a) Stalingrad Madonna
A found object poem in the Ku'Damm, Berlin. Hollow Tooth. Evidence of a bombardment. No more details except for a Madonna with child on a map. Sketch made by Dr Kurt Reubens at Stalingrad, Christmas 1942. A cold coming we had of it, just the very dead of Winter. Ice floes in the Spree. Wandering the streets around Mitte. café filled with Turks playing cards or tarot. I asked for a small doner (but they call it Kebap, not Kebab) and it came filled with greasy, stinking meat.
Mr Hairy fingered Old Git still won't pass the Opal fruits. The arthritic Orang Utang he brought on the first day, yes the one that escaped into the tangled web of broken concrete (this barren Stalinoid fortress, my auld school...) has leant in the window and nipped off with his toupee. Now he's offering me a thesaurus in Euskeda. That lesson on Indo-European, it thwarted his attempts at world domination, it changed the course of a passing second, it altered the snurl on yer moustachioed lippen for ein second. Now, I kennen nicht. The generous unpattern that prompted so much is shardly disappearing. Must have done a very good interview.
Do you know what I had to do to get this job? I had to change my name from Paul Curlyfly to Robert Zimmerman? That's an irony, ahistorical monologic. a career. hip hoop hooray. I took the last name of a very important Welsh poet, inverted, turned it through a triple loop and then added my own invention. The Italian for room - hence, Bob Stanzaman. Better than Bob Testacle or Bob Germania, another idea I bobbed with.
Kant's hairy chestnutsssssss.....
b) Herr Apfelmuß
'A moose?'
'I thought he said moose too.'
'Apfelmuß'
'A triple decker with sahne.'
'Moose!'
'Do you think he's drowning in his ice cream? Is he waving? I think he's trying to tell us something.'
'What did he ask for?'
'Triple portion of Apfelmuß.'
'My God I can feel it too! I'm....I'm falling down a chute into a sea of Apfelmuß. My long lost love, my moose....'
'The Philosophers have only resisted change, the point is to wallow in intransigence.'
- Karl Apfelmuß
c) Adolph von Menzel
Adolph von Menzel travelled to Dresden from Berlin in the late 19th century, given special permission to make sketches of the baroque antiquities, began a reconstruction of the era of Frederick the Great.
d) Dresden, Valentine's day, 1945
Dear Herr Bratkartoffeln,
Yesterday I was in Dresden again, near the FrauenKirche and saw some photos portraying the firebombing of Dresden. Photos of the victims piled onto a piece of rail track.
What is your answer to the algebra of responsibility? Do you have an equation that will help me to figure it out? I'm sure there is one, but somehow I don't think mathematics has the guts or humanity to tell us anything about the little tragedies of each of these victims, their bodies piled on top of each other, the piece of rail track.
Little greedy, voluptuous piglets with their legs in the air.
Smouldering corpses.
best wishes,
Herr Knoblauch
Chapter 1 - I sang in my chains like the sea
'Dr Hegelfisch.*'
Dr Hegelfisch opened a jade green eye. It swung round the room telescopically and then sank back into its socket. A jaded finger extended. Scratching his wax candle melting nose, leafing violently through the text book.
'Ideology', what is it? Napoleon conquered and conquered. History as hero. What do you say? You say 'putsch' or 'coup' but we know heroic violence and call it 'revolution.'
'Revolution is - Dr Hegelfisch - a necessary prelude, that's all. You understand, don't you? People need preludes. Then the great take off into self-sustained growth. Then the multiplier effect but above all, Dr Hegelfisch, history itself is impersonal. An impersonal prelude to a heroic symphony or opera. People are such that preludes make sense when logic is denied or otherwise. Great preludes anticipate the most shocking events.'
'I'm bored. I need more information technology vocabulary. I can't afford to spend time pouring over - history.'
* A Hegelfisch. A spurious notion attrib to Murphy P. analagous to Quarks and Quantum Jumps as in his 'Three Hegelfisch for Michael McMoose'. An extract from this experimental diatribe follows:
Dear Sir,
sum of my pomes.
best wishes,
Ronald A. Twit
Li Po composes lines on death while staring into sun
red panda. confucious he say red panda chomping bamboo shoots. li po born. dies. sundown. red panda shits in river. time is river. red panda shit like time. transitory. Mao is born. China is better. all thinkers sent to the fields like red panda. jenner publishes poem. relieved of beer money throws himself in canal. believes and is re-born as red panda shit floating down river. all living things in cycles of re-birth and death.
Paul Murphy studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S. Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He is presently living in Berlin.
His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in journals worldwide. He has published two pamphlets and one book of poetry (In the Luxembourg Gardens, University of Salzburg Press, Austria), and a book on Eliot and Lacan (T.S. Eliot's Post-Modernist Complaint, Postpressed, Australia) and has read from his work throughout Europe.