifying rational society the other than rational is a recognisable response. But that is still a political stance.
Can you be apolitical ? It is a choice, and so can be viewed as taking a stance.
In contemporary Western society… but, no, when talking culture we must needs be specific. In multi-cultural societies ? Whichever definition it all comes down to specifics, to cultures, countries, individuals, but individuals speaking for others.
The poet with the individual voice and take on things, where can that one stand, how communicate to other than a limited number of others who have known, experienced, grown-up in, similar circumstances ?
It’s in what we all share, irrespective of language, lifestyle, political and/or religious directives. Does it have to be about issues at all ?
Take East Germany, the GDR. Part of the collective experiment, with its socialist-realist cultural directives.
The Marxist mindset made everything political.
Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) was born and lived in eastern Germany, and what was to become East Germany, until leaving in 1977 in the repercussions from the Wolf Biermann expulsion case. She was one of the signatories of the letter of dismay to the leadership at their cowardly tactics towards him. Life was made too uncomfortable after that, work dried up, micro-aggressions… she applied to leave, and it was granted. They usually dragged it out and dragged it out.
To start over in a different historio-cultural environment. She had believed in the ‘experiment’, it was just the particular interpretation in practice that was unpalatable.
Now she was with ‘the enemy’, and all its piffling consumerist twaddle.
Still, when you have strengthened your muscle against the iron order of the East, you have something to rely on to get you through.
https://www.dw.com/en/widely-regarded-german-lyricist-sarah-kirsch-dies/a-16830401
So, is this poem political? From 1974, part of her GDR period:
Still a Light on In The Kremlin
This is Lenin’s cat with white fur
Every night she goes patrolling
And her serious eyes of emerald
Peep on time out the window
She eats wayward bits of writing
With her paw knocks down the inkwell
So that nothing can be read
Masha slips through all the doorways
And if sentries stand before them
She will pinch her eyes so tight
Steering with her sickle tail
Safely through the pairs of black boots
………………………………………………………………
(translated by Magritt Lehbert)
Political because she does not take her subject seriously. In the severe 1970s I should imagine this treatment would not have gone down well, and yet… the subject was in accord in the regime.
This is one of several Russia/Moscow based poems in the 1974 book. I don’t know the circumstances. Perhaps the all-important GDR Writer’s Union required a tribute from its members, perhaps even ordered/arranged a Moscow trip?
Another poem from this volume became quite infamous : Black Beans
Afternoons I pick a book up
Afternoons I put a book down
Afternoons it occurs to me there is war
Afternoons I forget each and every war
Afternoons I grind coffee
Afternoons I put the ground-up coffee
Together again backwards lovely
Black beans
Afternoons I get dressed and undressed
First put on make-up then I wash myself
Sing am silent
That the regime could allow such writing! or That the regime would allow such writing…. The official responses varied over time.
So much can be read in the poem – are the deferrals of action due to specific political calls to act ? The coffee beans, Cuban perhaps ? The book, was it de rigour reading for citizens of the GDR ?
What was the war ? Vietnam ? Is there an echo here of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, where there is always war, to justify the regime’s conditions of control ?
So much can be read in the poem, and yet the official approach could not see that because only one way of writing was acceptable at the time.
On that war subject, take this earlier poem – but first, some details. In 1957 the GDR set up its own People’s Army. After that the GDR promoted its miltary credentials, especially every GDR celebration.
When He Has to Go to War
I swing myself into the apple tree
Tie myself fast with my hair
I shall wait for you Golden One
One month or more in the wind
(ibid)
The response is more in line with folk song, folk tale, than socialist-realist. Of course using this particular mode she was in line with the cultural models of ‘the people’.
And here we get a glimpse of how she was able to handle her balancing act on that rope between self and State, sometimes a slack rope, sometimes a tight rein.
There is a comment later on in the memoir Red Love, The Story of an East German Family, by Max Leo, about how the author’s mother, Annette Leo, another disgruntled believer in the GDR, took to reading an author who had retreated into herself rather than reach outward in challenge. I suspect the reference was to the celebrated GDR writer Elke Erb.
You could see Sarah Kirsch responding similarly, writing from and asserting the individual, rather than collective experience.
That writing is always the hardest to achieve, because it demands a word on word attention, tuning each one out of the mass tone, and into the personal.
The Preface to Anvil’s Winter Music selection of her work writes of her techniques of Gliding enjambments… frequent omission of punctuation… (that) offer resistance to any quick, superficial reading… some of her lines never yield a ‘correct’ reading but remain ambiguous….
This can illustrated in the poem Calling Formula from her 1970s Magic Spells collection
……………………
Swim
Under his eyelid mingle
With my hair
Bind him so he doesn’t know
Is it Monday is it Friday and….…
……………
A lot of these literary techniques are second-nature to us now. At the time they must have been a little outrageous – how rigid even the most revoluntionary systems can be !
The writing used outrageous techniques, and completely avoided socialist realist subject matter. I think we begin to grasp how and why the writing of Sarah Kirsch was a bit of a problem.
Even her name ! She had changed it from Ingrid as too Teutonic, to the more Hebraic Sarah. Anti-Semicism still lingered from the Third Reich, no matter how vehemently the new regime repudiated those times. To go back to the book, above, Red Love even there there was a school episode where Jewish identity was a serious problem.
So how did her writing change after she left East Germany ? Like many, she realised and relished a world without a wall –
from Billet of Thanks
This is a beautiful day. I sit down into it, the eucalyptus|
leaves fly down and up, up for a long time, and when I see|
the tree body naked and white I know that it is a lovely|
day.
An opening up, and not the negotiated desire of before.
Initially she moved to West Berlin, but soon afterwards moved away, to northern Germany, towards the Danish border.
I cannot help but think of this poem as a distant relation of The Coat, by W B Yeats. My connection only, perhaps. If there was a need to walk naked, it seems only a passing one.
She seemed to be seeking out an austerity, a bleakness of landscape, that met her inner landscape. Her later work captures these moods very well, but offers little comfort. Her techniques continue, but are more in service of expression of selfhood, than marking out a difference from the State as before. The new State was identifiably German, but a lot less controlling.
An opening up, and doing away with the mask, to be able stand as oneself.
There is another poem Crow Tree, that tells of a tree whose blackened autumn leaves blow away. Once again the naked tree, only this time a crowd of black crows fly into it, as the leaves had blown away.
How we present ourselves to the world; that is a masking also.
We have the well-endorsed list of dissenting writers, known mostly for their meticulous stands against their regimes. Sarah Kirsch owns a place here also, the quality of her imagination and writing weigh differently but the strength of her dissent is unquestionable.
‘The Lost Women of Science Initiative is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with two related missions: To tell the forgotten stories of female scientists who made groundbreaking achievements in their fields and to inspire girls and young women to embark on careers in STEM.
The Initiative’s flagship is the Lost Women of Science podcast, which, through deep reporting and rich storytelling, revisits the historical record one extraordinary scientist at a time.’
https://www.lostwomenofscience.org
This is an excellent initiative, and really worth spending time exploring. It is an on-going project – which, in itself, is quite an indictment of the scientific establishment. Let us hope, no, let us make, that a past-tense statement, a matter of historical curiosity only.
I cannot add to this, and ask you only to explore for yourselves -it says far more than I possibly can.
This appealed to my quirky humour, I just had to share
http://getbacklauretta.com/2024/04/01/it-figures/
And the answer is literally ‘blowing in the wind’, my friend.
From the Get back, Lauretta blog
This is a hugely enjoyable and surprisingly varied blog page. I would urge you to visit, and explore.
Oh yes, count me in !
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-68649600
… if only as audience.
Begun in 1914, and continued roughly until ‘running’ out of sponsors in 2011, it is now On Again !
Hold on to your croissants, mes amis !
Based on a True Story, by Delphine de Vigan, published by Bloomsbury, 2017. Translation by George Miller.
The banner on the book back reads Do Not Trust This Book. And for good reason. This is the book to follow Nothing Holds Back the Night, the supposedly autobiographical novel.
Fiction and reality – fiction’s relationship with reality is … let’s say oblique, at least.
The book begins with author fielding the fame and infamy her previous novel brought with it.
The problem is that fiction is composed from the real. Many have tried to blur the boundaries.
The author contemplates her next book, based, she thinks, possibly on Reality Shows.
Yes, think Big Brother, Love Island, but now for us Traitors.
How many others, like me, were appalled by the first series of Traitors, thinking How could the participants be so………!
But we only saw what we were given, what was edited, and doctored.
In this book the author chats with such a programme editor: Of course ! she says. We create people !
Imagine watching the programme you have just been a part of and seeing yourself with a very different character, maybe someone quite hateful. The participants would have been prepared for the feedback before the show would be released. But then, this is all hypothetical.
There are certain magic stage shows that bring an audience member on stage. The trick/illusion is performed, and the audience gasps. The audience member stands dumbfounded, Nothing happened. What did I miss ?
It is all in the audience’s view position. Something quite ordinary, in certain circumstances, can be made to seem… mysterious, threatening, glamorous… I think we get the picture.
And so, with the earlier book – did we fall into the trap, knowingly, or unknowingly, of believing it was truth, reality ? There is no shame in that; it does not make us appear naive or simplistic persons, it shows how skilled the author is – and she is very skilled.
In this book a woman inveigles her way into the author’s life. It is told in retrospect, with the author shocked at her own gullibility as she recounts it all in detail.
The pay-off at the end is shocking in itself, the realisation that… oh no, that’d spoil it.
Our lives, the narratives we create of our lives, based on memory, maybe diary entries, other’s accounts… how trustworthy are they ? Do we fashion ourselves upon what we secretly would most want ? The meta-narratives that play out in our beings, they are as much ourselves as not. What images we present to others, and of what we think we know of ourselves, do not always match up.
One again Delphine de Vigan has produced a remarkable book.
From their Transmitting Live album.
The song, under the Scottish Gaelic title, Pog won oidche earraich, first appeared on their 1993 album, Amazing Things.
I mention the date to give context to the lyrics ie after the break-up of the Soviet Union etc. It is surprising that, apart from the specifics of events, the song could easily allude to our own times.
The song is, as most of Runrig’s songs, aspirational nevertheless.
British translation
The six o’clock world
the day’s work over
family, taking of the fruits
of plenty, good health, and love
Russia is falling down around my ears
the Middle East in a broth of darkness
and you, evil, murder, and fighting
in my life every night
Oh love
what power there was in that embrace
that has left me in union with you today
who could ever have foreseen all that has grown
from a kiss one spring evening
The grasp that was so firm and special
like a hammer in my fist
the moon that was so bright
and promised so much
We we’re like sailing ships
on the young, yellow ocean of the heart
confronted by children, and the world family
without voice, laughter, a god, or food
Oh love
What power there was in that embrace
That has left me in union with yountoday
Who could ever have foreseen all that has grown
From a kiss one spring evening
So where do the stars come from, I said
from where did the sun appear
we are so wounded below this moon
souls tortured beyond hell itself
still you keep bringing inspiration to my years
with blessings beyond my need
whiter than the snows of each winter
the song of love, my confession of guilt
Oh love
What power there was in that embrace
that has left me in union with you today
who could ever have foreseen all that has grown
from a kiss one spring evening
Lyrics by Calum MacDonald, Rory MacDonald
translation from the Scots Gaelic by http://www.musixmatch.com
This was quite a surprise for me, on the esteemed la regina gioiosa blog site.
https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/152288470
Stay with it, savour the subtleties of sounds. And with me, enjoy.
Synaptic Island and also Living Sound
This is me making every day International Women’s Day.
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