Photo by Mike Flemming.Copyright

Stan is feeling very odd

He ate a piece of rancid cod.

He hates to throw out bits of food,

but now his inside’s stewed.

He feels sick and tired of life.

He hates the housework and his wife.

He’s tired of cooking cakes for her.

And he dislikes her hair.

He does like talking to his cat.

They always have a friendly chat.

And he likes teaching tricks and jokes

And see….his ears do smoke!

He went to see a Doctor Brown

Who wore a bright red dressing gown.

He asked him why he had no suit.

And only wore one boot.

Dr Brown said, Look here,you!

I’m the doctor,how do you do?

So Stan said “I am feeling sick.

The world whirls far too quick”

“Travel sickness is not nice,

The world spins once,then you spin twice.

I’ll give you some pink medicine,

See how you get on.”

“I want to get off, not get on.

My time on earth is surely done.

I want to hear angelic choirs

Instead of Mary’s tyres.”

“I think you’re very melancholy.

I prefer my patients to be jolly.

Please take Prozac ere you come”

“I’ve already taken twenty one,

But I still feel so black and grey.

I can’t tell if it’s night or day.”

Oh,help me doctor,it’s that time,

When poets run out of rhymes.”

“Now look her, Stan”the doctor said,

“I think that you should go to bed.

A little rest will do you good

And renovate your blood.”

“But who will bake the cakes and bread.

And make sure that the cat’s not dead?

And who will clean the purple bath

And sweep the garden path?”

So Doctor Brown began to cry.

He’s not much good but he does try.

So Stan went home and had a rest,

And ate some buttered toast.

Some days the world is too much there,

But other days it seems more square.

So Stan feels he can cope with life

And even with his wife!

http://www.arduity.com/

Extract from Arduity website post

Paul Celan’s Todtnauberg.

Many, many people think of this as the most important poem of the 20th century, it records the meeting between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger in 1966. Heidegger is becoming an increasingly villified figure as the depths of his anti-Semitism become more apparent but he was certainly the most influential European philosopher of his time. Celan, the finest poet anywhere in 1966, was an admirer of Heidegger’s work but remained angry and disappointed about the philosopher’s silence about his membership of the Nazi party prior to and during WWII. Celan visited Heidegger at his cabin in Todtnauberg and they spent the day together. The critical debate that has simmered away ever since centres on whether the poem records a reconciliation or further estrangement between the two. Of course this isn’t helped by Celan’s use of ambiguity:

    Arnica, eyebright, the
    draft from the well with the
    star-die on top,

    in the 
    Hütte

    written in the book
    -whose name did it record
    before mine?-
    in this book
    the line about
    a hope, today,
    for a thinker's 
    word

    to come
    in the heart

    forest sward, unleveled
    orchis and orchis, singly

    crudeness, later, while driving,
    clearly,

    he who drives us, the man
    he who also hears it,

    the half-
    trod log-
    trails on the highmoor.

    humidity,
    much.

Given the complexity of the above, the best response is to acknowledge that we will never (ever) know with confidence what happened when these two met and walk away. This is the default arduity position but in this instance I feel forced to side with Pierre Joris (whose translation this is) and others in ‘reading’ this meeting as a complete failure. Being unable to read German, I can’t comment on the accuracy of the translation but I am aware of the work and views of both men and cannot imagine how any kind of reconciliation could take place primarily because Heidegger was incapable of acknowledging his personal guilt.

Joris has written a fascinating description of the work that this translation entailed. He draws attention to Celan’s use of the word ‘waldwasen’ which he translates as ‘forest sward’ but ‘wasen’ also means the land where the knacker guts and buries livestock. These two men would therefore be walking over the bodies of the dead victims of the Holocaust. The rest of the Joris thesis is too complex to describe in detail but has persudaded me. In all fairness, I don’t want the meeting to have been successful primarily because Celan had dedicated his life to bearing witness to/for the victims of the Holocaust but also because I don’t trust anything that James K Lyons, the main proponent of reconciliation, puts forward.

In summary, it is important that we should know more about this meeting but also acknowledge that we never will. This shouldn’t however stop us from paying attention to the poem.

http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_famous_free_background.html