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17.1.03
At Your Service
Verveelt nooit het uitzicht
Van een vernauwende gracht
Die snikkend en bloemen me draagt?
Te sterven op het juiste moment,
Liggende in stakende volgorde
Met kaarsen, en verwelkende
Verkiezingsaanplakbiljetjes,
De versterte herinneringen –
Totdat de hekken van de Kathedraal
Waar een helden beeldnis
Recht op heeft?
De schreeuwende waarheid
Is door de straten gedragen,
Verminkt door een escadrille van media
Authentiekte in het bejaardentehuis
Van de achterkamer politici,
Verraad bij verraad
Totdat
De oogen barsten,
Barst de bom van de woede:
Een brandstapel van menselijke dromen,
Waarvon de assen
Door kijkcijferzoekers
Verzamelt zijn.
Zij rouwen massal;
Insinuaties, schuldigen, ongelovingen,
Een nieuwe geschiednis zonder herkenbare straten,
Een kaartje van bedreigingen,
Toeschouwers en kandidaten.
Het verveelt nooit,
Droefheid die zo geregiseerd is,
De manipulatie neemt zijn eigen slachtoffers mee;
Te scheppen of stuktemaken
Is de vrede vraag.
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MOORDFABRIEK
Uiteindelijk de peuterige machtloosheid
Beweegt zich voetje voor voetje
Naar zijn eigen conclusies
En in verklaring
De uitspraak van het leven
Vermindert zijn eigen waard
Op zoek naar een oplossing
Zo knap als een waarschuwing
Die zo duidelijk
En zwaart en wit
Geschrieven is.
Ondertussen de gedaagden knoeien
Nog een maatschappij
Door zijn kleinzieligheid en zijn vergelijkingen.
Ik stem in een gevaarlijke opeenvolging
Van dagen en ongehoorde ongezondlijkheid,
Sjekje na sjekje
De wereld mompelt rondom mij
Maar zijn bedoeling
Staat nog duidelijk
In zwaart en wit.
Roken Is Dodelijk
En het leven is een moordfabriek.
4:28 PM
LIEFDE SUBSIDIES
Wij praten over hoe to schuilen.
Waar is het plattegrond van ons ontduiken -
Bent jij of ben ik
op zoek naar de liefde subsidies?
De vlekken van je tranen zijn
onleesbaar,
je aflopende uitlovenen zijn
onhoorbaar,
Lekker luider, liefde luisteraar -
niks is nietzeggend.
Niemand kennt zoals een denkwijze.
Niemand denkt over
hoe afzijdig zich in openbare
gebieden te houden.
Mijn liefde verbrand
en hier zijn de assen:
generaties van weigeringen
geen conversaties, geen koffietjes,
geen getuigenis van eventualiteit.
Ik zet in schaakmat.
Ik moet met de Dame praten.
Opeens, je zal mij antwoorden:
Bent jij of ben ik
op zoek naar de liefde subsidies?
Soms bent jij de buitenstander
maar je stroomen zijn samengekomen
door een verdrag:
dat jij het onderpand houd
van het schuld van alle de hartzeer van iedereen.
4:27 PM
15.1.03
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it couldm, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we creapt toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivilent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullabye rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
"Good morning" I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dissheveled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was "very wide" and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed "from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history", and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. "Geez," I tell him, shaking my head, "why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?"
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: "An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves posssess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age." he clears his throat and continues: "Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?"
*********
1833 was also the building of the "Petõfi" Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
12:53 PM
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