Experimental Film 3 — Max Planck subset

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. 

This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see. 

Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this. 

There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.

    John Kinsella

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