martes, 29 de julio de 2014

CHRISTIAN LOIDL [12.554]


Christian Loidl

(1957-2001)

Nacido el 17 de septiembre 1957 en Linz, Austria fue uno de los notables poetas austriacos de finales del siglo XX. 

Doctorado en literatura alemana vivió desde 1975 en Viena y trabajó como periodista en radio y en el suplemento del periódico (u.a. für „Ö1“ und für die „Presse“).

Decisivo para su desarrollo artístico fueron las largas estancias en la "Escuela de Jack Kerouac de Disembodied Poetics" en Boulder (EE.UU.) en 1990, donde trabajó en estrecho contacto personal con los artistas de la "generación beat" (incluyendo Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith ). Posteriormente, co-fundador de la "Schule für dichtung" en Viena en 1992.

Desde principios de los años noventa, se centró en el trabajo de su poesía y de su presentación a través de actuaciones, a menudo con músicos y compositores (entre ellos Wolfgang Musil, Bernhard Lang, Otto Lechner, Marwan Abado).

Invitado en numerosos festivales internacionales de poesía en Macedonia, Lituania, Colombia, Argentina o Estados Unidos, estableció diversas y de larga duración amistades. con poetas de estos países.

El 16 de diciembre 2001 Cristiana Loidl murió a causa de un accidente en su apartamento de Viena.

Entre sus libros publicados se destacan: Profecías falsas (1994), Misterios de Viena, (1995), Helechos en flor (1996), y Pupila (1998).




De helechos en flor 

¡Cuan lento se posa
el polvo lustroso,
Afuera, encandilada
por la luz del sol,
zumbando
una mosca!
A principios del mes de enero,
la madera del mirador
recubierta de verde intenso
y bañada en el
oro solar;
el alero se está herrumbrando
y suenan las hojas
arrastradas por los golpes
de viento.
La voz chillona de la corneja
se va incrustando en
la mampostería;
el humo, hacia la torre,
se está encrespando;
y todo el mundo,
tornando el sol,
sin más ni más.





Requiem for Christian Loidl 

Por William Levy

In a way, the Austrian poet Christian Loidl's demise was an Icarus action, radical as was his life. Chris' partner wrote me – “It seems that he had taken mushrooms and jumped out the window, out a of a closed window, so he had to break the glass first, and then he fell or jumped and broke his neck. That's all.”
People who are afraid of heights are not afraid of accidentally falling. They are terrified of their inexorable urge to jump, to fly, an abyss-merge-craving-rapture as a triumphant exit strategy to Zion, the highest region. Chris called himself an “airpoet,” he lept at life — in the faith that he could grab it. He believed: Let's be realistic and demand the impossible; and, The only thing worth contemplating is that which cannot be contemplated.
A lot of people loved Christian Loidl. “Imagination is not a State,” said the visionary British poet/painter William Blake, “it is Human Existence itself.” And Chris owned this airy realm of dreams — let it here and now be said — in his daily life with concentration and generosity, with a guileless chivalry. He was one of poetry's natural troubadours, an avant-savant , wandering minstrel, hierophant of epiphanies.
We first met in Vienna, near the grand Ferris wheel of the Prater — made famous by The Third Man film. I had just flown in from Lithuania. I had been there to do readings at the Autumn Festival in Druskininkai, an enchanting once fashionable, Middle-Earth-type spa town surrounded by a mushroomed primeval forest. Then to downtown Vilnius for the very official book launching — at the baronial Writers' Union building — for my collected poems translated into Lithuanian, Kas pavoge vistyti? ( Who Stole the Chicken? ). It seemed like no coincidence that Chris likewise knew this haunting Baltic country. We fell immediately into an extreme discussion. About the spirit of that place, its hidden misteries, its careless beauty, its spiky vibrato light and weary eerie unforced pagan mood, the click click clicking of an abacus, the paintings and the music of M.-K. Ciurlionis, sonatas of the stars, samovars — so began our fruitful communion that lasted the next four years until his passing on.
When I got back to Amsterdam, we exchanged our works — printed matter and sounds. Our brains felt well fed and apoetized by each other's gems. A couple of months later, a German publisher wanted to do my book The Night Before Charisma: The Rise & Fall of Otto Muehl , an essay about that imprisoned artist, philosopher and sex communard. I asked Chris to do the translation. During the winter/spring of 1998, we were in constant, intense contact over this by letter and seriously long Sunday telephone calls. Unser Freund Otto Muhl: Eine Studie zum Kulturschock , appeared that summer and Chris flattered me with: “Should you ever consider a similar job, it's fine with me.” 

Over the next few years, we saw each other only one other time. When Chris came to Amsterdam to perform well-tempered Mongolian overtone chanting at a presentation for a book of Balkan tales by a Dutch author. Then the next day Chris came to my house, early, for dinner. We spoke out out hearts and minds, and without regret. Chris mentioned, I remember hazily, a poetry festival he had been to in Medellin, Columbia: “Where lots of gente have fun, share visions, bask in powerful green mountain winds and where erotic friendliness and sensitivity charge everyday dealings.” All of a sudden, it was two o'clock in the morning. The conversation was so good, so buoyant, that after noshing on the assorted seafood hors-d'oeuvres, lamb meatballs in sweet and sour tomato sauce, dark bread and salads, I completely forgot to serve the steamed ginger chicken with shiitake mushrooms. It wasn't missed, though, since that evening invisible language had been nourishment enough. 

Although we didn't see each other again, I continued featuring Chris' latest verse and tunes on my weekly radio program, the Dr. Doo-Wop Show . He continued to send me his own stuff, as well as diverse rare and remarkable cassettes. One was a recording of the last hours of Timothy Leary — with his real-time death moment. Others included Helmut Qualtinger's wonderfully preposterous songs, and the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising , recorded in jail by Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer. Also, new great maestros — from Germany, Austria and Switzerland — deluged me with their latest audio art, with a covering note, that said: “I got your address from Christian Loidl” or “My friend Christian Loidl told me to send.” Few poets promote someone else's accomplishments. Chris did! And, in solidarity with him, in every case I found a place to give them airtime, in airplay to transmit something of these embers of the heart on the airwaves. Ubertragung . Chris was always trying to get artists to be part of a conspiracy, to conspire, con spirare , breathe together. 

But Chris was not a quietist: he worried about politics. After the chauvinistic Jorg Haider-led Freedom party (FPO) entered government, he wrote me: “Now those twerps have unearthed patriotism as a weapon against dissent. People like us are traitors of the Fatherland.” And in another card he wrote: “Yes, Austria's in deep shit.” Yet went on with his infectious optimism, always seeing the sunny side, “On the other hand, there's an awakening.” Chris recognized that: “Resistance brings people together; there are smiles in the streets in the shadow of the frowns. There are spine-amputation clinics now, particularly for people in culture politics. Underground makes sense once again.”

Here is something from one of Chris' letters to me I want to share. Written in 2000, at the very beginning of the fresh millennium, it seems to be an answer. An answer, I think, to my family's annual New Year's report. Although in prose, I have made it into a short poem that I hope finds its way into Chris' oeuvre. In his own words… 



Get Your Millennium Sparks 

Spent New Year by myself 
this time, 
in celestial intoxication. 

Oracle with molten lead: 
an eagle-wing 
with lion perching on it. 
Or: Eyebrow of an old warrior king. 
Or: Eagle starting from rock into abyss, 
which the tip of his beak 
has fathomed. 

A blissful transition. 


Ach, so! Nevertheless, here's another transition, a further abrupt change, maybe an awakening. The poem of mine Chris enjoyed most is Crippled Warlords . First published one score and five years ago, it remains ether resonant, an archaic ritual applying a mental radio vector. I would like to read it for you now. 

I can still hear Chris echo in my ears, his high-spirited glottal street shouts. The sharp, quick sound of loud hiccups, hiccups personally transferred to him by American Magus Harry Smith: 
Woe-oh! Woe-oh! Woe-oh! 

I know Christian Loidl will hear this, my… 





Crippled Warlords 

We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end 
We are all early Christian, Sabbatian Terrorists 
Doing our best to force the end 
We are all enchanting insurrectionists 
Giving you a heavenly enema 
Doing our best to force the end. 

Narses, an intriguing eunuch bureaucrat 
in Constantinople 
at the court of Justinian 
sixth-century AD 
Being a eunuch is a job you have to be cut out for 
But Narses had balls 
At the age of sixty 
He undertook to lead an army 
Annihilated the Vandals in Africa 
The dog-headed Ostrogoths in Italy 
At the battle of Vesuvius 
And the Mediterranean was again a Roman lake. 
And what was the outcome? 
From the Euphrates to the Pillar of Hercules 
War, fiscal oppression and religious persecution 
Accelerated the decay of life 
Prepared — pale, emaciated, miserable – 
For the event of Muslim conquers. 

We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end 
We are all enemies of the stars 
Confronting the darkness 
as a spiritual act 
Demonstrating that the outward action 
Harmonizes invisibly with
The structure of the cosmos 
We are all creative nihilists 
Doing our best to force the end. 

Timur, or Tammerlaine, or Timur the Lame 
Became crippled as a result of an accident 
During a robbery in his youth 
Say Western observers 
More likely the result of a ritual assault 
A form of sacred lameness 
The eight sign of royalty; 
Tammerlaine who believed all human settlement 
to be against God's will 
Like the yellow serpent 
inhaled wheat fields and exhaled dust bowls 
passing over the face of Asia like a fire storm 
leaving behind him desolation and wilderness 
where had once been fertile plains; 
Tammerlaine, a paradoxical balance 
Of heroic virtues and savagery 
Of cruelty and love of art and philosophy 
Slaughtered a million people in Baghdad 
And stacked their heads in a gigantic pyramid 
for his own memorial 
Yet spared the libraries, the mosques, the hospitals 
Spared the scholars who he sent to his capital 
Tammerlaine taught that warfare is part of Nature's purpose 
That strife should be the law of our souls. 

We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end 
We are the scourge of God, the spawn of the devil 
and the punishment to the world 
Doing our best to fit those terms 
Blood, Frog, Vermin, Infectious diseases 
Noxious beasts, Boils, Hail 
Locusts, Darkness, the Killing of the First Born 
We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end. 

Rising out of Bohemia like a yeast ghost virus 
With the image of the chalice on his flag 
Calling for a universal dispensation 
Communion in both kinds to rich and poor; 
John Zizka, a blind general of the Hussite reformation 
A fifteenth-centure chiliast fundamentalism 
Told his followers to make every effort to see 
That anyone who could swing 
A club or hurl a stone is up in arms 
At every hour of the day 
Using mobile nomadic circles of wagons as fortresses 
He defeated warriors from all over Europe 
Sightlessly directed his armies in glorious raids 
Against all that was 
Holy, Roman, Imperial 
In certain parts of Austria even now 
Five centuries later cows are kept indoors. 
Seeking the truth unto death 
Zizka's last will and testament commanded: 
”my body be flayed, the flesh 
thrown to the birds and beasts 
And a drum made from my skin” 
And with this drum beating a sound 
His Orphans should continue the way 
Prophesying their enemies would turn 
To flight 
As soon as they heard 
the voice of his skin. 

We are all haunted warrior priests 
Following a harsh creed 
Doomed to survive a tragic hunted past 
In a fanatical drive for destruction 
Advancing on a broad front 
Through the flames of consciousness 
Braving the winter cold of being shunned 
Crossing the watery obstacles of success 
And smashing fortifications of healthy desire 
With redemption just one sin away 
The end of days 
Promised us as equally 
A judgment and a favor. 

Cutsie pie Lord Byron with a club foot 
A literalist who fought the war 
For Greek independence 
Thinking he was reviving classical ideals 
When he was really a dupe for Russian 
warm water expansionism 
Bur fortunately for everyone 
He spent most of his time limping around 
Limping around blind drunk 
Looking like 
Looking like 
An an-an-angel. 

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany 
Queen Victoria's favorite granson 
Had a withered arm, the left I think; 
After he sacked Bismark 
Statesmanship was conspicuously lacking 
Crisis followed crisis 
The road to war 
Depressingly smooth and well-signposted 
And the influence of the first of the world wars 
Equally cataclysmic on the victors 
and victims alike: 
Most of Europe of 1000 years was shattered 
Three empires tumbled to dust 
Wilhelm ended his days a commoner 
Chopping wood 
With his good arm 
In the center of Holland. 

We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end 
We are always on the lookout for something 
Hostile to the order 
We are all ever on the side 
Of any wild force 
Mystical Redemption with Visible Historical Change! 
We accompany each other into deathliness 
Through only one may return to report it 
Mystical Redemption with Visible Historical Change! 
Not one, nor the other, but both 
We are all crippled warlords. 

It took an alliance of two crippled warlords 
To defeat Nazi Germany 
The first 
Joseph Stalin taught Hitler the techniques of tyranny 
Got people arguing over two lies 
Had whole nations in slave labor camps 
Introduced periodic purges of officials 
as state policy 
For the purpose of uplifting the morale of survivors 
Stalin was born with nine toes 
And went to school with Gurdjieff. 
The second 
Franklin Roosevelt was struck with polio 
It left his legs paralyzed 
But being confined to a wheelchair 
Like the Vietnam veteran of later date 
Did not prevent him from having lovers 
Wouldn't you? 
If you were married to a pious cow like Eleanor? 
Soul in the Earth 
Soul in the Blood 
My liver shall sing praises to the water and air 
And in the end the soil of Europe 
was renourished by the blood 
Of fifty-nine million people 
And the Russian and American armies 
By prior agreement 
Stood facing each other on the Elbe 
Waiting for the bell to ring 
Beginning the next round. 

We are all crippled warlords 
Trying our best to cover the sky 
Ye Ye, O lay eye 
God on high 
Man on earth 
Ye Ye, O lay eye 
God is God 
Man is man 
Everyone in his house 
Everyone for himself? 
We are all crippled warlords 
Waiting for the sun to die. 

John Kennedy, former President 
was drugged to dull the constant pain 
and shakes from Addison's disease 
Had a self-inflicted back injury 
Gotten from crashing his PT boat into a dock 
On a bet, he lost 
Demanding yet another galaxy of medication 
JFK 
Botched the Bay of Pigs invations 
Botched killing Castro 
Conspired with Cardinal Cushing of Boston and 
Cardinal Diem of Saigon 
To send Americans into Vietnam 
Satisfying Pope John XXIII's request to protect his interest 
In the heroin business 
Finally Old Joe 
His father bumped him off 
The sacrificial son had his brains 
Hamburgered in Dallas: 
As a result of what Jack Kennedy started 
but couldn't finish 
There was a Cuban army in Africa 
And 1500 Soviet “technicians” in Laos 
Controlling Golden Triangle opium production 
When the USA lost this concession 
They no longer had the gold 
To pay for oil 
Only the bad die young. 

Nothing is more powerful than a crippled warlord 
Who sees history as a series 
Of improbabilities 
Of incongruities 
Who has the angry readiness to throw 
Everything overboard 
A willingness, a longing 
To become part of dissolution 
We are all crippled warlords 
Doing our best to force the end. 

We are now all under obligation to enter the abyss 
Let us surrender ourselves 
“Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth 
they little ones against the stones” — Psalm CXXXVII 
Let us descend together into the abyss 
before it shuts again 
Let us cram the mouth of impurity 
with the power of holiness 
until it bursts from within 
Bo-rooch at-to A-do-noy 
E-lo-hay-noo me-lech ho-o-lom, 
matt-sir is-u-rim 
Blessed art thou O Lord our God 
King of the Universe 
Who permittest the forbidden 
Who loosens all bounds 
We are all crippled warlords 
The Word 
that heals and 
The Word 
that kills 
Dwells in our mammal flesh 
and grows 
in grace. 


[Réquiem por Christian Loidl realizado por William Levy y Dichters Dansen Niet en el STERN Teatro el 16 Diciembre 2004]


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