Sweeney Dreams He's Having a Nightmare of Clearing

In his dream Sweeney sees himself de-feathered and crashed in the grey sand,

unable to pull himself out of sleep, locked into a nightmare of a bulldozer

running across the land like an electric razor, the entire bush falling

to its gigantic all-encompassing blade. Nothing stops it, not even

the largest jarrah and marri trees, nothing just nothing will thwart

its progress, not even boulders setting their shoulders against

the onslaught. Sweeney in his dream tries to stop the nightmare

in its tracks, and calls on those who have become his friends to help him:

Forgive me for my mis-sayings for my well-meant efforts that have failed.

Forgive me for not spreading my wings wide enough to protect you all.

And with that he rises from the sand and squawks so loud the driver

halts his deadly machine, and leaps down and jabs his finger

into Sweeney’s charred breast, like an image out of a painting

yet to be painted, and says, Now listen, buster, this is how I make

my living, and who are you to take food from my table?! And Sweeney,

feeling the sway of his argument and feeling himself fall back

into the nightmare, sees his own beak moving, hears his own words

tumble past the nub of his tongue in more than mimicry of a human voice:

But when it’s all gone, you’ll have no more work anyway and the world

will be dying. And the bulldozer driver replies, You may be right,

but what would you have me do? — this is my job, and I know no other.

And with this Sweeney wakes, from both dream and nightmare and sweating

and feeling for his feathers to find them black and red and white and intact,

and says: I will fly high and watch over them all, I will fly from grey sand

over gravel and ochre loam and granite and brown clay. And in doing so

he flies past Walwalinj which the colonisers call Mount Bakewell,

and watches the fires the farmers have lit to eat their stubble and chaff

from the last harvest running over their firebreaks into the shreds of bush

remaining from past clearings and past burnings-off, and he watches a digger

knocking down four magnificent York gums —  ancient solar systems

of life — to make a paddock even more vacant, more productive

in the short term, but dead to the future, and he cries and cries

but his tears put out neither the fires nor the work zeal of the clearer

doing a job as night falls, and the kangaroo’s head is renamed

the Southern Cross and the ends of the earth play

on the stereos of machinery and cars and houses

and personal devices. Sweeney

in his dream of a nightmare.

            John Kinsella

High Ordnance Temporariness: Deathcultism and Deletions of Place

                               by John Kinsella

It is the air of atrocity.

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

     George Oppen (from Of Being Numerous, 1968)

When I was a boy, actually through to the age of sixteen, I was obsessed with explosives and rocketry. Looking back from this point in my life, as a pacifist of thirty-plus years, I am bemused why the physics of explosions so fascinated me then. It was ‘technical’ and not ‘political’, though I was also in those days interested in things ‘military’, especially in terms of technology, equipment, ordnance and their relationship to strategy and tactics. The Australian military could have made good use of me if I had not had a pacifist epiphany (eventually).

And when I read of Al Weimorts, the civilian engineer working for the US Air Force Research Laboratory who designed the GBU-43/B Massive OrdnanceAir Blast bomb used yesterday on a Taliban cave network in Afghanistan, a horror of disconnection falls on me in so many ways. Obviously, the sheer brutality of this largest non-nuclear explosive device ever deployed as an act of war is horror enough in itself. This device, that has a one-kilometre-plus blast radius, and that will inevitably cause non-targeted casualties (though in the aftermath this has been denied), is the inheritor of the Vietnam forest-clearing 15000-pound bombs, ‘daisy cutters’, used by the US airforce, and then the bunker-busting bombs used by the US in the first Iraq War. The glibly nicknamed MOAB (I won’t even begin to untangle the Biblical subtexts), was designed for use in the last Iraq war but not ‘called upon’.

Al Weimorts, who died of a brain tumour in 2005, and was even celebrated in a New York Times obituary, was also the designer of cluster bombs used in Vietnam. On his hands is the blood of those killed by his death devices. He was a ‘righteous’ murderer, in the same way the designer Kalashnikov was (even with his near-the-end epiphany), or, for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci.

Many of us are personally implicated in this in subtle and obvious ways — and that is for each of us to consider and work out. Personally, as a child and early teenager, the fascination I had for ‘explosions’ (more than their ‘application’) was intense, and was only moved on from when I underwent an ethical and political shift at seventeen, developing an awareness that my politics of action were tied to the place/s I was in. That ‘explosions’ were a contradiction of place, that all I loved and respected was undone not only physically but also conceptually by my experiments.

When I exploded a ‘device’ to observe for effect, or set off a rocket to see what kind of altitude it could achieve, I was indifferent to the effect it had on the immediate ecology. The same kind of view of place as a performative stage for individual desire is what allowed me in those days to shoot things and fetishise weapons (all of which I long ago renounced and still renounce). Now I see that when those kinds of seeings are directed through work and patriotism into the Al-Weimorts-take on the world (that man with his children and grandchildren, well-dressed even at work, neatly groomed in the pics), the gap between being in a place and destroying that place is wider than death.

Weimorts witnessed the one previous explosion of a prototype of the weapon in 2003 at a site in the US (we see a forest in the background which we imagine was vaporised), so he physically felt and saw what it did to place. A place set aside for the testing of weapons, a place that had lost cultural and ecological variables to ‘necessity’, a replacement of ontology of existence with temporariness (the site before explosion) and a new presence of emptiness (post-explosion). The explosion caused by that prototype resulted in a mushroom cloud that could be seen 32 kilometres away.

Now, many years after Weimorts’s death, the Trump administration has used Afghanistan as a site of demonstration to impose its new global order. The American command in Afghanistan is denying that the use of this weapon is connected with Trump administration posturing, saying it was purely an internal ‘on-the-ground’ military decision made because the terrain and target were ‘tough’ — but only the deluded would accept this bit of propaganda as fact. This was an act to show the world that the US is ‘permanent’ (at least the pro-Trump parts of it!) while the rest of us are ‘temporary’.

 The US military used ‘daisy cutter’ bombs (at least one) early in the capitalist war in Afghanistan to vaporise entire deployments of Taliban, so a country was already made temporary before the new permanence of mass destruction. The non-nuclear is sold as a step down from total annihilation, but it’s also the calling-card of the total destruction that will come. The simulacrum of a nuclear weapon without the ‘fallout’. Just deletion and cascading effects on habitat (of humans, birds, animals, micro-organisms, those scarce plants in ‘desert’, and inhospitable — how can we even use this word? — place/s).

The desire to go nuclear, to merge the theory of general relativity, the escapism of wormholes, and the mediated ethics of Einstein (representative of human aspiration and ‘genius’), into a digestible paradox of being, of being under conditions of capitalist-state ‘liberties’. The ultimate home defence is to attack before they get to the door. In the same way the Geneva Convention underpins warfare by defining degrees of abuse, in the same way the RSPCA underwrites the slaughter industry as long as it operates within their definitions of non-cruelty, so the MOAB is the atomic bomb when you’re not having (allowed to have) an atom bomb. It is a lot less ‘powerful’ than an atomic weapon, but it makes a big impression and causes big damage.

Also, as a thermobaric weapon, the MOAB (it offends to use the acronym — they wish us to use it... this is the problem with all namings) sucks oxygen from the area around the detonation to feed the reaction, and in doing so evacuates space/place of even that marker of life. Through the caves and tunnels in the mountains it was targeted at, it deletes in manifest ways. There is more than a symbolic act in this.

The ultimate message: all living things, all places, are temporary before the might of US imperialism. Weimorts is the enabler of this imperialism, rewarded with the signs of the empire. Further, it’s not just a deletion of people (potentially on a massive scale), but also the deletion of the markers of culture and even the topography, geology and ecology of the place. This particular weapon is not a deep-penetration weapon, but is said to have ‘low to medium’ level below-ground impact with an absolute deletion of what’s on the surface in the blast range. Yet it does affect what’s below (thus its use against a broader cave system), so its implications are those of terraforming — rescaping the planet for eventual colonisation.

There is no gap between the cultural weapons of radical religious bomb-makers and the Al Weimorts of the United States. Both look to ‘defend’ by ‘attacking’ — conserving and extending their belief systems in the process — and also to remove the markers of the previous culturality and topography. It’s worth noting that the Russian military brags of having a ‘conventional’ bomb at least four times more ‘powerful’ than the MOAB, and the Americans themselves have a ‘bunker-buster’ that has a higher ‘conventional’ explosive yield. And with the ultimate deployment of ‘nukes’.

Nukes — that word that has almost become affectionate euphemism in a gaming age, as a kind of reflex action regarding power and inadequacy... Trump thinks of these endgames in the same way... because they are so real, they are made unreal... a taunt in the playground in which the taunters, the victims, and the playground, are all temporalities... slippages in time-space that have everything to do with going to sleep and nothing to do with waking. The temporary itself is forced through a wormhole of temporal fantasising — vast time-scales are drawn upon, the half-life of plutonium bandied about like military budgets. We live in this grotesque unreality where place is localised or internationalised by causational connection, and shared responsibility is somehow lost.

It was with disturbed interest that I read of an ‘end-state’ in military-political thinking today (I wrote this article on ‘Good Friday’ but am revising on the Saturday) — its glibness is horrifying (and I think likely also to the academic who deployed it) and in writing my Graphology Endgame poems it sadly has to come into play as a static in the background, or a different form of fallout. This from the ABC news website regarding the use of the MOAB, quoting Professor John Blaxland (of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University): “‘This is telegraphing to the opponents of the Government in Kabul that the United States … is now upping the ante, and is prepared to kill many people to achieve its political end-state,’ he said. That end-state, said Professor Blaxland, is for the Taliban to cave and for the US to be able to reduce its presence in Afghanistan.” So we have pursuits of end-state while playing humanity to an end-game. Grotesque.

As a young person obsessed with ordnance, an obsession I no longer have, I went through a variety of decision-making processes every time I made an explosion. My interest was specifically in the rapid uptake of oxygen in a reaction (the MOAB exploits this to the fullest) and literally the colours an ignition produced.

I was less interested in the stress placed on the container in which the ignition took place, though I almost died (along with two others) when a 3mm steel pipe went off ahead of time and sent shrapnel three feet underground, the explosion being heard 5kms away. That was my epiphany — because of coming close to losing life and causing the loss of life, but also because (a) the ‘controlled’ event did not behave as I’d expected (b) the ecology around the event changed so decisively that I finally understood that such events have long-lasting effects on topography and on culturality. They permanently change what we (especially as kids) might consider as temporary and continually available to change (our little ‘improvements’! or a change can happen because it was ‘nothing much to worry about’ to begin with) — that is, the change can have repercussions.

And such events do change surroundings — they damage flora and fauna, of course, but also a place’s psychology. They make it ‘feel’ vulnerable. They place it (and I choose the word carefully) on tenterhooks. What I was doing (in the name of ‘science’!) was wrong, and I turned against it, which given I was also deeply interested in things military back then, was surely a healthy thing. And as my politics and ethics evolved, my repugnance at such terraforming, such cultural impressings, has led me to metaphors as redemptive acts of place ecology.

Having said that, I think creative thinkers can hide behind the figurative while still being fully implicated in the damage being done. Metaphors can be violent as well as healing; but more than that, they can create a reality in which the performance of a screen-place, in which the creator’s morality is played off against the (bad) morality of the non-creative materialist. We surely have to be wary of this.

I am looking at a photo in the public domain, presumably supplied by the US airforce to the world at large, with the caption: ‘Al Weimorts (right), the creator of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, and Joseph Fellenz, lead model maker, look over the prototype before it was painted and tested.’ Rather than paste the photo in, I’ll tell you what I see. (‘Brown bear brown bear, what do you see?’, that classic of American literature my son grew up with, that prepares ways of seeing that loop our selves into a material reality, a linguistic and visual presence in place.)

I see two men and the ‘homemade’ bomb before it becomes the industrial weapon (apparently, to this point, only fourteen have been manufactured);  they look serious and yet ‘mature’. The ‘model-maker’ — such a ‘play’ title — and the designer, both exhibiting confidence and gravitas, there’s a most serious production. And yet almost casual, too — we can whip this up in the back shed because that’s US know-how and culturisation. This place of making can replace all places. And more than that is not worth noting. It is what it is — from someone who played weapons inspector in Iraq, a seeker for weapons of mass destruction, a weapon of mass destruction ‘half in love with easeful death’. The weapon looks solid, well constructed, permanent. Its moment of destruction is an eternal marker of human endeavour — the post-it note on place, dropped from high altitude (‘air supremacy’) from the back of a cargo plane (an MC-130) and ‘guided in’ with GPS, from here to there. The ironies implode in direct proportion to the explosion. Oh, and the men touching the unpainted weapon: lovingly, cautiously, and confidently. All of this, in the theatre of the photograph. And never forget the early days of the war: Halliburton, Bush, gas. Lest we forget.

These horrific doings in the unravelling of the narrative of human presence on the planet — its unravelling by the few who have the power, also of all our narratives in our inability to prevent them, and in some cases, complicity — are a denial of the essence of place in the human condition. By disarranging place, we deny place. Such massive violence against life and presence, against the markers of belonging, is showing our temporariness while claiming an imperial permanence in which power and enslavement to death are projected through time and space. All our stories of implication are relevant to attempts to reassert Eros over Thanatos, to reconfigure the spatial and temporal variables of our shared existence. We need to analyse the play, the actions, the events, and the narratives of our own lives from earliest memory and see how they have participated in or diverged from the deathstory of global and local militarism.

On occasions, I have turned to Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) for ‘pithy’ summations of horror. But it too often fails me. Regarding Eros and Thanatos he says, and I can see this, ‘There is not the death drive; the throes of death are thefts from unity, lost multitudes.’ (p.46) But as part of his essay, Blanchot also cites Mallarmé: ‘There is no explosion except a book.’ (p. 7). This is under a separate ‘bullet’ and sits alone: it is a critique, of course, of its own absurdity, but it is also given reflective space. It is true, and yet absurd. Under the MOAB blast, in the caves of the violent and sadistic and deathcultish enemy, there are gestures of the human. Snuffed collectively. And insects and birds move above. And creatures we ignore. Snuffed. The English teacher, Mallarmé, has to shake our foundations linguistically to make such a declaration simultaneously float, and attach. All our personal stories validating our presence, the presence of our families, our people. As entwined (or not) in place, the land/s.

And yet, the MOAB is still made and many people are proud of its making. It’s what you’d expect. The schools that made the engineer. The jobs. The belief systems. Family (liking it or not). Community. Circumstance. Notions of enemies. The fallout is devastating. We register the explosion on a seismograph. And yet, there is no spike in measurements of radioactive fallout. That almost ‘largest’ non-nuclear device.

But then Blanchot follows with his next — or his publisher’s next — bullet point: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. What does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual’ (p. 7). Yes, because all writing has been vaporised. Even those who in their caves see literature as corruption, even their hands for writing and typing have been vaporised. The page is gone. No new pages replace. Does the translator of Blanchot, does Blanchot himself know what ‘beyond the pale’ does in this context? Probably. And if so, what of beyond writing beyond fragments beyond disaster? The disaster has been deleted. This post-disaster acceptance. These acts we perform after hearing the news, as we all do. These copyings and rewritings of our own narratives.

Just a few ‘paragraphs’ before he mentions the Bishop Faustus, Saint Augustine in his Confessions writes (roughly, in the Penguin books R.S. Pine-Coffin English translation, 1961): ‘Clearly the wicked do not know that you are everywhere. But you are not bound within the limits of any place. You alone are always present, even to those who set themselves apart from you.’ (p. 92). I treat this in a secular light on Good Friday, the most sacred Christian time. I copy this onto this ‘page’ in the long hemispheric of a secular patriotism that allows such barbarity as the MOAB to even exist. Make no mistake that such massive deployments of violence require spiritual sanction: even the most brutal states will make use of any ‘permission’ and validation they can acquire. The wicked do know ‘God’ is everywhere, and that God is unbound by the limits of place. And the same for the temporal.

But this idea that place is a human limitation over-ridden or over-come or incorporated by God is a very earthly desire: the desire to be larger, and controlling of place. And what better way to do that than delete place. To replace ‘place’ with the constructs of military-capitalism, fill in the holes with the machinery of ‘liberty’. The metaphors of othered history that we pick over for evidence of material and non-material existence are the permissions we collect for our actions, collectively and individually. We could all stand up and refuse! If that happened, the war machine would stop, and the God so many want to believe in would be respected in all place(s), not in acts of hubristic and horrific deletion.

Graphology Endgame 63

We wish to extract

from what we can’t see?

Oxygen from surroundings

to facilitate an explosion

spirit from emptiness

to fill those voids

A love — no, no, a need —

for gravity wheedling us out.

Or a question of limits,

statutes, gasping

for aspirations.

Workshops

of erasure.

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The Nature/Nurture Propaganda of New-Wave Taxidermists

            by John Kinsella

Window Shopping at the Taxidermist’s

The permeable glass — sieve-like — drains
the liquid light, a fluid more precious
than formaldehyde, the smell of life …
A grimace or a grin stretches like a trap,
and as a backdrop a deer dispenses
with its claim to needing a heart,
it’s only there from the neck up,
though its eyes are sharp, senses finely
tuned, nervousness held in check
through a familiarity born of sharing
a display case with a pack of wolves.
The window shoppers hunt amongst the grime
of the city’s unglamorous side, their prey
the glimmering skin, the combed and shining —
here they show their skill, knowing
where to bag the finest trophy.

I wrote the above poem in 1992 and it was published in my 1993 volume, Full Fathom Five. I am pretty sure I wrote it at the base of the Darling Scarp, though it’s actually ‘about’ a piece of taxidermy seen elsewhere, maybe in the northern hemisphere when I was twenty (though I am pretty sure it was triggered by seeing some taxidermy in a window in Northbridge, Perth). It is a poem-critique of a capitalist disrespect and abuse of the dead, and also, though only by implication as it is superficially ‘genderless’, of a patriarchy of trophyism.

Living in central Ohio in the early to mid 2000s, an excursion out into the region would take us past taxidermists’ shops — not rare in hunting territories. Some of the taxidermists prided themselves on ‘artistic flair’, ‘respect for nature’, and ability to deliver a ‘quality product’. If I recall correctly, at least one of these taxidermy businesses was run by a husband-and-wife team. Or am I wilfully misremembering? I don’t think so.

Taxidermy has haunted me since seeing, as a child, ‘specimens’ in the Perth Museum — what others might take as a point of inspiration, the seeding of a vocation, I took as disturbance. But though back then I was not a vegan, and not an animal rights activist, and in fact did hunt and fish, I found the ‘re-enactment’ side of the displays — the animating of the dead to give humans a sense of authenticity, to provide entertainment and ‘education’ in elements of the world that cannot be shown — hypocritical and dishonest.

To illustrate, to capture (again) the animals in a (faux) performative moment in their ‘native habitat’, was to mock their living, individual lives. To make the dead ‘live’, to make the temporariness of their lives (however ended or taken from them), quasi-‘permanent’, to arrest their being in such a manner, was grotesque to me. Their eyeballs seem particularly wrong. And in each case, little adornments of ‘place’ — a branch, a rock, a snake rising in the corner on real sand. It truly bothered me.

What brought this all back, suddenly, was seeing another article (one was run last year on that year’s instalment of the same taxidermy exhibition) on what we might term ‘new-wave taxidermy’. And though this is an interpolation, written after what follows, I would bring to mind Carol J. Adams’s question in The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum, New York, 2000), ‘Where does vegetarianism end and feminism begin, or feminism end and vegetarianism begin?’ And consider her observation a few lines later: ‘Our meals either embody or negate feminist principles by the food choices they enact.’ (p. 178)

So new-wave taxidermists are wishing to get away from the word ‘taxidermy’? This is ‘art’! So they’re trying to get away from the ‘stuffy’ version of weird men in back rooms playing with animal corpses? So they’re trying to get away from the idea of dead animal ‘mounted’ as ‘trophy’?

Instead, we have a ‘gender’-angled promotion (as extension of arts-capitalism, not as an act of liberty and liberation) in which some women (especially younger women, it seems) are territorialising the realms of the dead. A reconvening of the underworld in which Persephone reclaims the space of body articulate in the domain of Hades. There’s an absurdity in this configuring, but the subtexts of the gender issues around the new-wave taxidermy, as conveyed by promotions and ‘teachers’ wishing to ‘modernise’ practice, are playing into these tropes. Don’t worry: all of this will suit those ‘stuffy’ male taxidermists and death fetishists very well indeed. Their kingdom grows through the process.

We read that we’ve gone (in Australia) from one woman over a decade ago (officially?) playing with dead animal corpses, to over fifty in the here and now. And now, it’s nurturing nature morte — bringing life to dead nature. The women are placing the animals in ‘natural settings’; they are bringing life to what is dead. A new fertility — a reclaiming of the birth of death. This, of course, is withering gendering discourse. It is setting women up as clichés and prisoners of the incubator, with a femininity (anxiety) so powerful it can re-animate the dead (as Dr Frankenstein succeeded in doing, but failed, as his creator Mary Shelley knew he must; or horror struggling with right-wingism in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction). This is a torturously constrained semantic display.

We read that to not understand this is because of our ignorance, because we don’t know how to read this new presentation of the living dead. We (male or female or non-binary) apparently need to be taught. We need to be educated in the aesthetics of displaying death, the rewriting of ethics through playing the ethics of gender (in)equality. The gender of the stuffed (!) animals becomes a variable in the display. Of the beauty of the fox (so hated in Australia) in its ‘natural’ environment (what, the Australian paddock, the Australian national park, or the vague ancestral memory of English fields?).

Such gendering of death-plays is destructive and demeaning, though probably not more than a non-gendered death display, but it’s not liberating in any way for humans or animals alike, and shouldn’t be claimed as such, outside the machinery of chromosome counts.

The abuse of dead animals to make nature ‘art’ is an abuse of the animal as subaltern — written into it is not only a politics of indifference and insensitivity, but a demeaning of women as process. Okay, if people are going to be exploiters of animal corpses — removing all sanctity and spirituality in death from their rights and rites, then they shouldn’t pretend it’s to do with redressing the grotesque and omnipresent social and personal wrongs of gender inequality and gender abuse. These are facts.

Women have no ‘equal’ status in any real terms, and need to constantly push in every context to redress this. Taxidermy is not an effective medium for this — in many ways, it’s the endgame of patriarchy. And if it is to become a medium to dismantle patriarchy, then it needs to be textual and abstracted, and not literal: that is, no real corpses used in the process!

To use death as a metaphor of rights, especially within the faux fertilities of reanimation and ‘art’ (and ‘design’), is a furphy, an advertising ploy, and capitalism’s happy incorporation of women into its consuming maw in yet another profit-orientated context. I am reminded of an artwork I saw at this year’s student art exhibition at the Western Australian Art Gallery — a commentary on different aspects of gun culture, from a form of critique of gun violence to a personal romanticising (attempting to be the opposite) of a ‘farm girl’ holding her rifle, owning her own destiny.

The contradictory message of this artwork wasn’t generative or liberating (which contradiction can so often be), but entirely compliant with the patriarchy, entirely compliant with one of the many versions of self-empowerment and self-confidence that gun manufacturers sell to the world (I should say that there were some superb artworks against abuse and degradation of animals in the exhibition — across ‘genders’).

There is no ownership of destiny with weapons — no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ version. Guns kill. There is nothing outside this. Maybe the student sees this? If so, she needs to develop her critique — maybe she will, and in doing so offer new ways of critiquing the existence of guns in all contexts. Guns will always be weapons, and only weapons. Guns are patriarchy whatever gender we identify with.

And taxidermy is what the faux-animating of dead animals is. How and why people collect the dead is also a question. The fox shot by a farmer/hunter and brought lovingly ‘back to life’ by the artiste? Gender is part of all we do, and has implications in all we enact, but some gender resistances and affirmations bring positive change, and sadly some don’t.

In his 1996 preface to Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin, London, 1998), the translator Michael Hamburger — a very ‘direct’ translator of the poet’s German — said, regarding the act of translation and possible doubts about his method, that ‘freedom to re-interpret, recast and even omit has never been my way. I had probably been needled by Robert Lowell’s description of my kind of translator as “taxidermists”.’ (p. xii)

The unwitting and grotesque irony of ‘needling’ aside (always amazes me how even experienced poets who are constantly dealing with the polysemous might miss a slippage if their own politico-ethics don’t allow for a broader expanse of contexts and interpretations), Hamburger’s distress is with the fact of not only bringing a living poem into a death, but that the poem is killed by such ‘directness’ in the first place. He, of course, felt it was not the case, but likely is offering the poem a life in a different habitat that is equivalent to the one it possesses in its originating language.

Lowell’s use of ‘taxidermy’ is actually an example of an artistic view of taxidermy as a false art of ‘life’ — one only ever moribund, bound in its origins of death. The ‘artistic’ acts of taxidermy as aesthetic enactments of the dead, making the dead perform for the living human audience, are of this category error. What Lowell wanted were ‘translations’ that, above all else, lived in the language in which they were being remade (a fine example of this is Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal).

Ironically, for all their literalness, Hamburger’s Hölderlins largely achieve this quality. But Hamburger’s final riposte to Lowell comes at the beginning of the last paragraph of his preface: ‘Gaps in Hölderlin’s fragmentary later poems have not been filled in with taxidermic stuffing.’ (p. xv) Does this defensiveness actually suggest that Hamburger well knew what his ‘needling’ represented in the discourse, and was using it to brutal effect?

In the making of metaphors, language can grow, but its growth doesn’t mean that cause and effect vanish for other uses of the word. Hamburger’s first use of Lowell’s reference is, of course, scare-quoted; his second isn’t. He has grown into his task of re-animating the supposed corpses of the English-language versions of Hölderlin’s poems. The dead poet, the dead era, the prophetic poet, the ‘modern’ audience as receptors, the leap across languages and a multitude of cultural variants, and the alienation of mortality, and the intimacy of dealing with the dead, all coalesce. In these usages, a form of rivalry and trophyism is afoot.

Taxidermy is about control, oppression, and hierarchy in its figurative as well as literal manifestations. And in the living world of media and textuality, as I was going to leave this piece at this point, another news item comes in — scientists-taxidermists at the Queensland Museum putting their ‘skills’ on show (‘hands on’) for the public during a science fair. Here we have the false claims of necessity and environmentalism — the notion that the dead are brought to life in their interaction with an audience (note the classic journos’ promotional ploy: ‘taxidermy comes to life’ — that headline ‘joke’ at the expense of the dead).

The museum’s colonial and imperialist urge cannot change — a museum that makes use of the dead is denying the rights (and rites) of passing from the corporeal to non-corporeal. A collection; a zoo of the dead. And note that ‘most’ corpses are brought in as roadkill or from some other apparently morally benign source. Most. Historically, naturalists have filled the museums of the world with captured specimens, killed to inform not only scientists but their customers, their audience, and ultimately their paymasters. Taxidermy is an act around which a language of euphemism, deception, dissembling, and gallows humour attempts to dilute ethics. Death is never entertainment! (Though, in the case of say, Jack White, entertainers can clearly be enthusiastic taxidermists and collectors of taxidermy — Meg White dabbled with less enthusiasm; so maybe taxidermists feel they can be enthusiastic entertainers).

And ‘science’ does not require this, no matter how it’s sold.

Having Given Up the Ghost, Sweeney Flies in With Seedlings to Help Stitch the Wound

A traumatic wound — gashed open to the bone.

But the Emperor and his Jester are up the creek

without a paddle, wading against their own effluent.

A traumatic wound — gashed open to the bone.

The spell feeding on the workers like dermonecrosis

is broken, and they disperse into healthier skin.

A traumatic wound — gashed open to the bone.

Having given up the ghost, Sweeney flies in with

seedlings of native vegetation to help stitch the wound.

A traumatic wound — gashed open to the bone.

In the sand the bushland had grown from, Sweeney

knows country is still alive and consults with the Elders.

A traumatic wound — gashed open to the bone.

It can be healed. Its essence is spilling out like a balm.

The red-tailed cockatoos are thinking of the decades ahead.

            John Kinsella

So let's hope this is the end of the assault on the Beeliar wetlands, and that replanting and healing of the damaged land begins immediately. Of course, for many creatures and much vegetation it is too late. This is a message of thanks and well-wishing to all protesters past and present at the site.

The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact

            by John Kinsella

In attempting to dilute the impact of the crypto-fascists of the now on community (the Australian Broadcasting Commission moves further and further right with each government incision), those who would label the nationalistic and bigoted agendas of rightwing groups around the world as ‘lukewarm’ versions (if versions at all) of earlier fascisms are actually mediating grounds for fascist behaviours.

Further, to say ‘fascism’ is really only a term of ‘abuse’ when used regarding the now is to smokescreen the issues: as if it’s a tit-for-tat. I’m afraid that it’s real, and has very specific co-ordinates rooted in an admiration for aspects of historical fascism and the essential fulcrums of racism and notions of national superiority and exclusiveness. 

Origins and histories of terms are paths to understanding their meaning, but the real-time applications of terms matter inherently. The politics of race and religious hate, the attempts of imperialist and ‘post’-imperialist nations and their supporters to separate immigration to ‘their shores’ from their own invasive activities (past and present) that led to such movements and displacements in the first place, are part of the resurfacing of fascism as much more than just a term of ‘abuse’ by those opposed to rhetoric and actions of the rightwing politicians and their ‘parties’.

There is a rising global fascism in which race and religious hatred become an international commodity in the wall-building of the 'local', and a language-in-common in creating an exclusive economy of shared values; denying this strongly suggests a sympathy with at least some of the likely outcomes of exclusion. I have come across this again and again with Brexit — nominally left-wing individuals with sympathies for Little Englands as a cultural normative which gradually reifies within their selective application of left values (rights of their workers, their environment, their socialism).

To say the signs of fascism might only be evidenced in religious and immigration issues but be less evidenced in other aspects of daily (governmental and social) life of, say, Europe, is a gross dereliction of observation: for those who aren’t of the right, or who aren’t sympathetic to the right, or who aren’t benefiting from policies of the right while feigning left-wingism, it is appallingly obvious that European ‘democracies’ are using the military and the police to enforce their belief systems. One doesn’t get to vote to dissolve militaristic nation states to be replaced by community consensus!

The French nuclear power network, the tyranny of nuclear weapons, the trashing of the environment, are also expressions of militarised nationalisms, and when linked with anti-immigration and a bigoted religious programme (even in so-called secular states), it is the machinery of fascism we are dealing with, whoever is in power.

And when the far-right gets hold of this machinery, the consequences are obvious. No fascism? So the support of Farage and Le Pen and Trump and Putin by overt neo-Nazi groups is incidental? Of Hanson in Australia (who admires Putin's leadership 'strength')? Incidental? No — fascism didn’t vanish after the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler and their acolytes; rather it took on different forms, different forms that allow the apologists of the Western state and its fascist underpinnings to thrive, to dominate, to control.

We might not have reached a 1939 scenario quite yet, but we are in the early 1930s again and moving inexorably again towards Global Fascism on an horrific and disastrous scale.

When we see the bigotries of Australia’s One Nation party becoming part of regular political discourse — the signs promoting candidates (alongside their leader Pauline Hanson), well-known for their far-right views, a common sight at the moment on rural and suburban roadsides, one becomes aware that we ARE in the grip of a fascism that is normative now, that has shifted the discussion to excuse itself as speaking for the people as a whole.

And it’s when the people as a whole shift further and further right because this is seen as ‘the way things are’, and their ‘intellectuals’, ‘scholars’, ‘writers’, and media commentators (and others), try to change the language of the discourse to make the fascism of Hitler seem a ridiculous comparison, that we have real problems. The comparisons on many ‘finer points’ and a few blunt points are there to be made.

Recognising this, rather than denying it and playing pseudo-historical games with terminologies, is part of a process of preventing the worst. Fascism changes according to the times, but in the end, it is time and all it contains that the fascists seek to control. They reach back right into the DNA — they have been present long before official origins, and operate outside an historian’s conservative (because you are, you are!) conceptual containment policies.