Landscape with Minotaur

When I walk across the meadow

At a brisk clip

The haemophiliac light

haemorrhaging in the West

half expecting to see

on the other side of the river

the city of sacrifice

a yak, a water buffalo, a llama

the puma-shaped city

“the butts of the rest”

the bats swim by

the minotaur

just below the tree line

keeping their distance

the train roars

in my rear

the turn of the boars

boats …

Landscape with Hypnos

Infiltrated, polluted and cajoled by podcast-(p)ushers spamming up my emails, I listened to a podcast from the New Yorker – one of a whole swarm of podcasts supposed to turn you if not overnight at least after countless hours of dazed listening into a genius or someone who can reasonably fake it.   The New Yorker podcasts house hours and miles of author voices – who can put you straight to sleep.  For the first time ever I heard words of Harold Brodkey whom I mixed up with Joseph Brodsky (so much better – a direct descendant on his father’s side of an ‘ancient Rabbinic dynasty’).  Harold Brodkey died almost in the same Aids wave in New York as Reiner Schürmann (sociological curiosity my excuse for listening to his ‘story’).  The reader is a gay writer of a certain age (who doesn’t want to be necessarily considered gay in his writing) from Cincinnati.  

The story “Dumbness is Everything” is fairly rudimentary – only just giving the lay of the land – that sexualized geography around NYC in its rich hinterlands of Westchester County and a married couple driving home drunk from one of their boozy parties.  Just a few breaths before the word popped up in the story – I already heard, felt, smelled – this is Gatsby land – and obligingly in the foaming spray of words – out came “Gatsbyoid” to describe the power vectors tensing between the conjugal two backed beast on the conjugal  sublet lawn under the starry skies of Great Gatsby country.  The beginning of the tale is promising – a few asides about the property relations of the wife’s Mafiosi-ish family.  The reader of the story, whose choice it is, says it is about class and class bodies – somehow a taboo in American prose.  Upper Mafiosi class, Harvard class – the Jewish boy ‘made good’ who sneaked into Harvard is pitted against the she-demon scion of a Mafiosi family whose considerable not so old wealth comes from money laundering and shady real estate deals.  (Sort of a fifties ancestral prototype of the dynastic union between Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump?) 

She moves as if she were brandishing a riding crop.  Where they live though seems to be in essence parvenu-pariah land – the other houses scattered on the slope are “owned by Jews”.  So is this sexed up class war really just a turf war between rival fractions of the pariah-parvenu class – rather than a genuine gentile versus pariah reciprocal seppuku/lingchi pact?  A moot point?

Other than the ‘mindless topology of the highway’ - the only setting of the scene Brodkey concedes is how the couple in their drunken stupor try to ferry in unnoticed into that Westchester village where they are domiciled, sneaking past the only light – the lighted gas station and police station.  This sounded so familiar.  Almost.  Except the lighted police station in our village is just a mock up – or even if it’s lighted and even if police bodies are inside they’re not there for us, to protect us.  They’re there explicitly professionally to ignore us.  It is an empty shell of a police station but conscious of its emptiness.

Besides these two monuments of rural villagehood – the story never strays from the grounds of their estate.  They live in the caretaker’s cottage which they never reach in that very long story – seeming to end numerous times but refusing to die just like that.  (Brodkey wrote it at the end of his terminal illness.)  They stop at the lawn – a sloping lawn, near a garage, a stone or brick wall – where clothes are torn, pulled off – and then it’s just the landscape of their fucking bodies on the lawn – commandeering and commanded – a few token snatches of dialogue about ‘who might see us’ – how alone they are on their expensive borrowed lawn.  Sex in that vintage year some time in the fifties – “at sea on the lawn” – had a bronze like character.  Bronze kisses, caresses, ‘nuzzles’, licks, scratches and other tactile ploys – the woman is unexpectedly a ‘bad kisser’ but her mushy lips thicken the plot.  The gargantuan fuck on the lawn – Westchester County’s tribute to “Dejeuner sur l’herbe” - is interrupted occasionally so the author can take note of plant life, the air, a passing cloud of party ghosts.  The story’s reader denies that there is any nostalgia in it.   The present of 1954 or so is just not happening now, but somehow eternally then.

Brodkey does his best to de-conjugalize the sexual congress on the lawn – to make it less proprietary.  Still the story begins with an inventory of property relations – lest doubts arise later – on whose land they’re fucking. 

Landscape with Dilettanti

Boat Dilettanti
Fishermen/Angler dilettanti
Drug dealing cocaine snorters
Who fornicate in the pub garden
Dilettanti
Working Men’s Club dilettanti
And Handymen ultra dilettanti
“none of us are experts”
three tiles are missing in your roof
won’t cost you a thing
Dilettanti
postmen dilettanti
Wet mail all curled up in a corner dilettanti
Costco Thai curry pub food dilettanti
à la carte Lebanese night dilettanti
taking Christmas reservations now
dilettanti
Costa spiv dilettanti
sidewalk café dilettanti
volunteer firemen dilettanti
tutti quelli che
et tutti quanti

( Engendered by the use of the word dilettanti in the egregious British film “The Governess” where the lord of the manor character named Cavendish – an amateur naturalist in a remote pile on the Isle of Skye – dabbles in camera obscura pre-photography – until finally the Sephardic Jewess faux Christian governess-jus-primae-noctis-lay discovers the magic potion for fixing the image – salt water.  He expresses the fear he would appear to be a dilettanti.)

"We will catch up with you." - Nazi Philo-Zionism Read Backwards

 

The Jews were always meant to be the engine of their own extermination machine – the Nazi plan was for their genocide (to the greatest degree possible) – be self-financing, self-propelling, self-executioning.  Such economic thinking was not specific or exclusive to the Nazi design for mass murder – it was in keeping with the Ur-cell of all German national economic thought – maximized autarchy.
Jewish cultural, social and political institutions and aspirations including the desire for national self-determination should never cease to accelerate the momentum of the Final Solution.  
The Hitler dispositif was also opportunistic, Hitler and the SS often made it up as they went along.  Zionism in the thirties was an ascending force in the Jewish community – even more it was roiling within the territorial jurisdiction of their rival – and highly emulated model – the British Empire’s “Mandatory Palestine”.  What a tempting morsel for SS appetites – a quasi-self selecting pure Jewish colony under direct colonial rule.  No wonder the various members of the SS “Jewish Department” like its head Baron von Mildenstein and his protégé Eichmann were so energized by their visits to Palestine – waxing lyrical with almost genuine admiration for Jewish feats of pioneering in their towns and kibbutzim.  Mildenstein – a ‘völkisch’ Nazi spent 6 months in Palestine at the beginning of Hitler’s reign researching pro-Zionist articles for the Nazi press.             

Following the British lead – the Nazi-Hitler strategists in the German Foreign Office under Konstantin von Neurath sought to manipulate unrest and internecine battles within the various populations under their control for their own hegemonic pursuits – including of course the conatus for self-determination.  Just as T.E. Lawrence co-engineered Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem towards the end of World War I on the back of the demise of Ottoman power and with the muscle of the irregular legions of Emir Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca – the Nazis thought to use the German Zionists to disrupt and undermine the British hold on Palestine.  The SS became rigorous Zionist recruiters – forcing German Jews to ‘ethnicize’ themselves in line with the Nazi Weltanschauung of racial purity and separation – learn Hebrew, stop speaking German and acquire useful trades for Palestine.  Mildenstein and Eichmann almost went native – studying Hebrew themselves, listening to Hebrew folksong records in their office. (How ironic that some thirty years later Eichmann was tried and put to death in his beloved Zionist Palestine – by that time Israel.) But unlike the British tactics and methods – the Nazi expansion drive was not merely intent on using Zionist colonies to secure a bridgehead for their own imperial designs on Palestine and the region.  The concentration of Jews in Palestine was to have been a proto-ghetto – perhaps even a model for all those Jewish ghettos-to-come along the route of their exterminatory invasion of Europe – the waiting rooms for the death camps.

For a brief period in the mid thirties Hitler and his SS followed a stratagem of ostentatiously favouring and grooming Zionist organizations in Germany.  This ‘experiment’ was as much a prelude to genocide as the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ - just another means of extracting German Jews from the German ‘body politic’ – softening them up for ‘the kill’.  The Nazis in fact defended “the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, the finishing touches of Germany’s pre-Second World War anti-Jewish legislation (…) as an expression of their pro-Zionism.” (Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Croom Helm, Lawrence Hill, 1983, First Internet Edition, pdf, AAARGH 2004, p. 85)  As Lenni Brenner further notes: “The Zionists could not even claim that they were duped by Hitler; they conned themselves.  Hitler’s theories on Zionism, including the Jews’ alleged inability to create a state, had been there in plain German since 1926.  The Zionists ignored the fact that Hitler hated all Jews, and he specifically condemned their own ideology.” (ibid. p. 89)

Hitler’s Zionist ruse though still has the power to captivate and deceive to this day – as shown by Ken Livingstone’s recent credulous exhuming of the Nazi bogus pro-Zionist policy in his shrill claim “Hitler supported Zionism”.  The German Zionist Jews who were taken in by Hitler’s attentions, wouldn’t have imagined in 1933-38 what the ultimate goal of Nazi policy towards the Jews was to be – but what’s Livingstone’s excuse?  As Queen’s Evidence for his case Livingstone has shanghaied Lenni Brenner’s 1983 study Zionism in the Age of Dictators – failing though to grasp its many subtleties.  This is how Lenni Brenner summarizes Hitler’s ‘Zionism’ – and the tragic complicity of part of the Zionist establishment with Nazi pre-genocidal immigration politics.
“However, the fact that the Zionists became Adolf Hitler’s ‘favoured children’ hardly qualified him as a Jewish nationalist.  Even von Mildenstein, for all his Hebrew records, accepted the party line when it turned to outright murder.  Throughout this period the Nazis toyed with the Zionists as a cat would play with a mouse.  Hitler never thought he was letting anyone get away from him because he was encouraging Jews to go to Palestine.  If the Jews went to far-away America, he might never be able to get at them and they would remain the foes of the German Empire in Europe.  But if they went to Palestine instead?  ‘There’, as a Gestapo agent told a Jewish leader, ‘we will catch up with you.’ ” (ibid.) 

Fortunately history ‘caught up’ with Nazi Germany – too late for the Jews of Europe – but in time for the Jews of Palestine.  That is when they turned their attention and energies to expelling the British from Palestine with all the means of persuasion at their disposal.  Although later an ex-member of the Stern Gang and Anglophile of sorts, habitué of a famous bohemian café in Jerusalem across the street from the ‘Old Knesset’ was wont to lament after several cognacs “If the British ever return to Palestine, we should cut off their legs so they stay here with us.”  It was Labour’s privilege under Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin to oversee that painful withdrawal of the British presence from ‘Mandatory Palestine’ and contraction of the British Empire.  Ernest Bevin – the foreign minister – Labourite workhorse and buffo ogre – conducted the immense retreat of British imperialism from the Palestine theatre.  Are Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn still grieving for that particular loss of British power on Labour’s watch?