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Initially published in Atroxhity, CrashTest Magazine
Artwork: David-Baptiste
Txt: Xavier
Note: all the other works labelled "David-Baptiste Chirot" on this site were created and posted by David-Baptiste
Showing posts with label David-Bapiste Chirot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David-Bapiste Chirot. Show all posts
David Baptiste Chirot & Xavier Srrn - Crash on BallardDay
El Ojo de Dios Part the First: Insects & Letters
El Ojo de Dios
For Leonardo Sciascia
“J’ai trop a ecrire, c’est pourquoi je n’ecrire rien.”—Stendhal, Journal, 1804
Part the First: Insects and Letters
El Colonel smiles. Bright birds sing in the morning air. Limpid light through the wide open windows bathes the high celinged room’s whitewashed stone walls. The coolness of night, refreshing as nearby mountain streams, rises in the wake of dawn’s departing mists. “The promise of a good day is given unto him,” El Colonel hums, imitating the cadences of a childhood hymn.
El Colonel smiles. With practiced precision, his favorite adjutant appears, “true to the appointed minute, ever mindful of detail.”
El Colonel smiles. Along with his great fondness for alliteration, El Colonel has an addiction for placing thoughts, those improvised compositions, in quotation marks. This brings “a deft touch of intriguing and entertaining irony to the most prosaic of ideas, events, and persons “ Habituated to an imaginative isolation, El Colonel’s intellectual companions are his “compositions” with their attendant “commentaries,” “asides,” “digressions,” and “annotations.” By means of this “ironic distancing” he continually invents “a hitherto unknown and as yet unpublished form of writing, never before seen nor heard.”
El Colonel smiles. This writing is a method of creating for himself a reader who is in turn accompanied by his own doubling as a writer. Where there had been “no one with who to share his most intimate thoughts, the fullness and agility of his life,” there is now not only such a companion; there is also a recorder of “his deeds and exploits.” In such a way El Colonel simultaneously acts, writes and reads both for himself and to another, who is also both a reader and an other author in turn, providing El Colonel with his own role as a reader. By these means his life takes on an aura of legend, and he acts both as though creating the performance of something which is happening, and of something which has happened “already.” By the latter means, his life is taking place in a futurity in which it is read, and in a present in which it is written. The simplest acts and words are invested with the immediacy of a drama “taking place,” the glow of “great acts having taken place ,” and, to heighten both drama and aura, the precisions of a prefatory “about to take place,” which allows for the insertion of the necessary commentaries, directions, and asides. “For the benefit of the listener, for the pleasure of the reader, for the background material necessary to the writer,” as El Colonel describes it with relish in a self-penned blurb.
El Colonel smiles. “Implacable face of an idol, obsidian eyes set in burnished copper,” the handsome adjutant stands before him with the morning’s first batch of dispatches, files, runner-delivered letters, and neatly folded and crisp “primarily Provincial” newspapers. The adjutant is one of El Colonel’s pet projects, “a raw recruit before our very eyes transformed into a perfect specimen of youth tempered with discipline.”
El Colonel smiles. The adjutant’s high cheek bones and broad shoulders “indicate a physiognomy and physique in harmony with the topography.” “Impassive, inscrutable, O what rock hewn ages has your being not known,” El Colonel hums as the bright birds sing.
El Colonel smiles. Snapping to attention, the handing over of the documents being accomplished, the adjutant speaks in clear, carefully enunciated tones. “Colonel today is the one appointed for your meeting with El Ojo, at 10.00 hours.”
El Colonel smiles. With a slight broadening of his lips, El Colonel indicates to the expectant adjutant that he, too, may smile. A smile which El Colonel “knows full well he is eager to indulge in.” El Ojo is well known to be a great favorite with the men of the “Heroic Patrol.” His meetings with El Colonel “inspire and arouse curiosity even among the most stoic.” Sometimes these meetings change nothing more in the daily routine than this “elevation of interest”; sometimes “they indicate an imminent Action of the Heroes.”
El Colonel smiles, the adjutant smiles. “El Ojo,” El Colonel pronounces with firmness, and, with a broad gesture indicating that a small table and two large chairs are to be advanced to the center of the room, adds, “Prepare the strongest Reserve coffee and bring two pack of unsealed cigarettes.” It is well known that El Ojo will only smoke cigarettes whose seals are broken before his watchful gaze.
El Colonel smiles. Going to the wide open window he gazes through aviator sunglasses at the bright birds, the luminosity of the landscape and “reflects on the irony that reflective glasses shield one’s reflections from observing eyes by their mirrored reflections of a thwarted inquiry.”
El Colonel smiles. Behind the reflecting sunglasses, “his own reflections concern themselves with a reflection found within the ‘Author’s Note’ to the Second Edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a copy of which he found when literally ransacking a small private library whose owner he had been ordered to take possession of.” El Colonel “recollects in tranquility,” that the passage had “greatly interested, inspired and amused him, for in it Conrad had written: ‘Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine.’”
El Colonel smiles. Watching the play of light on large leaves upon whose surfaces insects have begun to gather “seems to remind him of the play of the light even in the cool dimness of the library on the leaves of the book, upon whose surfaces the letters had gathered.” This “doubly reflecting” aspect of his seeing and his recollections strikes him “as an image of the intimate intercourse of the natural and human worlds, of the revelatory union of the exterior and interior of consciousness, and of the synchronistic simultaneity of the moment and a memory which doubles as its mirror.”
El Colonel smiles. Conrad’s man who may smile and smile, loving the obvious and shrinking from explanations, he finds himself to be the “paradoxical embodiment of the contradiction of.” For, “reading Conrad’s words crawling on the leaves of the book in the cool, shadowy light, he had found himself, not as the one described, but as the union of the description and its author. As both the smiler and the investigative explainer who describes and refutes him, as the one whose task it is to bring into being their union. As and in himself. And in that moment he experienced the recognition of his unique Vocation and of himself. “
El Colonel smiles. “To smile, to love the obvious, and to present and preserve the explanation which both the smile and the obvious conceal, the reflections behind their reflecting surfaces. This, this is his alone, this unique vocation, this great passion, this most confidential mission.”
El colonel smiles. Checking his watch, he turns and approaches a chair on one side of the table set in the center of the large light filled room. This chair and the one on the table’s other side are high backed, with strong arms of a wood hard as iron and painted in a still shiny black lacquer. The upholstered seats and backs are not uncomfortable and of a worn red fading into rose. With studied and precise, angular movements, El Colonel begins to arrange himself in the correct position in which to be found by his “immanent and eminent visitor.”
El Colonel permits himself a barely audible and very brief laugh as “he takes possession of himself the better to assiduously arrange the head, the torso, the limbs, the folded hands, as though he were in the process of preparing a stuffed and mounted specimen of a representative example of a Colonel, whose taxidermist he himself was.”
Waterboarding, Translation and Poetry
Waterboarding & Poetry:
Francois Villon & the New Extreme Experimental American Poetry
The rack was the reality.
In the chill air he was stripped. He was attached to the rack that sloped down from head to feet. His outstretched arms were strapped behind his head to iron rings in the wall. The middle of his naked back was arched on a raised, painfully wedge-shaped wooden block. His ankles were lashed to bolts in the floor. The rack was ratcheted, stretching his body. His penis was tightly laced, preventing urination. He was told to open his mouth. He would have been beaten, had he refused. All this without haste. All this in numb terror. A pear-shaped object was pushed into his mouth, the poire d’angoisse, named after a bitter-tasting pear grown in the Dordogne village of Angoisse. {Note: angoise in modern French means “anguish”—a very bitter-tasting pun, as are many in Villon’s own work--dbc} The poire was hinged in upper and lower sections that could be levered apart with a key, widening them, forcing the jaws open. A strip of gauze was laid across the prisoner’s mouth.
Then, slow dribble by dribble, slow pint by pint, pipkins of water were poured down the throat through a horn tunnel, gradually but on and on.
Usually about four coquemars,
large kettlefuls, sixteen belly-swelling pints, water pouring from swollen ears, but always into the trapped bladder until the body was bursting, drowning, helpless, fainting,. Then release, retching and spewing in the straw, the clerk asking for names, getting no answer, the half-conscious victim roughly dressed and hauled in soaking clothes back to his cell.
(Images here and below & this text from: Danse Macabre: Francois Villon Poetry and Murder in medieval France by Aubrey Burr)
These are the procedures used on the 15th Century French poet Francois Villon.
In the early 21st Century, the USA produced its first truly Extreme Experimental Poetry--the military censored Poems from Guantanamo, writing produced by tortured detainees held as "enemy combatants" in a War on Terror based on among other things, the "16 words" of the forged "Italian Letter" and the transcribed ravings of a desperate alcoholic would-be Iraqi immigrant to Germany (Curveball.)
The translations have also been an issue for some, in that they are by "non-literary" translators assembled by the lawyers who made the book possible in the first place.
(The lawyers and translators and Iowa University Press who published the book, have long shown great courage in the face of the military and governmental extreme restrictions and censorships.)
Thank you to Joseph Parsons, Acquisitions Editor of Iowa Press, for providing the following details:
Just as the habeas attorneys must pay their own way to Guantanamo to
meet with their clients, the "nonliterary translators"--as they've
come to be known--were hired by these attorneys so they could
communicate with the detainees. In many cases the original Arabic or
Pashto versions of poems were deemed too sensitive and not released by
the Pentagon's privilege review teams, though the translated forms
were. By "released," I mean the attorneys could not even keep copies
as they worked to represent their clients. All of this left Marc
Falkoff and the Press to make do with translations rendered without
benefit of the range of tools (dictionaries and other reference works,
in particular).
By basing reasons for War on Terror on Error--forgeries, invented "evidence," to be furthered by "embedded reporters" and the propaganda and disinformation filling he media thanks to near total use of the former Israeli Intelligence member co-founded MEMRI as "sources," "reports," and "news"--everything that follows becomes contaminated, turning Language into Lies, Weapons of Mass Destruction of "critical thinking" and "poetics," reading and writing and producing immense Walls of mirrors, which are taken to be windows into a world of "Open forms" and "radical resistances" of phoneme and morpheme to "closure" and where, to paraphrase the title of memoir by Lynne Cheney, "the skies are not cloudy all day."
The skies of Empire--the open forms of the "open range" "where the deer and the antelope play" and
Seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day."
Along the way this New Extreme Experimental American Poetry has included the sky writing of 9/11 in NYC, eerily echoing the CIA backed Coup's bombing of the Presidential Palace in Santiago, Chile 9/11 1972, the Photographic Atrocity Exhibit of Abu-Ghraib and a "disappeared" CIA library of waterboarding torture videos.
This new Waterboarding Extreme Experimental Poetry (WEEP) permits the USA to accomplish something dazzling: not only to forge into the Unknown of the 21st Century, but to simultaneously travel into the period of the 15th century just prior to and including Columbus' "Discovery of the new World." By opening the Future of American poetry, America has also been able to reverse the colonization process and begin to establish "outposts" in 15th Century Europe, and so, beating Europe to the punch, "Discover the Old World" prior to its discovering of the "New."
American reviewers and commentators on the Poets of Guantanamo have so far found exactly what they were looking for: "bad" poetry in Formal terms, written by "bad" people and translated by "bad" (i.e. "non-literary") translators.
Since, ironically, the translation procedure is not unlike some advocated by such luminaries of American "radical" "experimental" poetries as Charles Bernstein, one might posit the Guantanamo works as simply "bad" Experimental poems by "bad" people, "untrained amateurs," and relegate it to the dustbins of history along with a lot of other "poetry of witness."
Due to their methodologies of reading and writing, American reviewers, commentators; have missed the hidden In Plain Site/Sight/Cite nature of these "purloined letters."
That is, that the poems are the production of American language, American readings and writings and "mistranslations" (non-literary) and the most advanced and most medieval techniques of the "discipline of Writing."
In effect, the writing has not yet been recognized as American.
But what looks back at American eyes from the poem's letterings on the page--is the writing produced by years of American training, discipline, censorship, forced and tortured words further tortured along their restricted and supervised journey to the page in a book published only in these versions in the land of the torturer.
So--of course, the torturers are very happy and self-satisfied in reading these works and finding them lacking in poetry.
It is a sign of the "rightness" of their cause--and of their Security--from there being any "good" poetry to issue from these "enemy combatants," "Islamo-Fascists" and "terrorists."
The sign of a major defeat for the American reader and writer is that their distance from Language has become so great they cannot recognize their own writing staring them back in the face.
But then--this is for the better, is it not?--For it absolves the American reader and writer of all responsibility, of recognizing any "hand in the matter."
Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate, while acknowledging the situation of poetry in a raw state of the Guantanamo poems--also remarked--"No Mandelstams here." How comforting for the uneasy American readers and writers to be so reassured!
But then Stalin's Gulags contained far more millions of prisoners than Guantanamo.
Rejoining the 15th Century, as also the 21st is forged into--
a few words from a Contemporary, Maitre Francois Villon, born 1431, the year Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake by Occupation forces during the One Hundred Years War. --An early ancestor of the War without End on Terror.
In many ways the poem below by Villon finds echoes in the writings from Guantanamo.
But then--Francois Villon was a "bad" man.
Probably a far worse "bad" man than the great majority of those in Guantanamo.
(Villon, already twice sentenced to hanging, several times imprisoned and tortured, was banished from Paris in 1463--from which he'd already absented himself twice, for five years of self-imposed exile-- & "vanishes from history.")
from "Ballade"
(aka "Ballad of the Hanged Men"; translation by Galway Kinnell)
Brother humans who live on after us
Don't let your hearts harden against us
For if you have pity on wretches like us
More likely God will show mercy on you
You see us five, six, hanging here
As for the flesh we loved too well
A while ago it was eaten and has rotted away
And we the bones turn to ashes and dust
Let no one make us the butt of jokes
But pray God that he absolves us all . . .
The rain has rinsed and washed us
The sun dried us and turned us black
Magpies and ravens have pecked out our eyes
And plucked our beards and eyebrows
Never ever can we stand still
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts
At its whim it keeps swinging us
Pocked by birds worse than a sewing-thimble
Therefore don't join in our brotherhood
But pray God that he absolves us all
Prince Jesus, master over all
Don't let us fall into hell's dominion
We've got nothing to do or settle down there
Men, there's nothing to laugh at
But pray God that he absolves us all
El Colonel Smiles
El Colonel Smiles
For Roberto Bolano
Yo, por bien tengo que cosas fan seneladas, y por nunca oidas ni vistas, vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entetierren en la sepultura
--Lazarillo de Tormes
El Colonel smiles. Pleasure birds fly in exotic jungles, among tableaux of hacked and burned nude bodies assuming famous paintings’ poses. The aesthetic arousal stimulates his penchant for a “formal” fetishization of alliteration. Straining to suppress his laughter, he murmuringly intones: “Impeccably attired in immaculate form-fitting fatigues whose rigorously ironed creases crackle with each movement and gesture, he strides among his technicians, laconically ordering a different angle here, another take there, a still living victim to be placed over there. The crisp morning air is a sweet salience; the taste in the mouth is of clotting blood.”
Licking his lips in anticipation, his eyes through aviator glasses gaze to the red flecked vulva of a dismembered young woman . . .
A brightly colored bird lands near the alluring meat, pecking its way towards the prized mound. El Colonel snaps a brisk order. The startled and obedient bird launches into flight. With deadly accuracy El Colonel brings it down. Blood from a small hole in its breast bubbles out among the girl’s slashed thighs . . .
El Colonel smiles. Peeling a tangerine he looks to the misty hills of morning. Dew flecks the flesh of flowers at trembling verge of opening. His fingers play among the fruit’s sections. Probing,--to elicit a secret.
El Colonel smiles. “Poetry is born of suffering. Poetry, born of torture—a more delicious beauty to be prompted and petted, O roseate Muse of pain.”
He fondles a razor-sharp letter opener. Licking his lips, he slits a new file. Classified forms and photos of “missing persons” come tumbling out . . .
. . . Names—addresses---relatives’ reportings . . . “last seen by—at—when”
. . . El Colonel caresses the photos . . .
El Colonel smiles. Facing the cadets’ young, soft faces . . . their expectant, obedient eyes—he writes with a felt tip marker on a vast white board, feral teeth gleaming in the brightly lit lecture room. Among headings and sub-headings he sketches a plan . . . “Memorize this closely, my children, it is not in any manual . . . remember it well, for it is the key to unlock the doors into the Temples of Art, the Theaters of Poetry, The Cinemas of Catharsis.”
El Colonel smiles. The Americans have published a book of poems by detainees. The products of torture, censorship, controlled translations, the poems meet with poor reviews in terms of “poetry.” Might not the productions of a poetry of torture be greatly enriched by bringing to them the benefits of his experience, his expertise, the generous gifts of a lifetime’s aesthetic experimentations?
El Colonel smiles. Neatly refolding a fresh newspaper along its crisp pleats, he places it on top of a precisely aligned stack to his left. Turning slightly to his right, he lifts and efficiently opens another briskly crackling journal from the morning mail. Every few days, in one or another language, at varying lengths in differing fonts under tersely worded headers and with now more, now less details, there are appearing enigmatic reports of a series of American poets gone missing. From the library of a bucolic small college, from a hotel lobby in a great city, from the bathroom at a conference, from sidewalk cafes and sumptuous banquets, from illicit rendezvous’ and quiet nights in offices, now here, now there, American poets “minor” and “major” are vanishing without a trace.
El Colonel smiles. He sips from a deep drink of sweetened and spiced irony He, the trainee of American Special Forces, a graduate of the old School of the
El Colonel smiles. “Yea, verily, they shall feel the wrath of my Prod,” he murmurs, his fingers caressing the instrument’s metal dreamingly, as though playing the “backbone flute” of a famous Russian poet. Leafing through the files of the latest arrivals, he studies their photos, the bits and pieces of examples of their work culled from the internet, the various bits of biography, critic’s comments, book blurbs, the sententious pronunciamentos that make up an American poet’s CV. The Universities most are associated with interest him only in terms of the corporations and government contracts they are involved with.
El Colonel smiles. In the beginning was the Word and it dwelt with the original Author, the Non Plus Ultra Writer of Blockbuster Epics., the Master of the Page Turners, the Laureate of the door-stopping tome, the Bearded Bard of Radical Verse and Purple Prose, the eminence grise of the Academy, the Namer, the Shaman, the Seer, the Supreme Source of the Scribblers and copying Scribes. To return poetry to its origins, before the word, and then to shock it back to life, to force it to speak again from the primordial darkness, to make it speak again the craven and craving phrase, “Let there be light;” this is among my projects, El Colonel murmurs in a self-invented code.
Permitting himself a dry staccato laugh, El Colonel, speaking in the tongue of his devising, murmurs, “Yes, let there be light—but an electric light! For this is an advantage the Old Versifier did not have.” Flicking his stainless steel “lighter,” he “lights” a cigarette, smiling as he realizes what “shocking” thoughts he “occupies his time” with. His hands and eyes go back to the files, cigarette smoke drifting blue in the clear light of morning.
Time that flows--eye-drawn skies
A cryptic tryptich
Your life that goes by,
That flows
Unbalanced, strange—
Ephemeral-
Shadow,
who dresses in shadow
Not knowing mourning,
Nor who I am
No one whispers death—
No one even knows--
Knows no one
that I am--
even I
---------------
Happenings never happening,
Names changed in secret
Time--
Of the shadow partner
That goes by, that flows—
Actions odd, that unfold—
Whisper in mystery,
Torture torturers' twins
Time--
Of the empty room
Disfiguring depths,
Distant scars—
-------------------------
Zero moments,
Illustrating a mouth--
Opening
An O
Eyes drawing lines
Calm a heavy sky
Aerial poems
Photograph a hand
Inventing
A day
Time- -
Of the lucid eyes
Deciphering dusts,
Dimming names—
Encrypted lives--
Interpreting a death,
Detecting
A birth
Time, your life—
That goes by,
That flows
Shadows, lines—
That draw eyes,
That lift
Time—
Of the eye-drawn skies
That flow--
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