Vocational Salvation
Hours before the Allies arrived in Gardelegen north of Magdeburg on April 13, 1945, an SS detachment bugged out
from guarding a column of civilian prisoners, and Wehrmacht troops, remaining SS, local volunteers, and some
Hitler Youth and Volksstrum took over
And executed over a thousand of the civilians by gasoline-soaking the barn into which they had been driven and
burning it
Those trying to escape the smoky hay and fodder fire were murdered by machine guns set up to cover the
barn’s doors
While I was shooting marbles squatting on a school playground in the Shenandoah
The day was a Friday, the day after FDR died in Warm Springs
A quarter century later while bent down to study a Wehrmacht helmet bolted to a grave’s cross in a church cemetery
in Oberösterreich, a woman appeared behind me cursing violently and repeatedly swinging at me with a spade
In Europe, “Night comes from Asia, and asks no questions” (Adam Zagajewski)
When Peter Hanke stood up in the Princeton Chapel in the Gruppe 47 meeting, April 1966, shouting about the
descriptive impotence, Beschreibungsimpotenz, of his German contemporaries, my German wasn’t up to
understanding what was going on and I was about to leave for vocational salvation in California
There the chain of potent volcanoes which are the mountains themselves and the wild Pacific itself waited and wait
When moving into a lookout at the start of fire season, first orient the fire-finder correcting what accidental jars,
adjustments by people ignorant of direction, and the winter’s earthquakes and tremors have done to the plane table
all along the bloom below,
scrolling the wrestle of directions
that make the oceans go
(Les Murray)
Anton Webern was shot and killed by an American soldier on a street under curfew in Mittersill, Austria,
September 1945
Instances of change that coalesce into a sinister post-modern coherence
The twenty-first-century proposal of a sugar tax to counter obesity echoes back to the beginning of African slavery
in the Americas
After the enslaved pre-Columbian residents died off on the cane plantations, Bartolomé de las Casas, their
advocate, proposed bringing in Africans instead
The trade winds carry well from West Africa to the Americas thus the Middle Passage and the triangular trade
All for sugar
Slaves in, sugar back to Britain and Europe, trade goods to West Africa, slaves out
And slaves in, rum north to Maine and the Maritimes offloaded for dried cod and tall timber (white pine masts for
ships of the line), then back across on the westerlies
Sugar and slaves, slaves and sugar
Trade and technology ruthlessly modify
Turocolonialism, technocolonialism
Corpoturf
Oil became the elixir and radical exchanges followed
Petroleum fosters plutocracies, plutocracies foster petroleum
In 1966 there were a hundred and eighty thousand residents in the United Arab Emirates, now there are eight million
Future shock
Entrenchment
Dig in
Hold on
In the manner of any opportunistic orthodoxy
S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=A=L=I=S=M
With distracted readings of Derrida, Barthes, Sassure and Benjamin and their dogmas
As current literary critical idiom involves originary, cognized, stylismic, alterity, foregrounding
“Americans are highly moralistic, and any kind of moral ambiguity irritates them. As a result they completely fail to
understand themselves, which is one of their strengths” (J. G. Ballard)
Earnest, incompetent, aging Wasps often self-depreciatingly confused, befuddled, charmingly and tellingly like
surviving aborigines living on the fringes of the new computer-driven vitality
“Nothing is more certain than the foolishness of old certainties” (Elliot Weinberger)
Such pinched and narrow Aubrey Beardsley faces
A self-defining clerisy
Accessorized
At the 250-years-of-Princeton reception of the university’s architecture department in the 1990s, almost three
quarters of all there were dressed completely in what was still then metropolitan black
French paced piano wistful, ritardando, cédez, serrez, rubato
The hanging drift smoke of rubato
The Florentine palazzos, Strozzi, Pitti, Medici, Rucellai, Pazzi, Antinori
Italy, tolerant of divorce and abortions, idealistic but grossly materialistic, deep respect for intellectuals but horrible
mass media and childish popular culture, conservative but highly stylish and able to innovate brilliantly, a corrupt elite
“Anachronistically, I imagine the Florentine patricians [Pazzi v. Medici] solving their problems by learning the trick of
rotating apparently opposed but complicitous factions in power in response to the whims of a complacently
enfranchised popolo anesthetized by mass media and consumer goods” (Tim Parks)
The startlingly monumental Piero in Williamstown, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, massive in the
manner of his Resurrection in Sansepolcro
Piero, exciting as the indisputable stirrings of spring
Or the autumn theme from Glazunov’s The Seasons, the Adagio of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, or Tristan if in the right
mood for it
“…Dawn always tells us something / always.” (Adam Zagajewski)
A thousand writing programs established mostly in American universities and colleges
Plus who knows how many unregistered with AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) along with
private and community writing workshops involving who knows how many tuition-paying earnest people questing for
a freedom window
Against odds similar to a high school player making it to the NBA
The whole, with chronic American cooption in play, keeps a cadre of generally well-meaning writing teachers in oil
changes and baby food
Flaunting flat-brimmed, bowl-crowned Boss of the Plains hats, facial hair and haven’t read that attitudes
“Society… teaches its members that their only hope of salvation, within the established order, lies in an absurd and
despairing attempt to get free of that order” (Lévi-Strauss)
Gainsay any connection to AWP
Or to the fictive/factive nuttiness of psychiatry/psychology
Or to mysticism or spiritualism
Or worldorderism of any sort
Smelling of moldy carpeting and cat piss
Gainsayer, gainsaid
“Mysticism… a mental system that prefers vagueness to meaning, coincidence to causation and pomposity to
criticism” (Druin Burch)
Much better is the intense, vivid sarcasm of Goya
The defining acuity of Les Murray
The precise wonder of W. S. Merwin
Straight-shooter Umberto Eco, stick with the subject and the words will follow, and in poetry stick with the words
and the subject will
The trundling sound of travelers pulling along their rolling luggage
Accessorization
El Escorial’s one hundred and sixty kilometers of corridors
Fixity and order
Bearing gravely on the commodification of girls and women, the normal gender ratio is 100:105, presently China’s
is 100:121 and the world’s is 100:107, by the 2020s one in five men will be surplus in China and northwest India
Having to do too with all sorts of other unsettling things
“I wonder what I am, / a passerby who won’t last long” (Adam Zagajewski)
Most probably that’s just as well but then it will be others like us when unsustainability will encourage all sorts of
grotesque ethical compromises down the line
D. E. Steward mainly writes months with 364 of them to date. Most of them are published, as is much
of his short poetry.
