A poem from AND IF YOU DON'T GO CRAZY I'LL MEET YOU HERE TOMORROW by FILIP MARINOVICH

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“Live From The Kaukasus” from And If You Don’t Go Crazy I’ll Meet You Here Tomorrow by Filip Marinovich

(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, 2011)

Live From The Kaukasus

                                    -for Matvei Yankelevitch

The liver feels really sharp in me,

The beak sharper.

Crafty Fileep, get your SUV and drink its gasoline.

See how it fuels you – can you get off the Kaukasus with it?

Will your asshole become the tailpipe

To blast you off the crag you’re chained to

And will this eagle fuck off already

With its lightningboltbeak –

Crafty Fileep, McPrometheus, your liver is a Big Mac

The eagle eats when it rips through your ribcage.

You are bleeding to death. Have a Q-tip. Stick it in your ear,

Pierce your eardrum, laugh and hug that eagle coffin.

*

In this poem, the poet and/or narrator (who has the same name as the oral version of the poet’s name), has identified himself with, not the Modern Prometheus – that was Frankenstein – but a contemporary Prometheus. Prometheus has no one else to speak to but himself, so we are overhearing an “interior monologue”.

But not quite. We are reading a poem. Perhaps that’s why “Fileep” is crafty. Because, even enchained on the rock, even alone with his liver being gnawed regularly, even in this horrible predicament, he is still able to bring us a version of fire, called poetry. I will return to this thought briefly at the end of this little essay.

Which raises a question: is that what makes him Prometheus? That he gifts us with poetry? I don’t think so. Let’s go back to the original myth. I’ll quote Wikipedia, since it’s as scholarly as I think I need to be here:

In Greek Mythology, Prometheus (Ancieht GreekL: Προμηθεύς, “Forethinker”) is a  Titan … He was a champion of mankind, known for his wily intelligence, who stole  fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals. Zeus then punished him for his crime by having him bound to a rock while a great  eagle ate his  liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day. His myth has been treated by a number of ancient sources, in which Prometheus is credited with – or blamed for – playing a pivotal role in the early history of mankind. During Greek War of Independence, Prometheus became a figure of hope and inspiration for Greek revolutionaries …

I think that what this poem calls into question is the foresight of the “Forethinker”, and this issue dealt with by the ancient sources, as to whether he gets credit or blame for his “pivotal role in the … history of mankind.” I have ellipsed the word “early” on purpose, since it can easily seem that that gift of fire held a powerful karmic charge, that hasn’t come close to exhausting itself in our time.

“Live From The Kausasus”: the title indicates that we’re in what’s called “real time.” This is happening NOW.

“The liver feels really sharp in me, / The beak sharper.” We understand immediately that we are in the Prometheus story, and that the first-person speaker is Prometheus.

I’d never thought about it before, but as I read here I wondered: why the liver? According to an article I found via Google, Thomas S N Chen MD Peter S Y Chen MD, “The myth of Prometheus and the liver”, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294986/pdf/jrsocmed00078-0036.pdf  Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Volume 87 December 1994

The liver is noted as immortal, not only because of its prodigious recuperative powers, but because for the ancient Greeks it was the seat of the soul and intelligence. The indestructability of the soul dovetails with the ever regenerative capacity of the liver. The equivalence of the liver and the soul enhances the suffering of Prometheus which is primarily psychic. The gnawing of the liver produces minor physical pain by comparison. …

The article goes on to discuss the Greek knowledge of hepatic recuperation and regeneration, but I don’t think that’s important here. But I do think that the notion of the liver as “seat of the soul and intelligence” is crucial. I think that’s why “The liver feels really sharp”. Here there is more than physical suffering.

Though the liver feels sharp, the beak sharper. Because the beak is punishment. And punishment must bring pain in excess to the normal situation.

The next few lines helps specify the mental pain, and its punishment. I referred earlier to the karmic charge of the original transformation from the pre-fire (read pre-human) to the post-fire (human) situation: Crafty Fileep, get your SUV and drink its gasoline. / See how it fuels you – can you get off the Kaukasus with it?” Here, “Crafty Fileep” fills itself with a kind of irony. Not so crafty, really, are we? In this era of the end-times climate change hyperobject, that gift of fire has devolved, as it were, into the gift of the gas guzzling planet destroying SUV and it’s giant tank of gasoline. “See how it fuels you”: not very well, actually. Because the question “can you get off the Kaukasus with it?” continues through the hird stanza:

Will your asshole become the tailpipe

To blast you off the crag you’re chained to

And will this eagle fuck off already

With its lightningboltbeak –

And its tone indicates clearly: no way.

We have done this to ourselves and there is no escape. So what is it precisely that we’ve done? We get the answer is stanza 3:

Crafty Fileep, McPrometheus, your liver is a Big Mac

The eagle eats when it rips through your ribcage.

You are bleeding to death. Have a Q-tip. Stick it in your ear,

Pierce your eardrum, laugh and hug that eagle coffin.

This time the phrase “Crafty Fileep” becomes even more ironic. He’s no longer Prometheus, he’s merely McPrometheus, a fast food pseudo Prometheus, the way a Mcmansion is a pseudo-mansion. He’s the cheapest shoddiest most pathetic version of a Prometheus. Even his liver isn’t real liver, it’s a Big Mac. Even the eagle gets fake food to eat.

Which indicates that not only is the end-times hyperobject climate change, it’s also late capitalism, which brings wonder and glory to the 1% so to speak, and shit on a stick to the rest of us. With even worse on the horizon, as far as we can see. As has been said many times, “these days it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Which I take to mean, things will definitely get worse, and we no longer believe they will improve any.

The last two lines take us out of the myth as we now know it, into that different, much more horrifying and despairing scene. “You are bleeding to death?” Prometheus doesn’t bleed to death, he regenerates. Not any more, apparently. Why not? Because we’re trapped inside entropic hyperobjects. Prometheus is now aware of where he original intervention has led us.

“ … Have a Q-tip. Stick it in your ear, / Pierce your eardrum, laugh and hug that eagle coffin.”

Apparently, there’s nothing that can help. We may as well go deaf, unable to hear our own cynical bitter laughter. We’re worse off even than than Cacus in Dante’s inferno canto XXV, who “ At the end of his speech, … raised his hands, both making the fig, the obscene gesture, with thumb between fingers, shouting: ‘Take this, God, I aim it at you’ because now we know that the eagle is doomed, eating ersatz liver. All that is left is the knowledge that even the gods must die. It all goes down.

What a mess we’ve made. And the hug at the end seems to mean: we should embrace our fate.

But wait. If all this is true, why was a poem made? Is this a kind of agreement with what WC Williams writes in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: 

    It is difficult

    to get the news from poems                       

    yet men die miserably every day                                       

  for lack

    of what is found there.

Is there a sliver of hope-against-hope in spite of everything? If we puncture our eardrums, will we drown out the inessential noise? If we bleed to death, and kill the gods, can we finally be set free? To try again, maybe? Maybe a few can survive, and try to get it right next time …???

There’s nothing in this poems that says yes. But the mere existence of the poem says: given everything, we can’t go on. But we must go on. Maybe.

*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review.  To wit: NEXT.  And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!] 

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.