On filthbook (like this!)

I returned from filthbook the other night with the predictable feelings – vacuously psyched-up, morosely enjoying the illusion of having done something, while knowing full well that a kitsch, peter-pan nowhere land had again managed to rob me of ninety minutes of my life, time which I shall never again recover. I came across my closest friend from my young adulthood –aged twenty-two, I’d broken off the friendship with him completely, an action that had meant a lot to me. There he was, taking a home-made quiche out of the oven, sending out his charming, playful, bashful smile in photos taken thirteen years later. Suppressing the separation-pain and necessity of the break – buzz, buzz, click, click – I click him the pre-formulated filth request – or, to use the official party language, I filth him –  which he filths back, accepted, without message, some days later. So now we’re friends in filth on filthbook & if we meet, by chance, on the street in Edinburgh – him say coming up from one of the Cowgate pubs and me going down that street by the back of the Tron, past where the City Cafe used to be – we’re less likely now to blank each other, though the objective shame flowing under the swapping of Broughton High School news would only be the greater, because of the official link between us in the book.

It makes me think of card-carrying party members in one-party states; of course most of them know and knew in private that being in the pary is the lowest of the sheepish low; but being in the party can get you jobs, get you deals you wouldn’t have got, kid you into a tolerable self-image. Is that a bad-taste comparison? -  however bad-taste filthbook may be, it doesn’t torture or kill you, like the apparatchiks did. I wonder. The middle-aged man sounding of in front of 104 filthy-friends about the coolest piece of 1990s techno he’s currently listening to – isn’t he desensitising a piece of his consciousness for ever, murdering it actually? And who are we, sitting with bags under our eyes, flicking through these posts – bystanders, curious for 0.25 seconds, the vicarious pleasure not worth the skin of scum settling thereby on the soul.

But must finish now. Writing this article, I’ve been neglecting my duties on The Book for far too long. 

Goethe's Eight Hour Avantgarde

We sat in the very back row of the Thalia through eight hours of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I & II. The play started at 5 pm and finished at 1.15 am. The night of 1^st October this year in Hamburg was warm – a pleasant 21 degrees when we came out for the first break at 7.45 pm, after the end of Faust Part I; it was a wise directorial decision to pull that through in a oner. The sold-out theatre combined with the warm weather outside made drowsy air-clouds float up to us at the back, sending us to sleep now and again during the action.

            And that action was fantastic; it didn’t matter at all that you woke realising you may have dosed off for half-an-hour, the dramatic body was so rich that you couldn’t be sorry about anything you might have missed. It was an irreverent take on Goethe’s work, with a bit scripted in at the start of Part II happy to proclaim that many of the rhymes in Faust are shite, words pulled haphazardly out of a rhyming dictionary.

            Yet if there are a few duff rhymes in among the endings of the 12,000 lines that make up Faust I & II, then it hardly matters. The series of strong images that comprise Faust’s life – from being involved in the making of paper money, to – very much in the spirit of the Frankenstein times – being involved in making an artificial human being, were convincingly portrayed. The eight and a half hours were a time out of time, a spiritual and intellectual holiday. 

At the Thalia Theatre's Faust

On the October 1^st we saw the second night of the Thalia theatre’s uncut production of Goethe’s Faust. More on this theatre experience later, but we’ll begin with the end, with Faust, now saved, being pulled up to heaven. The text of these final lines of the play belongs to a “Chorus Mysticus”; in most productions these verses will be recited, but at the Thalia they were sang with the whole cast on stage, to a catchy tune, musical style. This is my English translation of what Thalia’s Chorus Mysticus sang:

All which will die on us

Is only allegory;

The inadmissible

is our contemporary;

The indescribable

now has been done;

The forever-womanly

draws us ever on.

A Lot to Swallow.

      Before returning on a late night train from the city to my suburban home, the yellow press suddenly becomes enticing, when in day light hours it's nothing of the sort. Hamburg's tabloid, the Mopo, normally suffices; but finding myself recently late in the evening at a community centre after a storytelling evening, I realised that any one of the strange free magazines on offer from all manner of unheard of groupings could easily rival the Mopo, for narratives of conflict, dirt & salaciousness. Picking up "Info of the Imprisoned" magazine, I certainly got a different kind of "info" than I had intended to.
        What got most under my skin was the story of a Mr Werner Braeuner, a prisoner in Sehnde, near Hannover, who went on hunger strike for 6 weeks in May & June of this year, before breaking of his strike after forcing a partial result from the prison authorities. Mr Braeuner's claim is that his fellow prisoners regularly defecate in the communal food, during preparation in the prison kitchens. As a result of his hunger strike he now has the right that some of his food is delivered to him directly & doesn't have to pass through the communal kitchens.
         The story reminds you of the most disgusting rumors from the primary school playground. Of course, it's impossible for an outside reader to be able to tell if the claims are true or not; but even if not, Mr Braeuner's claims & strike action are statements in themselves about how a politicised prisoner sees his world. You could attempt to brush off Mr Braeuner by labelling him delusionally insane; but if he is that, his seems to be an assertive, articulate & focussed type of insanity. I wish to add that I cannot support Mr Braeuner's wider politics in anyway whatever; but what does this particular case tell us?
       Allow me to quote (in English translation) Mr Braeuner's statement in the June 2011 issue of the aforementioned magazine, which is typical of his recent statements in various media:

"Prisons are homes of perfidy; they contain, in comparison to the population outside, a far above average number of people with personality disorders who exhibit extreme patterns of behaviour with the least possible cause. Possible triggers for these behaviour patterns can be, for example, a general feeling or being pissed off, or out of sorts - and the extreme behaviour can also be displayed without any discernable trigger. One possible reason behind an apparently arbitary negative behaviour is the psychological relief a disturbed person can experience, after carrying out a covert, antisocial action. It's therefore not uncommon that disgusting additions to the food are found in prison kitchens ... Although the other prisoners get to hear about these additions, most simply suppress this information, as they percieve themselves to be in a helpless situation. You swallow it, in the most literal sense, or you avoid particular dishes like the monthly hot-pot or the puddings. Everyone develops their own coping strategies. Disgust hangs constantly in the air, without ever becoming tangible; statements like 'the strawberry compot's got real colour today', start taking on a very particular meaning." (Werner Braeuner in "Gefangenen Info", June 2011).

And what's the moral of the story? Better the devillish tabloids you know than the free magazines you don't? Stick to the literary novel where you'll often be reading about the grubby dealings of the university educated but rarely about our prisons' grubbiness? Or simply make sure you're own mechanisms for suppressing unpleasant information are in good working order; take the whole thing, in other words, with a large pinch of salt.

Catching Rilke’s Autumn

Because Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous autumn poems evoke the season so strongly, it becomes hard, after years of living with these lines, to distinguish between your own recurring autumn experience - & Rilke’s framing of that experience. Harder, still, in days of climate change, to catch those “two final southerly days” that Rilke refers to in “Autumn Day”, which was published in his 1902 volume “The Book of Images.” Yet while our Hamburgian grapes rot on the vine – sweeter & bigger than last year but still too sour to eat many of – I feel it’s my last chance for this year to post my translations of ‘Autumn Day’ & of ‘Autumn’.

Autumn Day

Lord – it is time. The summer was so big.

Lay your shadows down upon the sundials,

and down the dales let the winds fly loose.

Order fullness from the last few fruits;

give them two final southerly days,

push them into ripeness – and hunt

the last sweetness in the heavy grape.

If you’ve no house yet, you’ll not build one now.

If you’re alone now, you’ll stay that way for long,

you’ll wake, read, write long letters,

and wander here and there through the avenues,

restlessly, as the leaves tumble down.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling from afar,

as if withered in the heavens’ furthest gardens;

they’re falling with a gesture of negation.

And in the nights the heavy earth is falling

out of all stars into loneliness.

We’re all falling. That hand, there, falls.

And take a look around you: it is in everything.

And yet there’s One, who holds this Falling

infinitely gently in his two hands.