CHIASMUS -- a Berlin Journal -- with an interruption -- June 2019

night on earth, jim jarmusch

here come the thrashers, the blind-scaping... nash, nash, nash

how to escape the evolving helter skelter of one's times and the ceaseless Big Brother Weather updates from the Polish Orwellian Central committee, red alert storm warnings of lightening thunderstorms, advice to stay inside,
do not take shelter under trees, etc etc (what trees?)

to live in the free-floating islands called cities the (in)communicative drift of internets unraveling deep space dust against tranquility trellis baffling babylon with lucidity, calm, distance
-- and to have lived in the suburb of Berlin called Poznan or in the vague suburb of Poznan called Berlin -- and travel the mental wires between the vardun of the imaginary chiasmus, migratory paths once again between the two trees, then the next two trees between them, we will have hewn with memory the passage for the Rom all the way to Andalusia

   here I will insert, jarring the frame, the poem, written in May, 2019 rather,  en route to play the DYM Festival in Santok, near Gorzow Wielkopolski, where the poet-singer Papusza lived once, after the double-exile (forced as the Gypsies were into sedentary city boxes, Papusza  Papusza -- who was also subject of a kris & declared pikie, her crime based on trumped-up charges she revealed the "codex" of the Romani language to Polish authorities -- a betrayal of her people, they said, when it was actually Jerzy Ficowski who did it all on his own by publishing a glossary within a book of her poetry in his translation)

    leaving from the west side station, Dworzec Letni, Poznan, aka Kaiser Station, formerly used exclusively by nobility when Wilhelm II and retinue would visit for vacations

but this time it's not the coal-guzzler locomotive but the modern "tabour" & me with my band of invisible mental gypsies flying still under the radar of the blocks & dish antennae

driven into the interstitial internal exile, with our relations: deer, fox, beetles, crack in the cement bunkers where something vegetal stubborn & rupestral chucks up a stalk of life, moving onward to

(lines written between line of the text)  

of the wars behind the Festung shambles in rows, rubbles, where some lingering  

Gorzów Wielkopolska to the Polish Rome of the shackled down Gitanos

bitter vinegar imaginary of zyklon B some souls still burn with final eyes blinking

 escaping into submarine dreams open the hatch to new War for the MIC 

close my eyes again, wishing it away, and with the rush of the cinematic windows 

the train awakens me in the forest that itself walks like tall trees my Gypsies stand

fir and spruce waves and witness to the bulldozers

  if this is dreaming it's very oddly cursive after all typically

looking out over the raw earth gutted for developments, 

logs piled for commerce,

 civilization breezing impotently through my hair, running like a train

by the lakes we declare we will be beavers of our own trees

the keepers of the stillness of our own lakes we declare where the waves

reciting our fishy erudition & cacophonous genealogy

 

     full of wandering go the ripples, these are the poems of peoples cross-currents

everywhere in hydrogen gambling through several stars & we few frail meteorites

 fallen in a splash within hearing. the form of the ear that cups the ripples

otherwise it's only muteness that sings the overtone ventilation's hidden incantation

at the rebirth of the magnetosphere surrounding earth within the engine

  while the greater blackness of energy mouths the contrary mantra of inexistence

maintaining the maniacal threads of hypocritical civilizations & suicidal life-forms

self-contradicting in the hells personal dynamos -- 

LOOK! the forest says,

Look, we are looking through you with Pinocchio eyes every limb

 & trunk severed pine-eye, the forest full of laughing silence, 

doe-eyes of the mare,

the marbly stare of our totem, of the lynx, peering through the leaves, the living bush preening itself like a cat rolling over in snow, or the throw of dice making words stick by chance to the paper, to the mouth of the speakeruntil I am jolted awake just by equal chance as the train arrives in Santok

and as if by a dream command, reality ensues

      and now, 12 hours and several dance-floors later

there is no return train for another 4.5 hours,

on Sunday, with nothing open in the Polish Rome of the Gitanos

 I sit editing over my lonely mishap fantasy journals shredded with truths waiting in the extreme normalcy of Orlen petrol station drinking over-priced coffee because it's too cold and windy to sit outside. & of course there's plenty of good pop music to inspire lonely fantasies of escaping which I share with the workers in the station, the modern petrol station with iTunes and Spotify & my habit of making up lyrics "food for life, can you be, food for life, fool as I am, for life, blurted blue out of the sky split open by the darkness desiring to pair with it's own alternating opposite, it's witness

baby, baby can you be my soul? the song seems to sing

and I try to be some soul, I cry, what I'm trying to be

Go, go, go baby, do your crazy math

Hello new words, goodbye, goodbye

I will never speak you again

May 19, 20


 

 Onward, back to Berlin, the post-postwar Berlin,

    freedom to live is a split infinitive binary and moody joyeux born of one surround sound paramecial or piecemeal membrane bouncing the wizardry from oz to osmosis

  Berlin, Neukoln/Kreuzberg/ Mitte/ in transit, all over/ May 28 until June 2, notes scattered, 

a deck pharos-light cleopatrick tarot cards, fanned or passed to hundreds of hands, back and forth,

language itself, this weather-worn & dog-eared effect, scattered notes, gathered

the screen lights your face so people actually see you typing out
your type, your aura secondaire, bristling with notions, the screen
reveals the scene inverse Diana was peeping upon
the veil over your mind the hologram of burdened desire
the lady pulling on her socks and restoring
her shoes & re-shoeing her skirt hikes up revealing her thighs and calves

revealing my eyes listening to all the people speaking mixed baroquen English and Germangly Turkish and being unable to grasp
the idea that one cannot grasp it (elusive context) anyway no matter what language

and what literature is. seems. becomes. an old form replaced by cinema while in both

the kinks into truth are in the details accidentally espied
like the Turkish girls walking arm in arm or with their mother's aunts
one only imagines they speak about potential suitors
you have to stay with things, walk arm in arm, with immediacy

& like the Turkish girls, around another Ecke, walking arm in arm again, this time with their grandmother's aunts or those who have the new husband in the first years still with the slick dark brilliantine hair fades in the zoomed style some bit of name tagged in the nape of the neck, the friend pushing himself the pram in those first years before something takes him away, a narrative we don't know about but you have to stay with things there unfolding the moss & sweet williams and the whirring ambulance that scrape slash of the kebab as it turns this peppery odor creating the hunger you don't really have, smell the Jasmine flowers hear the suitcase wheels and the French girls on their bikes as they discuss this city they don't need to hate, these two fishermen on the edge of the canal, with poles tipped in florescent green lights like antennae over the canal the grunting of swans disturbed in the floating sleep by the techno live-coding camp party for the Maria Himmelfahrt, the same old drunken thuds and their cigarette buds in the scuro drifting like fireflies almost extinct in the forest Glen on the other side of the water rippling...

all along the Paul Lincke Ufer it's only dweebie forever foreigners that cruise the margins 

when its another day the rain falls on Sylvio's (camper) caravan, he's feeding his friend's dog -- epxlains how his droogie in hospital was hit by a car while drunk -- and heavily on the canal there are millions of driokwrs (droplets) to see but without any umbrella I run now, quasi drenched by inches miles of rain above me not in itself wet because water isn't wet yet and the Turkish girl in hijab the couple she is with they crouch under cover of green overhang, looking out on the water without any rush regrets or rumbles, waters is watching itself escape endlessly... watching the wave propagations, maybe ... the freedom, so random, so still 

-- still cool, still abiding -- everywhere around that energy of every single body being ready for summer to jam and the burst of pollen through the nasal spasm the bee and hoverfly the titmouse & sparrow wiggling through narrow cracks in the walls --

There are no things really. Things are clusters, maybe, aggregates, amalgam of elementals maybe -- but things, as we call them, remain illusory by-products. The body is an ecstasy of energy. Movement makes things into an ecstasy of energy. One must or need only open the door to feel this ecstasy of energy. And once one goes out or comes into this ecstasy there is nothing that stops anything from going everywhere. You may say the skin contains the body & limits it to its flesh but every fibre of muscle and nerve and bone tissue is in flight and moves in this ecstasy of energy that even sweeps through sleep wide awake with metamorphic intentions that brainwaves barely notice at all. How can this be? We must wonder but we don't think about it most of the time because we are all serving this flow of energy 24 on 7. Everything we do is engaged in furthering this cosmological rippling of waves running across one another. Who can calculate all the gazes and flashes if the eyes?

the club called Loophole and all the scratches on the walls, how many dervish fingers filing nails

determined graffitists anti-de-featists making freaky grooves... our concerts and conversations mix with the passage of various languages -- my favorite pre-occupation -- listening and dreaming narratives -- more potential than real mostly -- never-ending surf and collide, pull and rush --

**

when she throws her loving drunken arms
around you at midnight
when the last train
is still in sight
and only then
when we are sure
we will forget
we will indeed forget
that we have need
of even this moment
fed upon being unable
to resist loving blindly
any isolate cloud
drifting across the desert sky
at one of the Ringbahn stations
where they heap sands

into granular hills
to ship later to desert
construction sites

combining

corruption and design

* 

now after hours delayed finally on the bus in mind I find the past
the scent of fresh wild rukola growing through grooves in the concretely at the Sudkreuz Berlin station pungent as the babble of voices of the Poles & Croatians, Georgians

drifting in the vape and cigarettes of permanent transition

which I wave away from my face in continual prayer

press freedom is being destroyed yes

but the less known freedom of other creatures

known even lesser, remains

collapsing into the liquid anthropocene

without any wave of recognition

perhaps for the better

to walk unknown

 *

freedom to live is a split infinitive binary and moody joyeux

born of one surround sound paramicial or piecemeal membrane

bouncing the wizardry from oz to osmosis. freedom is the bindweed

permaculturally specific to a fence that does not require vines but gets them anyway because of integrity of composition, staying power. freedom is one life to live within ever more moving leaves, concept set, venn hexes, carved on your life tree, swivelling blisters from bliss to blisters my sisters, you dangling blossoms, you thoughtless bastards. you -- made of many cells -- you -- organ within an invisible extension, none at all.and despite all that there is ever and anon a limit and withdrawal from the edge of freedom as if it's condition depended on drawing a line it should surpass by stepping first backwards before the leap into something largely nameless. this is the freedom of freedom: to not want nor care over much for itself. perhaps it is also vaguely some form of respect traversed by motionless. calm. position. vibration. scintillation. the awareness that there is nothing really absolutely necessary. whereas hunting or being hunted brings about a slavery and binding to a culture and it is capitalism that grows the false hungers. one freedom cobbles coattails cranial cases and  fabricates prams, basinets and identity preschools for many others. graduate into the perfectly polymorphous potentially polyamorous detachment from being unable to commit. the freedom not to do, to retain the right to do nothing, governs them all. very positively

*

when I ask myself...
have I met the eagle's eye?
i can say yes i have,
and the owl's and the lynx'
we are troubled somewhat
matters of survival
don't allow us to see
when other eyes, so plentifully,
surround us

distance comes in close,
little of the languages
known drifting between teeth
 huddle oviform
any longer than a pause

compounds of protozoans
entangle the blood
only briefly the sigh of the pestle
turns northern faces south

that's the smile
of the moon between
modernity & love

you can not kill
you can only buy
 
there is no sex
but a hexagon
making theft
into generosity

in the morning there will be
taciturn photons
under the palpebre
there is no better
word for them

my feathers, she said
they are dawns
making eyes
invisible
my colors woven
even through worms
the vision tore off
like a beak

faint echo reaches the fetus
from distant forest closing
the warm voices of the women, wooly
already heard the coyote
deer ears swivel
let us listen like a mountain
does it want to be seen?
does it want to be heard?
does the berry long to be eaten?
mind must quiet down to the empty
quieter than what I want to hear
beyond the threshold
you are telling me, a hand poised upon the door
mind quieter, as attention expands

.
we have re-labeled the streaked path of the glaciers
with indo-european promontories, tongues, 
cut up the parco into porco, carving out niches 
where hand-held units were once hand-holds
the brittle grip between precipices within caverns
the grotto a great ear into which dionysius'
trickle of the spring that summons the great chord
dashes into unicorns & harps the international garbage patch

.

The mixed cacophony of 3 or 4 competing sound systems is indescribable. the message is subtracted from the sum of the ungraspable -- "they are so contextually unconscious of what they are doing individually that they can't be competing/communicating with one another -- but the mind and ear trips and seeks endlessly to connect the things even as they drift away from any sense... so it's expanding the universe pushing time forward by chaos and collision toward the penultimate slowness of the long-lasting timeless but final vibration... The mixed cacophony of 3 or 4 competing sound systems is in fact indescribable and pervasive...

.

in the future fonts will be considered as visual timbre
awesome... i was even unaware... i have such a narrow habit with my devices, I can see how they do that, to screen, narrow, filter my perception. but that's mind-blowing, what you've written. seeing messages in another font, another cursive -- so like translation, in the personal sense (my mind is in a trans-translational crisis 25 on 9 days a week) -- but that the life of different languages, the modernity of a billion cellular floating icons of identity flapping their wings