by Tom Kuhn
So that here, at least, they breathe easy, or else find in the terrible outcome
Something fortunate, namely the acceptance of misfortune. Everywhere else
People are preparing to bring about by their own efforts such happy
Endings to the entanglements which, they have realized
Are the work of human beings, and so also resolvable by human beings.
The exploited, for whom you gather in, along with the ticket price,
Passing round the hat, a few tears, have already deliberated
How the tears must be overcome. And already contemplate
Great deeds in the creation of a society which, in turn
Will empower to further great deeds. The coolies are already striking
The opium out of the hands of the bosses, and the peasants are buying
Newspapers instead of potato schnapps, and you still stir
Into the dirty pot that old, cheap sentiment.
With your jerry-built world, made up of a few
Planks left over from a building site, you show
Hypnotic movements performed under magic lighting
To set the pulses racing. I catch one of you, trying to beg
Sympathy from an exploiter. And over there two more
Are faking a love scene with fervent sighs, which they
Must have learnt by listening to their tormented servants.
I see another, representing a general, eaten up with sorrow
And it is the sorrow he himself felt when
His wages were cut. And this one
Oh, your temple to art echoes with the cries of those that buy and sell.
I see one with the manner and gestures of a priest
Selling two pounds of mimicry, stirred up in the darkness
With hands soiled from money-changing
Out of all manner of rubbish and
Stinking of centuries past; and this one
Shows you, insolent, a peasant
Whom he saw as a lad, not out on the fields, but
On the boards of a travelling theatre.
Behold the ease . . .
Behold the ease
With which the mighty
River tears through the levees!
The earthquake
Shakes the ground with a nonchalant hand.
The terrible fire
Falls with grace upon the many-mansioned city
And consumes it comfortably
A practised eater.
O joy of beginning!
O joy of beginning! O early morning!
First grass, when we’ve all but forgotten
What green is! O first page of the book
Awaited, full of surprise! Read
Slowly, all too quickly
The unread part will grow thin! And the first splash of water
In a sweaty face! The fresh
Cool shirt! O the beginning of love! The glance that wanders!
O beginning of work! To fill oil
Into the cold machine! First rev and first humming
Of the motor as it starts! And the first puff
Of smoke, filling the lungs! And you
New thought!
In saying yes . . .
In saying yes, in saying no
In striking out, in being struck
In attending here, in attending there
So a man forms himself, by transforming himself
And so his image is created in us
In that he resembles us, and in that he does not.
See with what wonderful movement . . .
See with what wonderful movement
The magician pulls a rabbit from a hat
But the rabbit breeder too
May execute wonderful movements.
On empathy
You may establish that you have played badly
By observing how the spectators clear their throats
When you clear your throats.
They portray a peasant by slipping
Into a state of mind so lacking in judgement
That they themselves believe they
Really are peasants, and so too
The spectators also believe, they are
In that moment really peasants
But actors and spectators
May very well believe they are peasants when
Whatever they feel is not at all
What a peasant feels.
The more truly a peasant is portrayed
The less the spectator may think
That he himself is a peasant, because then the more different
This peasant will be from himself, who is, after all
No peasant.
On the critical attitude
The critical attitude
Seems to many unfruitful.
That is because in the body politic
They can achieve nothing with their critique.
But what seems in this case an unfruitful attitude
Is simply a weak attitude. A critique with weapons
Can smash the state.
The canalization of a river
The grafting of a fruit tree
The education of a person
The reconstruction of a state
These are all instances of a fruitful critique
And they are also
Instances of art.
Even the bravest man . . .
Even the bravest is not wholly brave: sometimes he falters.
In him contend cowardice and courage: courage will triumph, but not without fail.
When he once falters, don’t consign him straight to the list of the cowards.
The loving woman likewise may well be true, yet not without exception.
Be not quick to list her with the fallen, oft-times she’ll come good.
Granted, even the warriors sometimes transform into headless
Screaming chickens, unable to refind their former courage
Just as the faint of heart, once they are gripped by the rage of the people
May act like heroes, and when the rage has then lifted
Never entirely return to their old faint-heartedness.
When you now ask, how you yourself, both coward and hero
Often swaying and never constant, shall comport yourself
That the history-writers of your class might write of you with respect
Then I advise you: in your own thoughts carefully to track your course
As if, in your actions, also writing your own record
Addressed to your class, describing with a love of the truth
All that you’re doing, or leaving undone.
Song of the Hours (from the 17th century)
At the first hour of the day
Our Lord was taken
Like a common murderer
To Pilate the heathen.
Said Pilate, Why should this man die
Who has done nothing?
And for that reason sent him
To Herod the King.
At the third hour the Son of God
Was scourged until he bled
They plaited him a crown of thorns
And set it upon his head.
They robed him for mockery
They beat him red and raw
And the cross that he would die on
They forced him to bear.
They nailed him at the sixth hour
Naked on the cross
And there in pains beyond our prayers
He spilled his blood for us.
And those who watched and those who hung
With him jeered at his plight
Until the sun from such a thing
Withdrew its shining light.
At the ninth hour Jesus cried aloud
His God had forsaken him
They gave him gall and vinegar
To sup for the thirst in him.
Thereupon he gave up the ghost
And the earth was shaken
>
The veil of the temple rent in twain
And many a rock riven.
And then they broke the thieves’ legs
Towards eventide
And took a spear and thrust it
Into Jesus’s side.
And still they mocked when out of him
Blood and water ran
Such were the things they did us
With the Son of Man.
Epitaph
I escaped the tigers
I fed the bugs
I was eaten up
By the mediocrities.
Epitaph for Mayakovsky
I escaped the sharks
I slew the tigers
I was eaten up
By the bugs.
The tough grey goose
The Master went a-hunting
Shooting every-which-way
The grey goose come tumbling down.
Ah-hah.
Six years a-falling.
My wife and your wife
Six years a-plucking.
Ah-hah.
Six years a-roasting
We served him to the Master
Fork got stuck in him
Knife’s blade broke off on him.
Ah-hah.
Master threw him to the sow
Sow couldn’t eat him
Cut her mouth to bits.
Ah-hah.
Master flung him in the sawmill
Goose bust the drive wheel.
Ah-hah.
Last time I saw him
He’s flying away east
Six goslings behind him
Quank quink-quank
Flying away east.
Ah-hah-hah.
Letter to the actor Charles Laughton concerning the work on the play Life of Galileo
When theatre is contemptible but
Is not treated with contempt.
To make bread in, he has a pisspot.
There among
The high houses of Manhattan, among the last dinosaurs
Of vanishing epochs or where the new
Wondrous patriarchs house, the shows have their locations
Still rank with the sex-smell of the long since dead.
Called temples of art, and rightly, for temples
Are gold mines. Of course
Not all that stinks, is gold.
Our peoples were still tearing one another to pieces . . .
Our peoples were still tearing one another to pieces as we
Sat down over the dog-eared scripts, searching
For words in dictionaries and many times
We crossed out a text and then
From under the crossings-out excavated
Our first turns of phrase. Gradually
Whilst in our capital cities the walls of houses tumbled down
So too did the walls of our languages. Together
We began to follow in the new text
What the characters and events dictated.
Again and again I transformed myself into the actor, demonstrating
A character’s Gestus and tone of voice, and you
Transformed yourself into the writer. But neither one of us
Quitted his profession.
The Old Man of Downing Street (1944)
Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
JOSHUA 10:12
Workers in Flanders, tighten your leather belts!
The Old Man of Downing Street breakfasts today with your three hundred traitors.
Make bread with your seedcorn, peasants in the Campagna!
No land will be given you. Dockworkers of Naples
You will paint on the walls of houses:
GIVE US BACK THE STINKER! Today in broad daylight
The Old Man of Downing Street was in Rome.
Mothers of Athens, keep your sons indoors!
Or light candles for them: tonight
The Old Man of Downing Street is bringing you your king back.
RISE FROM YOUR BEDS, LABOUR-LORDS!
COME AND BRUSH THE OLD MAN OF DOWNING STREET’S BLOODSTAINED COAT!
I saw it still . . .
I saw it still
Under the Constellation of Steffin
With horror, in disbelief
Inhuman humankind
In the Great Disorder.
The poor man’s song
The skies are grey
A poor man is walking
Along the gutter.
He earns almost nothing.
He has nothing to eat
Nowhere to sleep
He cannot be kind
He is freezing cold
He is not merciful
He has no friends
He has holes in his shoes
He is ill
He is a lawbreaker
He earns almost nothing
He is walking along the gutter
The skies are grey.
Economical performance by the Master Players
In the theatre out of town, following an idea of the Dialectician
The Master Players usually performed just one scene. And this
They worked up that evening after seeing it enough times
Performed by a cast who had themselves
Followed the model which the Master Players had shaped
In the main blocking rehearsals. By this self-criticism
The shaping of a particular role was kept fluid and the whole work
Held in constant movement, flashing out
In different places, continually new and continually
Answering itself back.
The swamp
Many a friend, and of the dearest, I saw
Helplessly sinking in the swamp
I pass every day.
And this was not the event
Of a single morning. Often
It took many weeks
Which made it more frightful.
And remembering our long
Conversations about the swamp which already
Harbours so many.
Helplessly now I have seen him leaning back
Covered with the leeches
In the shimmering
Softly agitated mud. On his sinking
Face the terrible
Blissful smile.
Freedom and Democracy
Spring came into Germany.
Delicately, tentatively
Over the roofless walls and the ash
Birches dared to leaf afresh
When from the southern valleys processed
With pomp and circumstance and dressed
In rags a host of voters carrying
Two old boards whose lettering
Across the hacked and rotten wood
Was very faded but might be read
As this, so far as one could see
Freedom and Democracy.
From the churches peals of bells.
Orphans, shell-shocked, limping cripples
War widows and war-betrothed
Along the way stood open-mouthed.
Blind men asked the deaf what passed
There before them in the dust
What the appeal of it might be
This Freedom and Democracy.
First in line marched a saddle-head
Singing fit to raise the dead:
“Allons, enfants, God save the King
And the dollar, ting-a-ling.”
Two in frock and cowl strode by
One lifted a monstrance high
The other hitched his skirts and showed
A length of jackboot to the crowd.
But today the cross they wear
Wants the look it had before.
Moving with the times they’ve bent
What was crooked straight again.
But among them walks a nuntio
Sent by the Holy Father who
As we know, these days looks most
Anxiously towards t
he East.
Hard behind in closed ranks tramped
The unforgetting, shrieked and stamped
And claimed for their long knives the right
To another carte-blanche night.
Their patrons then, the swift grey-haired
Lords of the cartels declared:
For the armaments industry
Freedom and Democracy!
And here struts a Pan-German
Much resembling a capon
Freedom of speech, is his demand.
Murder, he means. A free hand.
In step with him here march the teachers
Brain-damagers, Power’s creatures
For the right to lead the youth of Germany
In the virtuous ways of butchery.
After them come the physicians
Who serve the Nazis, despise humans
And they demand their allocation
Of communists to experiment on.
Three haggard men with doctorates
Experts in what exterminates
These demand for chemistry
Freedom and Democracy.
Erstwhile editors of Der Stürmer
Beg a hearing for their fear
We might in lax forgetfulness
Forfeit the Freedom of our Press.
