Too Long In Exile
I found an old journal online. During the 80s and 90s I wrote a number of journals, recording my comings and goings. I called them by their French name, “Feuillitons”. This one - Too Long In Exile, I wrote in the city of Karlovy Vary, The Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia at the time. This is an excerpt.
I do hope to find some of the other journals. Hundreds of pages. One even was translated into Greek and won an award, way back then … time the destroyer.
But I’m still in exile. I think I got the name from the Van Morrison song/album. Not sure but fitting. I listened to Van a lot back then, no matter where I was.
…………………………………………………………………………
“There is no deferment for the living ”- George Seferis
May 10th
The "Ile de Beaute", the island of Corsica beckons. I will be spending the summer there, forgetting a young love, finding new love, searching for something as yet unrevealed, hidden in the maqui, the solid wisdom of the Corsican mentality and the full enlivening smell of the air.
I must consider myself fortunate to be able to spend three months a year there, amid good friends, real French bourgeois who know how to live, love, swim among the paradoxes of life. I say I am fortunate but at the same time I hesitate. I go to Corsica less as a choice and mostly because I have to, it is given. I need to seek out, find other people like myself, I need to experience another part of the world (the Mediterranean), to see how other people live, other people who aren't just the typical middle class, fast food, what will I acquire this week?, unliving, "uninspired", distracted types. This is the poet's vocation, Star Trek like, to go and seek out new lands (and I mean lands not just in the physical sense but also the spiritual sense). lt is an exploration of the human soul, from all angles.
But that said, I won't mind the change of cuisine -- ah!!, unlike the Slavs , the French understand the stomach, the base impulses of man. I go to understand this impulse too.
Poets are always full of contradiction. lt is the swinging between these extremes that makes the poet alight. He or she must seek out the world and find the places where the world lends " in sight ", whether this be the gutter after a bout of drinking or the ball, dancing with a queen. A poet judges not the world through things, things are but a means to a higher order. I have always felt the need of the poor man, I grew up dirt poor and still feel that despair and necessity. But as a poet , I seek out the other rich side of life, to understand human motivation, the basic drives of man. I stand in contradiction, I have my shirts ironed by servants yet don't have a centime for a cappuccino.
“As for living, our servants will do that for us.” - Auguste Villiers de Isle-Adam
I fly to Corsica on my last few Czech crowns, only to go to dinner with people who travel the world, who fly more than they walk. But as a poet all this "filler" doesn't matter. lt is just one way of being open to the world. lf I had stayed in Canada, in that small, cozy little town, l'd have been so comfortable and cozy that living would have been impossible. Life does not entail happiness only more life, it is a yea saying in the face of suffering. Life then means to suffer and still rise and say, I do, I can, I will, tuck it. Comfort and happiness are two words I would like to strike from the English vocabulary. They are a road to ruin. They are a means of postponing living and not "being alive". But the world never learns, only some few souls through their suffering, keep the world turning and being anew.
" There are some incurable souls that are lost for society ... So long as we shall haye failed to remove any of the cause of human despair, we shall have no right to try and remove the means by which man attempts to free himself of despair And who share in your ailments, I ask you: who would venture to stint us of our sedatives? Antonin Artaud, The Liquidation of Opium
Germans. Once again the topic returns to haunt(?). Me, Deubelbeiss, the “faux” German.
Today, I watched closely, a group of Germans tromp around the town. I had witnessed the scene a thousand times before but all of a sudden I was hit by a certain symbol that I'd kept inside for so long and now just connected with. What symbol represents the German nation, mentality, ethos? The eagle? The swastika? No, the umbrella. Why the umbrella? Precisely because when touring, most nations do as they please.
The Italians visit Paris and carouse about town oblivious to any orders. the French stretch out their legs in St. Petersburg without knowing what hour the tour will all gather back together again. But, but the Germans all gather before an upraised umbrella, one calls and the rest answer , there is only obedience, a basic organic and animalistic response to the most powerful, hidden in the German soul. As I've said, it is a nation, a people who in having given us through this same filter, Goethe, Rilke, Heine, Wagner, have given us the Eissenkommando, the heil Hitler and the forearm tattoo. Contradiction and reality. A reality we would do well to look straight at and reject.