WARNING
Murderer Master Suspicion
The enemy is outside
This Supremacy Masquerade
This Dictatorship
1978/82
Perhaps I succeed in it, in this text,
which seems to reject interpretation,
since, become shape, it stands there
like a red deer which has leapt from the forest,
which hasn't remained speech, which encloses speech in itself,
doesn't speak out from an unexpressed trace,
doesn't flare up towards speech with a resounding tone
of language, doesn't invite, remains for itself,
although, and precisely because of this,
its consistency is tangible
as that of direct speech,
in the way that someone speaks in thought,
speaks preceding themself, beyond themself,
pronounces to themself what passes through their mind,
begins with immediacy, proceeds logically,
and ends in the same manner,
a speaking very much to be taken as true
which completes something, clarifies something,
indicates a direction,
and its consistency is its clarity,
its train of thought which is untroubled
by objections, its immediacy, its unspoiled calm
its pure word, and the wording of its text
which in each aural intensity (each zone)
is open to quiet recitation.
To perceive it is to realize it,
and it is, moreover, all the same
whether one grasps the sense of it or not,
that to peceive its truth, clarity, immediacy,
calm, consistency, and shape
means to presuppose its causes as groundwork.
Since it affects me as a shape
so embodied and present,
I supposed, being entangled
in its perception, that I am
obliterating it when I apply myself
to its causes, as if it could
begrudge a dissecting of its groundwork;
I mean, to have to interpret it,
to have to graft dictums on to the silence of it
when I-interpet its groundwork;
and thus I instigate a two-fold confusion;
it's certain that I depart from its perception
if I am perceiving something else,
but why do I presume that that would be its interpretation?
and how is that I so naively assume
that to interpret would be to analyze and vice versa,
and that both of these activities might be devastating?
-Along the course which this clarification has now taken
what I wanted to present
was really only the embarrassment of the commentator
in face of the text,
to say
that that would be no more than decent,
and thus to protest
against that whirling assertion which shrinks
from no repetition
that a poem would be finally or generally inaccessible
(aha! the clattering of "Unauthorized Personnel"
between finally and generally
-and did they come by bus, by car, or in a tank?),
on acount of its presumed irrationality-
an assertion which either promotes the poem
as a beautific presence to be enshrined
(in reality, however, this alienates
the poem-of all things!-from the human);
or else excludes the understanding,
as if understanding weren't human,
and with this operation degrades the human
to the level of a destructive predatory animal
that conceals its own act of thievery (the Bank!)
and mirrors its own kept-in-reserve soul
in the feigned self-robbery of the poem,
which the predatory animal opportunely, snarling,
or, yes, sated, alludes to as encoding.
I wanted to say,
before my train of thought carried me off
(and all these concerns dissolved into thin air like phantoms):
It's mere decency
when a person is fearful,
if not somewhat in awe of what's referred to
as the Actualization of the Creative.
And with my introductory "Perhaps I succeed in it"
I wanted to enter into the attempt
to simultaneously perceive the poem
and take its non-poem, its origin,
and its design into consideration:
Murderer Master Suspicion
The enemy is not outside
The enemy is none other
Than your rapacity (crossed out)
Not the secondhand depravity
not what makes things unrecognizable
not this Masquerade Supremacy
your predator breath (last three
lines
crossed out together)
not this Supremacy Masquerade
this dictatorship of misfortune
not the lie, not the bicycle, not the beating heart (inserted
not anybody, not the
line)
The enemy is none other
than your rapacity
One day it will come to light
You have always been the secret Master,
the actual Murderer,
your miserable greed
(crossed out)
chased by fear, your poor repressed
never-satisfied greed, this betrayed nun, one day
it will come to light
Then I'll shit on everything that makes you cry,
because you're gorging yourself.
What did I have against this text?
I recall there was a time I woke full of rage and wrote something
down-was it that?-
and, in the writing, held on to my (so painfully recalled) youth-
ful outbursts of rage ("You slimy toad!", etc.),
and when I was finished (first appeasement)
I thought, still inside this resounding painfulness
which was like being inside a gonging bell:
It's good
that this impetuous, bloodless, defenseless
(forsaken by God and by all good spirits)
time can come to you again (second appeasement).
And I considered it and felt:
I still need a few more years, then I can
give the word to their curses and let them speak like this,
that an accomplished humanity might bear
this-sanguinary-speech (third appeasement).
I fell asleep again. The piece of paper got lost,
the strange event took longer to slip away,
then I found the piece of paper and reduced its inventory
to the four lines.
What I cancelled out automatically healed the rupture:
I wrangle on paper with someone who wrangles.
Ruptureless remnant:
I on paper with someone who.
The heading WARNING,
as well as the decision about altering the second line,
still state in one-joint-dare:
You can stick that on the mirror,
you can well see for yourself
whether that's the way you are
(to what extent the enemy for you is outside),
and you can see who you are.
To say it amicably: See for yourself-this Dictatorship
of a Supremacy Masquerade!
The impulses which remained on that piece of paper,
like the-kindly-foresight: I still need a few more years!,
have-as life goes-more or less fulfilled themselves,
or more or less not.
Life: an obstruction guards it against a blossoming
to which it has not ripened.
Translated from the German by Roderick Iverson