In Support of the African Communities in Tübingen

We wish to express our absolute support for the African community/communities of Tübingen in the face of the racism it has to endure, especially at times of distress and tragedy. Being 'green' (which Tübingen prides itself on being) is meaningless if human rights and respect for humanity aren't part of the equation. For context, see this article in The African Courier.

Forks

 

Lightning touched a clinic

near where the medical helicopter

lands and then it touched the old botanical gardens.

 

When a young African man was murdered

in the botanical gardens some months ago,

the mayor aligned cause with refugee status.

 

The dead man was blamed for his own death.

The man stabbed beneath the trees was said

to have been part of a drug syndicate.

 

The dead man under the trees which in March

were starting to reach towards their summer leaves

wasn’t numbered as a specimen in the arboretum.

 

In this ‘green city’ there is a failure of alignment

between cause and effect, and the behaviour

of the storm is placed on the behaviour

 

of others — behaviour, behaviouralism,

meteorology, shifting blame, enclave — a ginkgo

tree was planted for the 200th of the university hospital.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Working with Russell-West-Pavlov

John Kinsella

The collaboration between Russell West-Pavlov and myself has relied on two material actualities: proximity and interstices. These can be geographical — being in Tübingen — or they can be conceptual, an overlapping of ideas and interests. But they are both material in the sense that we configure them as ‘real’ and expect ‘real-time' occurrences. We might occasionally work with abstraction, and I certainly do in making poems, but ultimately our making relies on pragmatic and temporal actuality. 

Proximity might seem to speak for itself, but it doesn’t. Our first shared qualification of ‘proximity’, as opposed to our own individuated notions, came about across the distance — on a link-up between Schull, West Cork and Tübingen Germany. There was a virtual proximity, and also the proximity of thinking and what we hoped might be achieved by sharing ideas and making discrete writings out of this. 

So, collaboration was very much grounded in the dichotomy and paradox of distance and closeness. Apropos of this, when I have been in Tübingen, we find occasions and to meet and talk and walk and ‘congeal’ our ideas. Sometimes this has taken the form of notes, most often of conversation that shares ideals. When our working together was first mooted in 2016, we discussed the possibility of ‘mini essays’, and how they might form interludes to more explorative and discursive making in the greater context. And that’s what happened, I think.

Interstices are where we overlap in thinking, while sometimes holding quite different ways of seeing and interpreting. That necessarily comes through our different life experiences, our different ‘positions’ qua how we do and don’t interface with the world, in conjunction with our strong overlaps in political, ethical and social views. We also share certain experiences in a proximate ways (complex relationships with ‘Australia’, ‘authority’ etc, the rejection of values that inform our gender-ethnic-class statuses and so on), and this combination of difference and similarity creates those interstices from which we write. Our differences are as strong an informant of our sharing textuality as our similarities.

Though we have written at many tangents to our core ‘themes’, the focal points of our work till now have very much been orientated around time and place — both fundamental themes in both our work across the decades. In part, I am sure these interests are what drew us together. Further, a deep respect and interest around issues of the Global South, and resisting the abuses of capital, wealth and privilege, solidified our approach and ‘content’. And a major overlap on the Venn diagram of concerns is the environment in its spatial-temporal vulnerabilities around intactness.

Very often, in writing poems that relate to the foci of our book, I work in the overtly figurative and allusive. So, a poem that seems to be about, say, seeing or hearing a bird, or observing a tree, is also about the issues we tend to talk about between ourselves (via email, video link or in person). Sometimes I focalise a mutual concern/interest in a different way, and reflect over the independent threads that lead us to shared processing or a commonality that also emphasises difference:

Proximity Reciprocities and Contraindications

for RW-P 

 

This is return. Used so much, by us. Too much?

The meat ants have new volcanoes on their old range

and, to mirror, sugar ants have raised funnels. Click?

That’s taking liberties. Collecting wood, I hear machinery

of hunting, of tree clearing, of breaking up. But weirdly

there’s a certain intactness, even if a bullet pierces.

Membrane. The stench of herbicide on the air. And from

the hefty paddocks of Victoria Plains, the defcon smell

of pesticide. Early stages of crops. Protection. And NuSeed

signs proliferating in contrariness — their barren seed.

In return we measure change: storm damage, erosion — dry 

more than wet. What’s left behind. Inside the house,

compacted but at different points, new and overlapping

and reconvened narratives. Those who’d have us gone

before arriving again, though ‘before’ is as relevant

as the self-seeded rare tree — where did the seed 

come from? Dormant so long? Blow-in? Birdshit, claw, beak? 

Tail of kangaroo. Signs still here — tracks, scats. And ours.

Another type of poem is a response poem to an idea, text or situation that I send to Russell in the hope that it might prompt something back from him. And yet another is in response to something Russel has said or written, or that has arisen from a shared experience. Often those experiences have been based on walks or journeys around Tübingen in which Russell has imparted a piece of knowledge that has fascinated me, and created a potential for proximities and interstices for future response. 

In the case of the following poem, Russell did (I think) include it in something he was working on — a tangent, but also a shared temporality and a placing it in a zone of mutuality. So, separate and overlapping. Ourselves, and a common body of idea-making and intertextuality. Both of us emphatically believe that no one owns ideas, and that ideas proliferate and overlap and are part of a greater body of thought and works that share a concern for ‘rights’, so having these ‘whispers’ of connection are every bit as important as the more overt textual blocks with our name below:

Failed Narratives of Extinct Volcanoes

 

On the ledge

of the extinct volcano

facing another extinct volcano —

Georgenberg — sore thumb —

alp-life with villages

and factories, small or large

as families: castle keep,

bare-limbed forest

tries to hold its own

in cold rain, not sleet,

as lookout comes home

to roost, real city

below. Rain eases

into mistranslation,

generative phonology

of migration.

Whose ‘spanner

on the works’

makes production

skilled, well-engineered?

Winding down the cone —

Achalm, yes — lathed

mountains higher

or high enough, 

down into

Reutlingen, 

past oaks, word 

fragmentation.

And maybe the most common mode for me is when I am working in my own mental space, and observing things far removed from Russell’s physical location and life, and link some thought in the poem with something he has said or we have discussed. So, the poem is about completely different things — e.g. seeing an echidna and watching the films of Stan Brakhage (Russell and I have never discussed cinema, which makes the ‘linkage’ even more interesting to me... and as the poem below is also part of a completely separate series of poems it creates silent links for me that I find generative and hopefully ‘opening out’ for future discussions and interactions):

Liquid Flow of Echidna from Gravel to Grass Bank — Reflecting Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) While Painting Eye-Images

 

To roll and sway and merge

is to paint the path and deny

the tracks of pursuit, to crack

paint of script and rise and part,

push aside marbling and viscosity

of dry and wet, to roll uphill

to sway an orthography a writing 

of blur and merge: qualities

of sky and mouse-excavated 

tailings to nose into sense for

termites deeper than old tunnels

the awakening season for flame

to a-priori its ways into traces

of aquifer-augmentation — yes, beneath

hillside eroded; what reptiles

crossed in ascent or insects

with pre-fossil wings, pause

and sample, test and surge

a quartet out of crescent

of declining sun dazzle

in shadow of spines or spikes

or inverted feathers — inside to fly

bodily further in from the body

of valley while remaining so grounded, levitating

despite ‘poor eyesight’ — such misnomers of biology,

such occlusions of echidna-speak 

as close to ground they absorb and muffle 

our vibrations of passing or breathing hard:

shock-absorber psyches framed by

frames of universalised structures of art-speak,

skincells, hair follicles, applique and palette frescoes

of crossing over, of circumventing a branch,

of refreshing trails laid over a range

of terrains so specific you read

‘only’ into the allegories

the metaphors of consequence

for life overlaying their space — add quick light,

add flicker or flash, texture

to hair root and shadow enfilade

cosmos singing interior 

breaking of forms and refolding

to draw into a surface a logography

of constituents for all-time,

shared prognosis, differing

signatures and tellings, 

ends of lines.

And a new one for Russell to respond to, re-process, depart from (‘riff off’), or to leave floating in its own terms of reference... he hasn’t seen this one yet! When we were walking with our sons (Russell sorted the walk), I noticed a log covered in moss that looked animal-like... maybe a massive dog emerging from the side of a ravine. I took photos and pointed it out to Russell, describing what it looked like to me. I said, I will be writing stories about this, and asked him to take a look. As soon as I saw the strange shape, it sparked with ideas and scenarios I have been working with in my recent poetry: the politics of metamorphosis, transition, shifts, mergings... along with my usual concerns for protecting habitats. 

The place was the Seven Mills Forest near Stuttgart, and there is actually a working wood mill near where we entered, and near where I came across this was a hunter’s shooting platform, and that all bothers me. In a way, the animal-plant imagery is a kind of resistance, something beyond the human controls of the area. I did a series of poems and illustrations around the image, but when I got back to where we are staying in Tübingen I immediately wrote what follows. It's not dedicated, and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of our collaboration when I wrote it, but we were there together, and sometimes such moments can become something else. And in the spirit of metamorphosis, it’s over to you, Russell:

Animal Log Is Cautious But Determined 

 

These are not qualities of lurk

or weirdness, not cryptic

beyond cryptic colouration,

but its emergence is cautious

and its transition remains

private though it reveals

itself from the bank — moss

hair, wood trunk torso,

branch legs. Hear it speak

over murmur of stream,

hear it deny the hunter

a mortal point of aim.

(April, 2023)

And maybe in writing we might think back to our 2019 walk in the Black Forest and our discussion over its fate... different places, if places in relatively close proximity (especially when compared with my writing of forests near where we live in the Western Australia wheatbelt), across time — one pre-pandemic, one post- (or still during, depending on definitions). One on a short visit from me, and the second at the start of a long stay. Both walks were with Russell as ‘guide’ and facilitator.

With Russ in Neckar Valley: mountain forest walk

 

The fork feeds back

Up the hill to take

River away from

Its restrictions

Raptor whistle black

Woodpecker call

But without the tap tap

To decode, without

The ratcheting up

To grub the leafless

Beech which holds

Designs on a tolerable

Summer to come,

Of tolerance, specs

Of walkers’ passing

Interest, collective

Breath, body heat

Of Kant’s working out.

(December, 2019)

Or if that doesn’t spark, maybe we can reach back to our conversation around the horror of hunting towers on the edge of fields and forests, and deep in among the trees along the lines of traversal by pigs and deer. I have written many poems around these travesties and manipulations of desire lines, and they have become a focal point for an animal rights campaign involving German forests. What hope do I have? As Russell said on our recent walk, at least you are personally less likely to be shot than in a French forest, to which I glibly and lamentingly asked/replied: Ordnung? 

Here’s one from a walk I just completed... and accompanying the poem is a series of photos taken from deep within the woods which will find their place in the resistance to violence against animals as well as humans, too. This poem refers to an exhibition of Daniel Richter’s paintings I saw the other day: barriers, ‘silent’ guard towers, open and closed zones, and deep ontological and physical threat.

Lament

 

Daniel Richter’s painted towers

survey human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

The forest is an edge

to escape to or through,

and the forest myths

entangle fate.

The hunting towers

of the forest are not

those towers, and yet

they perform a similar

and equally deadly function.

How you rate an animal

in the schema of persecution,

how qualify rights and history,

will determine your perception,

The lack of critique

resounds with the movements

of swine and deer in the crepuscular

valley. In the folkish fantasy 

of woodsman architecture.

Daniel Richter’s towers

seem to be human lines

of oppression: the watch,

the fence, the zone

of destruction.

(May, 2023)

Now it’s over to Russell, and I am looking forward to where he does and doesn’t go with this, and to what further conversations ensue. And whatever happens, he will take things through proximities and interstices that I will inevitably find surprising and generative! Here's a manifesto of a particular approach to collaborative poetics in medias res.

World’s End

            after Jakob van Hoddis’s expressionist poem

The sharp-headed citizen grasps at his flying headdress.

A hell of a racket is busting out from here to there.

The roofs are too steep for the tilers split asunder.

Watching the news we are rudely confronted by rising seas.

The storm is upon us, demented waves pole-vault

Beaches and thrust inland to take out the dams.

Most of us have runny noses, which goes with the gestalt.

Coal-bearing rails cascade down from railway bridges.

            John Kinsella

Note: Jakob van Hoddis (Hans Davidsohn) was born in 1887 to a German-Jewish family in Berlin and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. He published one book of poetry during his lifetime, Weltende, in 1918, though his poetry was collected in 1958. He was resident for some years 'in care' (he suffered from schizophrenia) in Tübingen. There are public steps named after him in Tübingen (that were earlier named after a Nazi doctor, but finally renamed in 1992), and also a plaque on a residential building to mark where he lived. It is not far from where we are staying. The 'expressionist' poem 'Weltende' of which I offer a version (above — I have taken great liberties, but it seems such a prescient poem that I think it works as a commentary on human environmental impact), was published in 1911, and had significant influence on innovative German-language poetry of the time. Hoddis was unable to escape Germany with the rest of his family to Tel Aviv in 1933 due to the British authorities refusing him an entry certificate on the grounds of his mental health condition. The German Wikipedia entry carries far more information on him than the English version.

Temporariness (2): Photography

            by John Kinsella

I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way — directly, indirectly — but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The old town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-of-the-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... the fine artist who... has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard's Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin, p. 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’ — synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin, p. 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann; Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1999, p. 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in?), and read: ‘One of the — often unspoken — objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (op. cit. p. 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking — I am there again, NOW — of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot — dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, 

JK photographed by Tracy Ryan; Hölderlin tower behind

the same trees Hölderlin  would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on, and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted.

Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology — she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals — but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becoming familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno, worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged.  

This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock — its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience — both come into play.’ (Benjamin, p. 692) This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll?), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part.  There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its purpose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also.

Psychogeography of a Temporary Locality 1

Note: What follows is my first contribution to a collaborative book of micro-essays I am doing with Russell West-Pavlov. 

I have been here before. That was in 1999. I wrote a sequence of poems on the war in the Balkans. Those poems claimed Hölderlin was not mad. I am here now. Writing this. This visit is less temporary than the last, which was for a conference and only lasted a week. This one is around eleven weeks. Eleven times longer, at least. Duration and exposure. And this time I am with Tracy, and Tim who is thirteen, and so when I was here last time not part of the ‘messages home’ I sent every day. That home then was Cambridge, but Cambridge inflected through the Western Australian wheatbelt. Two different environments. And by environments I do not mean that which Lefebvre mocks as an ambiguous and non-defined space. What did he know about space, caught up in his urban ‘second nature’? Environment in the way I meant it, and mean it, is agency of the non-human as much as the human. The fens, caught, managed, made, turned into the vegetable garden of Britain, were and are still environment. I watched birds; I walked through the fens. I saw reclamation projects taking place, the growing of Wicken Fen again, beyond tourist curio to hard-core nature reserve. And what potlatch is still disinterred from the peaty ground of the fens. And now, as I build a multi-dimensional model of a damaged place, a place where Nazism is still close to the surface, where the polymorphous perversity of a Romantic god-poet, and forest reserves where the great crested newt struggles to breed, and the memorials of loss and butchery sit alongside the naming of the fuchsia and the spirit of a pastor who spoke for years against Nazism and was killed by it, where Cemetery X holds the body-parts of those experimented on, where bats move from attic to cellar to evade wood-preservative poison, where outdoor theatres can only open after a specific summer date and then only show silent movies to help protect that very bat, where deer antlers over doorways are warped cathode and anode to an organic-vegan alternative movement in which all nature is nature and environment is clear and definable. And now, writing in ambiguity, I search for the concrete. And that, and this, is inflected through where we came from by road and ferry and road and ferry and road — West Cork in Ireland via Cambridge. And always the mental space, the spatial configuration and underpinnings of Jam Tree Gully. Where late storms will stir fire memories, the absolute fear of excoriation and conflagration, the easterly and northerly driven firestorms of the Australian wheatbelt summer. The place where temporariness is our absence, and where we’re always expected back, whether we belong or don’t. Here, now, attempting to collate vocabulary, parse sentences in a language Celan broke into fragments, which others have reconstituted, I listen to Tim gather it to him with critical consciousness like rainwater off our Jam Tree Gully roof. It’s not a romantic image – that rainwater gathers the dust and the bird-droppings and all else deposited across the corrugated roof-planes, gathers the pristine and the contaminated from its functional open and occupied space, made invisible as it collects in the great 90 000-litre tank, is pumped into the house, issues forth visible again from the taps. As is language. No Bauhaus moment. And Tracy, shifting from language to language with ease. ‘Flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ I cannot use anyone else’s words here to support my argument. I offer no quote, no external authority. But I know that enough days have passed for the sound of the Great Tits singing on the bare trees, and the sight of the Schloss with its collection of antiquities, with its animals carved from animal, a lost animal, a great animal, are familiar enough to place a lacuna in temporary. It’s there I will go, and it’s there I will retreat.

           John Kinsella