Thursday, January 28, 2016

Cybernetic Gestures from the Max Planck Institute, Tübingen: Skewiff to Blake’s Illustration to Dante’s Inferno, Canto 21 (lines 46-56)



                                        ‘der Drache vergleicht der Natur
Gang und Geist und Gestalt.’

                                                Hölderlin

for Anton and Andree Gerland


Macaques. ‘Old World monkeys’. A Nobel
prize winner for literature also from Mauritius.
The headgear inserted into the brain cavity.

From pillar to post. Head-fucked
by surgery fetishists – the porn ‘scientists’
didn’t want you to see. Perspex life-coffins.

Literacy of God-lust. Shiny barred
cages to make it all easier. One could cast
an image, like an aspersion, film-feed.

Neuroscientist: death camp modernist.
Lab technician: jack-off-all-trades. To perceive
the neural mechanism. ‘Purport’. Probe

object reason perception the common good.
Who violates no violation recorded. Official.
It is not a question. Response noted.

Touching a brain is a quotidian
actuality, reach in deep. Implant. Cared
for caregivers. Such stress behaves

such behaviours to map a displacement.
Where their geography locates. Topography.
Tree sense. Tall buildings. Single bounds.

Flame out. Head rest. Probe that doesn’t
take, to wide-eye the cage largesse, you’re collared,
mate: but no three square meals a day. Precedent.

Just one that didn’t quite take or take enough.
Sterility? In their gowns they all look quite fit.
Cult of outdoors when leisure timing.

The breakdown of macaque speech.
Loss of external referents. Vocab drop-out.
Celan noted the loss of language.

Such legality. We should face consequences.
This activist, this call and response.
This treason against knowledge?
            Jail me. Go on, jail me.


            John Kinsella


Please note: I use 'death camps' and Celan in this poem because to me anyone who can do this to an animal has the potential to do it to a human. It's problematical deploying such analogies, but I strongly believe it is relevant in this case. Whosoever the people are that can do that, they are killers and torturers and belong in the 'Doctors' Trial' of the Nazi trials after the war. The mentality is one they clearly share. My use means no disrespect to the human sufferers of such medical horror during the Nazi period. But unless we identify and highlight what allows people to do such violence to living creatures, we also risk the same horror of those medical experiments on humans happening again. JK


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