Sunday 30 September 2012

Tommy the Thinker


I THINK THEREFORE I AM 

He roams our neighbourhood by day and by night. When it comes to relating to people he is an affable and  gregarious creature with human friends of all ages. We all know his name which is Tommy. When called by his name he responds; unless of course he has important business on his mind. He is often to be seen on his way to some urgent or mysterious appointment.

Like many cats he avoids dogs and dog owners. He can sense a dog's presence long before it comes into view. He will casually glance toward his intended escape route long before the dog gets near.

One time, I saw him being attacked by a crow which flew low several times with angry shrieks. The bird had carelessly dropped its bounty and wished to retrieve it but Tommy kept the crow at bay by waving a paw in the air and finally claimed the morsel for himself.

In my picture you will see that his whiskers are forward. This is a good sign. It shows that he is curious concerning my camera and also that he is not afraid of it. He is actually posing for the picture; just like a human in such a situation he shows his best side. He is already figuring out what his reward shall be.

He will decide between something to eat and something to drink. He will tell me with a sign and I will fetch the appropriate item; a glass of milky water or some meat.

Sometimes he repays my generosity by depositing a dead mouse in front of my door in the night so that I will find it when I go outside first thing in the morning. It's his way of saying 'thank you'.

He is over 10 years old and I have known him since he was a young cat. He is not my cat. I think he is not really anybody's cat. He can tell when somebody has died in a house. And he likes to watch children playing. He knows much which he keeps to himself. And he never stops thinking.


____________________________________
This is not the same cat shown 3 posts below.

Saturday 29 September 2012

On running up mountains




the runner runs 
above the cloud
being high and bright

above the cloud
being high and bright
the runner runs

being high and bright 
the runner runs
above the cloud


Friday 28 September 2012

An imaginary numbers game




I photographed three numbers.

They total twenty-eight. 

Today is the 28th day of the month. So here they are: 10, 13, 5.

 What does it all mean, this business of numbers? You may well ask it. And I will reply: Does it need to mean anything at all? It means different things to different people. Or it may mean nothing to many. I imagine you already knew that. 

Wallace Stevens begins page 28 of my copy of his Collected Poems with the line: One eats one pate´, even of salt, quotha. The poem containing this line is called THE COMEDIAN AS THE LETTER C. It begins: (1) The World without Imagination. 

And Stevens is a poet of the imagination!

At the sight of blackbirds / Flying in a green light, / Even the bawds of euphony / Would cry out sharply.

It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs.

I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.

Note to captions: THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD begins on page 92 of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens ed. Ferozsons (Pvt.) Ltd. Lahore - Rawalpindi - Karachi
ISBN 969 0 00707 6 pub. 1987 price Rs 90.00


Wednesday 26 September 2012

Strangers on a train

Cat with mysterious powers
Strangers on a train

a white and red cat
entered our space

took his place
on an opposite seat

and started
to read

the depths
of

our minds

or it seemed

so
to me
at the time

then all
of
a sudden

his eyes
were
black holes

as he turned
his gaze
to

the door

and lay crouched
and still

with whiskers
pulled back

and on guard


then after some while
two dark shadows
approached

and fell
on the glass
of the door


one
growled
to the other
close following behind


"Ain't going in there - there's a cat," 


those shadows passed by
and we all breathed a sigh
and relaxed 

the cat
licked a paw
and then nodded 

off
as we thought


___________



haiku



thunderbolts 

and fiery eructations

one more mountain wakens 




_____________________________
Sept 13th Fuego Volcano erupts
Sept 17th Gamalama Volcano erupts
Sept 21st Mt Lokon Volcano erupts
Sept 26th Popocatepetl Volcano shows increased eruptive activity


Wednesday 19 September 2012

Big Top (for Pat Thistlethwaite)



Pat screams whenever she sees one. And the spiders always scream back but no-one can hear them. 


The bigtop circus has come to Pat's town. Tonight Pat's with the kids in the ringside seats:

Row: 1,
Section: A,
Seats: 10, 11, 12. 

A tarantula stirs uneasily under Pat's seat. It arrived in a box of banana flavoured candy floss. Those sweet-toothed chimps will never know how lucky they were. Let the show begin!

First the whimsically musical clowns. Some with red noses. One with a bottle of scotch. 

And then the rest of the show in order: a glittery-sexy girl on the flying trapeze, a fire eater and his burning breath, a juggler juggling bottles and balls, a tightrope walker holding tight to his balancing pole, a snake charmer and his hypnotic serpent . . . 

. . . Pat screams. The spider screams. The snake screams. The children scream. The adults scream. What can it be? Has a lion escaped?

People are running in all directions. Send for the police! Send for the army! Bring on the clowns! It's complete panic. Cancel the chimpanzee's tea party.

It seems like almost  everyone has a mobile phone held high to record the scene; several people are yelling down their phones to their relatives, saying we are okay. Several others are speaking to TV anchors, describing what they think they have seen.

Approaching sirens can be heard in the distance.

And now there's the thrum and clatter of a helicopter hovering overhead. Next, a strident metallic noise is demanding surrender. There is no escape, it says. 

All at once all the lights go out. Stun grenades and smoke bombs are exploding. The top of the tent is suddenly on fire.

Pat takes stock of her situation. She slips the kids under the tent flap and they all creep quietly away. The cobra and the spider follow at a distance.

The chimpanzees run away screaming; a blue flashing light some distance behind them. 

Later there's Breaking News on the TV tickers: Suspected terrorists holed-up in candy floss factory refuse to surrender . . .


Will the sweet-toothed chimps come out with their hands held high? Will the snake charmer find his cobra? Will the tarantula find it's way into Pat's bathtub? Did the juggler drop his balls? Did the big top burn to the ground? Did the lion escape? For technical reasons these and other questions must remain unanswered.

No animals suffered abuse or injury during the making of this unlikely tale. 


Monday 17 September 2012

Why are we killing the sea?


It comes to light, courtesy of Norwegian daily newspaper Alfenposten, that Russia has been dumping its nuclear waste into the Kara Sea (Arctic Ocean) for decades.

The extent of the problem is greater than anyone could have imagined.


The nuclear waste in question includes:

14 nuclear reactors including 5 reactors containing spent nuclear fuel rods,

1 nuclear submarine (K-27) complete with two loaded nuclear reactors,

19 ships containing nuclear waste,

17,000 containers of nuclear waste.


Questions:

Where's the rest of it?

What other countries have been dumping nuclear material in the sea or are currently using the sea as a nuclear garbage site?


Saturday 15 September 2012

Cloud Story (for Mike McLaren)

All week long I've
been looking through
the windows

at the clouds
outside and all
week long

I've been waiting
to go outside
to the street

but the clouds
were always there
and I was afraid

it might rain. No-
one knows
more about rain

than those clouds



Man with green hat



ADOLF EICHMANN
by ADOLF FRANKL 

I recently visited the exhibition Art Against Oblivion - Visions out of the Inferno at Vienna's Art Forum am Judenplatz a stone's throw from Rachel Whiteread's holocaust memorial The Library and the Book.

It was my pleasure to meet Thomas Frankl, the son of the Slovakian born artist Adolf Frankl.

I was given permission to photograph examples of the works produced by Adolf Frankl during the years following the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. I chose for my subject matter the two pictures shown here.

Concerning one of the reasons for producing his works the artist wrote:


Through my works 
I have created a memorial for 
all nations of the world. 

No one, 
regardless of religion, race or 
political conviction, should ever again 
suffer such - or similar - atrocities! 

Adolf Frankl was born in Bratislava in 1903 and died in Vienna, Austria, in 1983. From just these two small lands, Slovakia and Austria, a total of 125,000 Jews were taken to the Nazi death camps and exterminated - many of them being tortured, humiliated and brutalized prior to entering the gas chambers.

THE TATTOOISTS
by ADOLF FRANKL

Tattooed with a sharp stick Adolf Frankl (inmate B 14395) was one of the few survivors of Ausschwitz-Birkenau. The titles of many of his paintings tell of cruelty, humiliation and horror: Excessive Flogging, Selection during Music, Before Gassing, Crematoria . . . etc..

We must be grateful to Adolf Frankl for these vivid images of terror which today serve as a warning to us all. We must be ever vigilant. We can never say It won't happen again. The truth is it can and it probably will. Rwanda and Cambodia come immediately to mind.

It seems that the world, from time to time, needs to be fed with a convenient scapegoat.

Jan Ateet  Frankl, the artist's younger son helped to span his father's canvases on frames. The artist painted with oil paints and turpentine; using palette knives, brushes and even his fingers. He worked without plan or model. Ghosts would simply rise and demand to be painted.

It was his creative attempt to overcome the incomprehensible and not become destroyed by it, says Jan Ateet in one of the information leaflets I was given.

Because of its subject matter the work often became so unbearable that the artist was forced escape to a nearby coffee house or some such place; but always behind him the paintings would be ordering him back to the small chamber in which he worked.


My title Man with a green hat has it basis in the post below titled Man with green hair. It concerns the rigid following of rules and the potential danger present in always doing so. I appreciate that there must certain basic rules so that we can all get along relatively harmoniously with each other, rules such as which side of the road to drive on, and that without these basic rules of behaviour life could become completely chaotic and extremely dangerous, as has been shown time and again. But on the other hand we should always question the rules, or the purpose of the rules, and ask ourselves why they are really there.


* * *

I particularly enjoyed this tasty quote from poet Robert Creeley whose bananaboxbargainbook Was That a Real Poem & other essays (pub. 1964 - Four Seasons Foundation, California) I am currently unpeeling:

There can no longer be a significant discussion of the meter of a poem in relation to iambs and like terms because linguistics has offered a much more detailed and sensitive register of this part of a poem's activity. 


Friday 14 September 2012

Man with green hair


SELF PORTRAIT
by DEZO CZIGANY (1909)

The Hungarian press of the time ridiculed the subject of this painting by referring to it as the Green Haired Monster portrait and another painting by the same artist as the Sulphur Yellow Woman. To the technique they gave the label Apache Art.

Fast forward to the era of Andy Warhol and consider, for example, his famous portraits of John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe and you can immediately appreciate how far ahead of the mainstream and the critical climate in  Hungary the progressive artists known as the Group of 8 (see post below) were.

Prior to the first World War in Hungary there was in the minds of those conservative Hungarian art critics, and hence in the mind of the public at large, the requirement to have all the correct colours in all the correct places.

Today, most of us know and appreciate that we live in a shrinking world and that there is a greater need than ever for tolerance and respect for the other fellow whatever his (or her) gender, race, or creed; and that this applies even when the other fellow's hair is green.



Wednesday 12 September 2012

Religion regrets . . .


It's an old story.

And it's a marvelous painting. The impact is immediate.

Who cannot be unmoved when they view such an image?

But then we say: It was a long time ago.

- CHRIST ON THE CROSS -
by ROBERT BERENY 1912

Today, being the opening day,  I was given 'special' permission to take a couple of photographs of paintings exhibited at the current Bank Austria Kunstforum exhibition of Hungarian art titled A Nyolcak (the Eight) which is subtitled: Hungary's Highway to Modernism.

The main reason I was permitted to take my photos without having to jump through any paper hoops was the increasing popularity of this Poet-in-Residence website (606 visitors yesterday for instance); but first I had to point out to one of the zealous guardians of the artworks the words in the exhibition's own booklet which stated that the exhibition had "the aim of winning an international position . . . . for little known . . . Hungarian art".

These might be fine sentiments, I added, but they were in practice totally pointless if bloggers such as myself were not allowed to record and promulgate these "little known" examples of "Hungarian art".

Not far away from the Bank Austria Kunstforum there is a plaque on a wall.

Some years ago the plaque was unveiled by two Austrian cardinals. Unfortunately it proved too difficult to photograph the plaque clearly due to a reflection on the perspex material.

Luckily I managed to find a printed copy of the text in the nearby Art Forum am Judenplatz.

The passage which interests me and which may also interest you is the following:

Today, Christianity regrets its share in responsibility for the persecution of Jews and realizes its failure. 

The date on the plaque is 29th October 1998. It's not a long time ago.


Die Acht. Ungarns Highway in die Moderne
Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna
12.9 - 2.12.2012


Monday 10 September 2012

Enjoyced: a Wake in Progress (pop: 1380)



darkly night whispers

darkly stout knightfalls

and the settling sunbeats downdawn

 question . . . ?

where shall   the fin agin wake . . . ?

if not in the liffesy

geniuess gottes 

of windstained glowed 

cathedral town


where adolfsadam never dropped 


his coastal boomshells


to sore impress the golden danzlinglady eva
in the dreamhouse of his gaaden 

splish splash splosh clunch!?



there ain't much room in a mushroom cloud 
an' there ain't much time for vanity

there ain't no future 
in future stocks 

so pull up your stocks 
and open seized locks 

ship on 
or ship out 

the dolphin class can crisp your ass

u-canboot your last sardine

an das

as thee shell see . . .

when whee! shell doubtless sea

shed the load

ah men!



CHAPTER THE FIRST


For it is written in geniusses 9/11

I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth



sad music becomes our plaintiff
for now he stands on ash and dust
though he ruled a world one time and smiled in similes of gold and purple and green and brown and is a strange and innocent dreamer once too proud of his old getout clothes when his mourning brightened our sky - gott will judge us! . . . and in his own time

did the earthfor give him? was it inn his pewter to do so?

we tremble with grief for our saviour in a void devoid . . . we say we will weep for the saviour when the last bell tolls in the dissonance but when the winged shadow comes over the ground our last breath will be as a cry

why does the pure fool not confess members and laydies of the juwellry, his blood is the prize we all have to play, why does he mind? is he too proud - our rigour is just - it's as clear as the moon and the sun - we have his address - the wise may read of it in a book

a shadow of another self
or one of them if he hath more

tonight he dreams
and takes him for another self

as before
the light
he casts
two shadows

and the other guides him

or is it three . . . ?

when he sleeps it's a restless sleep
like the sleep of a king in a crypt


yet see how he weeps

but why does he weep . . . ?

he weeps when he wakes


- The jewleery goes out and is prmptly back - All stand in caught  - We have verdicated! 



CHAPTER THE SECOND


ACHTUNG! Be uprising in court.  Enter from L. his Woesheep Adolpuhs Pilartus.

Mumblers and ladlers of the jawroly have you now bleached a verdict on which you are all agleed?

NEIN!

9 . . . ?

Begging your worsnip's patrone we meant to say did he take the oath?

That fool failed to form the great oaf as I now have it before me.

And did your warshleep then perchance move to water boarding?

Mit shleep deprivation it was doubly endcoupled.

As an aside - U-can boat your life-vest we don't take noah for an answer.

Many more questings foreman of the twelve?

What did he claim for his true ruleregion?

Thirst he makes know reply and then he owns it's all the strain to hymn.

Let us pay:

Our Father
Rich art in heaven, allowed
Be thy game
In earth as it is

Armen

Geddon with it!

Schnapps out of it!


This coat now adjourns. The chewery must chewover the new fax.

All rise.

Excunt R. the jugged.



CHAPTER THE THIRD
COULD BE THE LAST


McDolphin Class U-Boots

PRIZES!
AKTIONS!
SALES!
%S!
FREEBIES!

Buy one and get one free. So he did.

Up periscope!

Somewhere in the 7 seas.

Fin's waving goodboy to the World and his dog.

He can make pigs mad. The swine!

He once stole a donkey. They say he only burrowed it. And it was only an ass.

Geusts golt dlunk on walter! U coudln't tell the diff. It was his first wounder. One was jugde, one was a preist, one was a birde, one was goorm;  rear ole times they had in doze daze.

Target off the starboard bow!

Oder izit port?

But where, but where?

It's over. There!

And then he read from his father's tome (amended):

He Who Himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent himself, Agenbuyer, between himself and others, Who, put upon by his fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barn door, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these twenty hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.

GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO

Into the depths we samehowth plunged, torpedoes armed and ready, missiles launched in time for lunch, the heavens brightening o'er the bay where a muchroomed stream of saltysongsters bubbled briefly into view and flew themselves away as fast if not faster as Heroshema carts 'n' dogs and 'osses did at breakfast time that day when His Own Self wasn't looking.

But where? O where? O'Fin o where?

And why? The stilled small voiced. The still small voiced. The still small voice.

The small voice still.

Fin smiled to Himself. To His Own Self.

Then he sat on his hand.

Did he make no reply?

U-can boat say it.

Progress.


Fin 

THE END







Thursday 6 September 2012

Buying a ticket to Joyce

. . . like a scene from Finnegans Wake.

Having ploughed my way heroically through that tome and paid my best respects to Erin's fine son now resting peacefully in Zürich as well as poking my nose into the Zürich museum dedicated to Joyce's life and works and also having visited various Ulyssean  locations like the notorious Gentlemen's Bathing Place and the Martello Tower house, in and around Dublin, not to mention the partaking of a small cake and a Kleinerbrauner in the cafe' in Trieste where the first back of the envelope scribblings of Ulysses were made by regular customer Joyce, I naturally felt somewhat more than obliged to attend tonight's special reading of some of Joyce's work by the renowned actor Karl Markovics, an actor I saw presented with the Nestroy Ring a couple of years ago, and one or two other 'big' names at Vienna's landmark Theatre an der Wien; and so I went to the appropriate website, selected an unoccupied seat by clicking on it, accepted the terms and conditions and was just about to pay for  my €9 ticket in the back of the gods with my bit of plastic when the unspeakable happened. IT wanted my password!. I was already now at stage 3 of the 6 stage ticket transaction when all of a sudden IT demanded my personal Theatre an der Wien password!. I have no such password. Why would I have such a password!? I phoned the ticket office and explained to someone that I merely wished to purchase a ticket and to pay. I did not want a password!.

The voice at the other end of the conversation began with "I cannot English so good." And so I resorted to my Deutsch; a local Wienerisch variety "This is an international theater in a city full of tourists, I can't believe you can't speak Denglisch!" I ranted. It was no good. Everything the voice told me to do with my mouse I had already done. "Do it again noch einmals!" commanded the voice rising almost to feline soprano and so I did it again as calmly as I could in the circusdances. It was however to know travail. "You are doing etwas wrong" said the voice in almost echt Wienerdeutsch. "Sie haben ein Fehler gemacht!" "!Ich habe kein Fehler gemacht!" "Naja" und so weiter. And so I gave up and hung up. Logical argument had proven pointless for the voice could not and would not accept that its website was less than purrrfekt. It was . . .


I shall stay at home in the dark -  the unlit candle stout! 


Wednesday 5 September 2012

Nature notes




I snapped this peacock butterfly (Inachis io) yesterday afternoon when I was walking over the hills from Semmering to Breitenstein.                                      

The flowers are meadow saffron (Colchichum autumnale)
and are heralds of autumn. They bloom from August till October.

Also known as naked ladies these flowers can be deadly poisonous to man and beast

A woman on a cookery programme on my local TV station a couple of days ago claimed that you could make a delicious saffron sauce from the almost identical saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). Maybe so, but who would take the risk of eating it?

Every year quite a few people die here in Austria from the ingestion of plants and fungi. The usual suspects are a lily which is commonly mistaken for wild garlic and a toxic mushroom resembling a champignon.

This year I have noticed a sharp decline in the numbers of wasps around the place. In fact I've hardly seen any at all, not even in the gardens of the local wine taverns (Heuriger) where they are usually a real pest, especially if someone is eating chicken when they seem to appear en mass. This absence of wasps is most unusual.


haiku


through the mist 

the mountain barely seen

I think of Basho














Once again my usual debt of gratitude for my inspiration to KuniSan who posted an image of Mount Fuji at see haiku here. My top photo is not Mount Fuji but a mountain near Strobl in Austria; nevertheless the form and the mist and the twigs and the reflections give a Japanese flavour to the picture I like to think. It's what I tried to capture. Some more photos taken in the same area on the same day complete the album.


most enchanting 

ghosts on mountains 

seen in mists



Monday 3 September 2012

Train No. 1



Out of its shed
this sunshine day
an old electric train
clanked by
it made its way
in well maintained
and voluntary mode
its wonders to perform
at sedentary pace
with its number on its front
and sides
and with its polished painted flair
it seemed to me
to almost glide on silver lines
when the signal let it
so
to do
and at the crossing
village road
its reflecting
headlamp dim
it softly owled
its distant sound
its toot-toot- to
politely say
its
Here I come
and then it crossed
my mind
that
it might be
that an elderly pedestrian
or a baby
in a perambulator
perchanced upon
a sunny day
to cross
its path
its path
its parallel
and proudly punctual
path
its weekend
path
from
terminus
and
back

thereto



Saturday 1 September 2012

Outfoxed!


       Oscar Wilde famously defined riding to hounds as 'the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable'. At this mountain inn near Lake Traunsee in Austria 'the uneatable' is prepared to outfox 'the unspeakable' should they dare to approach; to turn the tables on them, you might say. 

haiku


another school out
more dolphins in the harbour 
another blood bath

Yes folks, it's the killing season again in Japan. 

It seems it's not enough that these beautiful and intelligent creatures are now under threat from the nuclear radiation in the Pacific Ocean food chain. Annually the dolphins are herded into shallow waters and publicly slaughtered. It's a sickening sight. 

Surely it's time for us humans to treat the dolphins and the environment in which they live with more care and respect. After all, they have never done us any harm.