(Ο Τσελάν απαγγέλλει το «Μέτρα μου τ’ αμύγδαλα»)
Φωτεινές μπάρες, το πηγαδάκι τους, στις κυκλοφοριακές νησίδες, με τις εν τέλει απολυθείσες εραλδικές απολαύσεις, / νοήματα καβάλα στα διαλυμένα πεζοδρόμια, / ο νεοσσό-χρονος, κλο-κλο-κλο, για να βρει την υγειά του, γλιστράει στο νεύρο-Κράκεν, / ένας αναρροφητικός βραχίονας αρπάζει, μέσ’ απ’ την τσάντα τη φτιαγμένη από ίνες τύπου γιούτα, τα εις τας συνεδριάσεις τής Κεντρικής Αρχιδεπιτροπής αποφασισθέντα ψηφίσματα-Βόλων, / άνω-κάτω στον οχετό παροχέτευσης κόπρου κυκλοφορεί τ’ αυταπόδεικτο.
Leuchtstäbe [8/9/1968] Schneepart V.6
Φύλλο άδεντρο για τον Μπέρτολτ Μπρεχτ: / Τι χρόνια είν’ τούτα που κοντεύει να γίνει έγκλημα μια κουβέντα που ’τυχε να ξαναπεί τόσ’ απ’ όσα έχουν ήδη ειπωθεί;
Ein Blatt [7/1968] Schneepart IV.3
Πηγάδια σκαμμένα στον αέρα: Κάποιος, στο καπηλειό, θα παίζει βιόλα στον κατήφορο τής μέρας / Κάποιος θα στέκεται με το κεφάλι πάνω στη λέξη «Αρκετά» / Κάποιου σταυρωτά τα πόδια απ’ το κατώφλι θα κρέμονται δίπλα στο μαγκάνι.
Τούτος ο χρόνος, / χωρίς βιάση να περάσει, / ξανά στα μούτρα μάς πετά Δεκέμβρη και Νοέμβρη, / ξεσκάβει τις πληγές του, για να χωρέσ’ εσένα, φρεσκοσκαμμένο ταφοπήγαδο, / δωδεκάστομο.
Brunnengräber [25/12/1967] Schneepart I.4
Η Αιωνιότης παραμένει εντός ορίων: αλαφρά, στις τεράστιές της πλοκάμους μέτρησης, με περίσκεψη στριφογυρίζει το — ακτινογραφημένο με τη χρήση νυχιών χεριών — μπιζέλι τού σακχάρου τού αίματος.
Die Ewigkeit [18/10/1968] Schneepart V.18
Μπρος για το νησί, μαζί με τους πεθαμένους στο νερό, / με τις πιρόγες δασοπαντρεμένοι, / με τα χέρια να τα παραμονεύουν οι ουρανοί, / κρόνια δακτυλιωμένες οι ψυχές τους:
έτσι οι ελεύθεροι, οι ξένοι τραβάν κουπί, / οι μάστορες τού πάγου και τής πέτρας: / με το κουδούνισμα των σημαδούρων όταν τις καταπίνει το νερό, / με τα γαβγίσματα τού ωκεανού που παίρνει τού καρχαρία το γαλάζιο. Κουπί, κουπί, τραβάν κουπί — εσείς, τα πτώματα που κολυμπάτε, δείξτε μας τον δρόμο! / Βάλτε κι αυτό, κι εμάς, στον κιούρτο! / Κι αύριο θα ξεραθεί η θάλασσά μας!
Inselhin [6/1954] Von Schwelle zu Schwelle
Μέτρα μου τ’ αμύγδαλα, / μέτρα ό,τι πίκρισε κι ό,τι σ’ άφησ’ άγρυπνο, / και μέτρα με μαζί:
Έψαξα το μάτι σου όταν τ’ άνοιξες και δεν σε πρόσεξε κανείς, / έγνεσα τη μυστική κλωστή / απ’ όπου γλίστρησ’ η δροσιά, που ’χες στον νου, / μες το κανάτι που φύλαγ’ ένας λόγος που ’χασε τον δρόμο του για κάποιου την καρδιά.
Πρωτοκληρονόμησες εκεί τ’ όνομα που ’ταν το δικό σου, / με βήμα βέβαιο διάβηκες τού εαυτού σου το κατώφλι, / ανεμπόδιστα πηγαινοέρχονταν στο καμπαναριό τής σιωπής σου τα σφυριά, / ό,τι κρυφάκουγε σε σκούντηξε, / ό,τι νεκρό και σένα σφίγγει στην αγκάλη του, / κι οι τρεις σας διαβήκατε τη νύχτα.
Πίκρανέ με. / Μέτρα με με τ’ αμύγδαλα μαζί.
Zähle die Mandeln [1954] Mohn und Gedächtnis
Leuchtstäbe, deren Gespräch, auf Verkehrsinseln, mit endlich beurlaubten Wappen-Genüssen, / Bedeutungen grätschen im aufgerissenen Pflaster, / das Küken Zeit, putt, putt, putt, schlüpft in den Kraken-Nerv, zur Behandlung, / ein Saugarm holt sich den Jutesack voller Beschlußmurmeln[1] aus dem Klöten-ZK,[2] / die Düngerrinne herauf und herunter kommt Evidenz.
Leuchtstäbe [8/9/1968] Schneepart V.6
[1] [murmeln: «βόλοι» (το παιχνίδι), αλλά και «μουρμουρητά» (εναλλακτικά «ψηφίσματα-Μώμων» κατά το «ψηφίσματα-Νόμων»· πιο κοντά στο νόημα θα ήταν ίσως το «ψηφίσματα-μουρμούρες»]
[2] [Klöten-ZK: το «Klöten-» εμφανίζεται σε ορισμένες εκδοχές τού ποιήματος (εναλλακτικά «Κεντρικής Επιτροπής Όρχεων»)]
Ein Blatt, baumlos, für Bertolt Brecht: / Was sind das für Zeiten, wo ein Gespräch beinah ein Verbrechen ist, weil es soviel Gesagtes mit einschließt?
Ein Blatt [7/1968] Schneepart IV.3
Brunnengräber[1] im Wind: es wird einer die Bratsche spielen, tagabwärts, im Krug, / es wird einer kopfstehn im Wort Genug,[2] / es wird einer kreuzbeinig hängen im Tor, bei der Winde.[3]
Dies Jahr / rauscht nicht hinüber, / es stürzt den Dezember zurück, den November, / es gräbt seine Wunden um, / es öffnet sich dir, junger Gräber- brunnen, / Zwölfmund.
Brunnengräber [25/12/1967] Schneepart I.4
[1] [Brunnengräber μπορεί να αποδοθεί ως «ταφοπήγαδα» (δηλ. πηγάδια στον άερα) ή ως «σκάφτης πηγαδιών» (επομένως εναλλακτικά: «Για σένα που σκάβεις πηγάδια στον αέρα»]
[2] [«Όποιος περπατάει με το κεφάλι κάτω και τα πόδια πάνω, κυρίες και κύριοι, βλέπει από κάτω τον ουρανό σαν να ’ταν άβυσσος», Μεσημβρινός] [Εναλλακτικά: «[όταν δοθεί]/ [με] το σύνθημα «Αρκετά»»]
[3] [Winde: βαρούλκο, τροχαλία αλλά και αναρριχητικό φυτό]
Die Ewigkeit hält sich in Grenzen: leicht, in ihren gewaltigen Meß-Tentakeln, bedachtsam, rotiert die von Finger- nägeln durchleuchtbare Blutzucker-Erbse.
Die Ewigkeit [18/10/1968] Schneepart V.18
Inselhin, neben den Toten, / dem Ein baum waldher vermählt, / von Himmeln umgeiert[1] die Arme, / die Seelen saturnisch beringt[2]:
so rudern die Fremden und freien, / die Meister vom Eis und vom Stein : / umläutet von sinkenden Bojen, / umbellt von der haiblauen See.
Sie rudern, sie rudern, sie rudern – : / Ihr Toten, ihr Schwimmer, voraus! / Umgittert auch dies von der Reuse! / Und Morgen verdampft unser Meer!
Inselhin [6/1954] Von Schwelle zu Schwelle
[1] [umgeiert: νεολογισμός· εναλλακτικά «με τα χέρια που τα οσφραίνονται οι ουρανοί»· στα αγγλικά η λέξη έχει αποδοθεί με το νεολογισμό «to vulture» ώστε να εκφραστεί η κίνηση λ.χ. τής ύαινας ή τού όρνιου σε σχέση με τη λεία τους]
[2] [saturnisch beringt: κρόνια δακτυλιωμένες· η εικόνα έχει να κάνει με τους δακτύλιους δέντρων]
Zähle die Mandeln, / zähle, was bitter war und dich wachhielt, / zähl mich dazu:
Ich suchte dein Aug, als du’s aufschlugst und niemand dich ansah, / ich spann jenen heimlichen Faden, / an dem der Tau, den du dachtest, / hinunterglitt zu den Krügen, / die ein Spruch, der zu niemandes Herz fand, behütet.
Dort erst tratest du ganz in den Namen, der dein ist, / schrittest du sicheren Fußes zu dir, / schwangen die Hämmer frei im Glockenstuhl deines Schweigens, / stieß das Erlauschte zu dir, / legte das Tote den Arm auch um dich, / und ihr ginget selbdritt[1] durch den Abend.
Mache mich bitter. / Zähle mich zu den Mandeln.
Zähle die Mandeln, [1954] Mohn und Gedächtnis
[1] [«Anna selbdritt»: μοτίβο απεικόνισης τού θείου βρέφους με την παρθένο και την Αγία Άννα]
waltendegewalt 
Αγλάιος Χαιρόπουλος
17/04/2020 at 9:47 μμ
να προσέχεις, όσο μπορείς
dkoss
18/04/2020 at 9:03 πμ
ta: 1772
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Willner
Funeral for the Old: Let Us Rethink «The Nursing Home» April 16th, 2020
As of March 30, more than 400 of 15,000 US nursing facilities had an outbreak of coronavirus—among residents, staff or both— according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There are indications, however, that those reports dramatically understate the situation. Minnesota, one of the few states publicly disclosing outbreaks in care facilities, reported 42 facilities with COVID-19 on April 4. This despite a relatively low infection rate among its overall population.
Minnesota Department of Health
April 7 2020
Along with our failure/refusal to test The Old in February– who reside in nursing homes,veterans’ homes, and psychiatric hospitals—we are now seeing completely inaccurate COVID-19 death tolls in each city of our country. These death tolls refer only to those persons who live outside of a nursing home, a prison, a veteran’s home, or a mental hospital.
In San Diego, for example, the death count is very low, but the city is the possessor of a huge quantity of nursing homes. Why are the numbers of their dead not listed among the number of the city’s dead?
Enormous numbers of the old in U.S. nursing homes have been infected; and the dead are often left in their beds, since these institutions lack morgues. Some homes have moved the dead into other rooms, but these homes have become extremely dangerous for the inhabitants, who lay three feet from the dead. And of course this situation is fatal to essential workers.
The numbers of the dead in nursing homes are not reflected in the city dead of COVID-19.
In Riverside, California, eighty residents of one nursing home were evacuated because no nurses or health workers showed up for work. Has this nursing home been able fo reach the sons and daughters of those evacuated? If separated into fifteen homes, how have their
children found them? Have they found them?
The Old in nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, and in prisons, exist in colonies inside the city, colonies for in-valids, who, in reality, are perceived as existing outside of the city–
as if living on an island of lepers, like Molokai, the island off mainland Hawaii; Spinalonga, the island off of Greece; or Carville, Louisiana, our famous leper colony. The lepers who were sent to these places were often arrested and sent by force by the priest or mayor of the town. The mother or father were left waving goodbye to the son or daughter, never to see them again.
This is the picture today that exists of nursing home victims. And this picture has existed
for decades. The coronavirus has amplified the cruelty of this imprisonment, but it also
can give us a chance to look more closely at an institutionalization which has failed those
so loved. Why do families send those, who have finally deserved their retirement– their place in the sun– after decades of hard work–to facilities of death, to camps where they lay or sit silent, waiting only for a monthly visit, oblivion, and death?
The social security check, which can be requested by a person of 62 years (and the federal government is try to raise the age of qualification) is a very small sum of money that will marginally pay for housing. It cannot cover food, household supplies, transportation,
or a meager supply of cards or gifts at Christmas for loved ones. It cannot pay
for a little Xmas tree. It cannot cover a trip to the hairdresser. It cannot cover the
large amounts of copays to the various doctors the old must see. It cannot
pay for «a life» worth living. It can only pay for a prisoner of a small apartment to live
without more than canned food and toilet paper. It cannot pay for a caregiver.
Why have the old paid taxes for fifty years, after working as teachers,
waitresses, factory workers, scientists, and nurses–only to be shipwrecked
upon old age? Why does our government not provide real funds to them? They, less than anyone, are not reimbursed because they are no longer considered part of
the firmament, of the main. (J.Donne)
We must learn from this virus that these people are us.
Life is short; we cannot hide from the inevitable.
They live in a no-man’s land, reminiscing upon their former lives as useful members of society –now, without a present or a future.
With the coronavirus, those who are not visited at a window of their nursing facility, are not visited at all. They are left to die alone in daily dread of the virus, in terror of the virus, infected by the virus, and dying with the virus as their only company.
Of course, those living in nursing homes are sent there because there is no
civilized place where they may continue to enjoy their lives–with the assistance
they deserve. But a broken hip is not a broken mind. A spinal injury is not illiterate.
Some of our finest minds are sent to nursing homes, where they completely deteriorate,
developing heart disease because they are not encouraged to exercise, dementia
because they receive no visitors or tiny amounts of care with love from an overworked staff.
Why is Life Sentence by Nursing Home a death sentence?
The giant number of infections that the old get in these places includes MRSA, Cloistrum Difficile, SARS, and many other diseases that, with single or repeated attacks,
cause death. The level of cleanliness in these institutions vary, but it is generally poor.
These diseases thrive on the unsanitary conditions therein. If one reads about the Chinese wet markets, characterized by animals running though feces,urine and innards, some of whom have been exposed to the Coronavirus by bats in a zoonotic transfer of the disease, one thinks of the nursing home.
Let us speak of animals; most humans revere animals over each other.
Enough to eat them. Which is what happens when humans eat exotic animals, when they put too many pigs, for example, in filthy yards before slaughter, and take over areas populated by indigenous animals, forcing them into a foreign population of other animals, with whom no contact should be made. Pets for all occasions, exotic animals, zoos, cross-contamination
from animal to human to animal to human. Humans love animals.
In nursing homes, in which sheets smeared with feces are often not changed for days, in which the wrong vein–of an arm without lymph nodes– is used to obtain a blood sample;
in which unsterilized medical instruments are passed from patient to patient, in which
catheters are brutally applied and not removed until the patient is screaming, in which infections are allowed to go untreated, including bedsores; infected sores on hands, feet, legs, and arms are rife and caused from dehydration; in which the patients are not treated for severe constipation brought on by poor diet, the overprescription of antipsychotics
(patient-management drugs), anticonvulsants and virtually no exercise–
using digital manipulation to remove dry feces–which is inhumanely painful–and which creates anal sores and continuous bleeding, in which patients hide in toilets in order
to apply carefully-hoarded tweezers or spoons to extricate this fecal matter from their anal area; in which peritonitis is so common because the hard stool rips through the intestinal wall
and poisons the body; in which hope is gone because of the abrupt treatment by overworked
nurses and other essential workers, each of whom may have a 20 patient load–patients are treated like the animals we most detest.
(The essential workers must do three jobs to provide for their families, because they are paid below minimum wage and also treated like animals, continuing the cycle of contamination from nursing home to family to nursing home.)
COVID-19 must be remembered as the Essential Worker Pandemic.
The nursing home is the ideal breeding ground for the Coronavirus.
And those breeded-upon have been ignored completely.
The nursing home is a prison for The Old.
Both nursing home and prison facilities share unsafe proximity of their inhabitants. Both are denied facemasks, gloves, any,or insubstantial soap, hand sanitizers, products to keep their bedsides clean, clean sheets, clean nightclothes, socks, foot coverings, underwear, and a
reasonable response time to urgent calls from the staff. Again,any staff that has to work without PPE is a staff of those who know they are going to die, or are not told that they are going to die.
Both nursing homes and prisons,to a large degree, are privately-owned facilities, which lose money if any one of the population is sick or dies. Better not to contact anyone, and keep making money off of their bodies.
In the worst cases, send to public hospitals,so that public taxation pays the bill.
In the USA, as opposed, for example to Italy, The Old are seen as in-valid; they are seen as having outlived their usefulness to society and are immediately treated upon registration–like living corpses.
There is no encouragement to exercise, and this means hearts and lungs that work poorly and cannot fight pneumonia, the most common form of death among the old, let alone COVID-9.
In Italy, the tragedy of the massive death toll of the old is, in great part, the loss of the familial body or center–the hearth, the embrace, the conscience, the forgiveness, the hope, the dream, the unconditional love, and the legacy.
This dream is held in the hand of the grandmother or grandfather.
The greetings of the Italians are composed of kissing,touching, embracing,and exclamations. The cooking with the family standing together and laughing, is the constant closeness
which is the open vowel of a culture so adept at singing because the language is the sonority
of the embrace. You can hear the Italian voice over the houses closes to each other.
This culture will be altered forever as a result of this virus.
Return to the USA and what do we see? The hearth of the family placed far away from the family, as invalid, as the useless appendage of a family indentured by the industrial
revolution, in which every man fights for himself to exact a fortune in the new world.
We have a cognitively impaired, mentally ill, and malignantly narcissistic president who is responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Americans, not the least of which
are confined throughout this country.
Sociopaths feel nothing for others, but this president is not even capable of pretending
to care for any of the sick. It is certain that his feelings about the old are terrifying.
He has committed the murder of thousands in the USA, by refusing to alert the population
to the danger of the virus for three weeks, and by refusing to listen to his own researchers in January, who advised him to stock his shelves with tests and medical equipment appropriate to a respiratory pandemic–ventilators, PPE, hospital beds, among other things.
He has refused to have a fluid and transparent non-partisan engagement with the governors
of each state. He has threatened to fire Dr. Fauci, and has terminated funding to The World Health Organization, in a moment of infantile rage, risking the pause of care and research needed globally.
The continuous, premeditating murder of our population must be placed at the feet of this president legally.
In the meantime, there is a lot of rethink available to many of us. We must appeal to our federal and state and city governments to fairly subsidize our oldest workers. We must imagine ourselves in their places, if that’s what it takes. We must rethink how we treat those who hold our love and our legacies to their breasts and sigh, «Remember what it was like when I was alive?»
– Diamanda Galás
dkoss
25/05/2020 at 10:26 μμ
Για τον Αντώνη, αν το δει[ς] {δεν μπορώ να βρω το μέιλ}:
Για την αξία τής ανθρ. ζωής (Ρενέ Ζιράρ):
Άπειρη αξία και συνάμα απαξία αποδίδεται στη σφαίρα τής θρησκείας στα άτομα εκείνα που εξομοιώνονται με τέρατα/θεούς/ημίθεους (τ.έ. στους φαρμακούς, σε όσους/ες συμβαίνει να ενσαρκώνουν την α-διαφοροποίηση τής θυσιαστικής κρίσης {τής στιγμής δηλ. όπου πολλαπλασιάζονται οι μη-διακρίσιμοι μεταξύ τους εχθροί-αδελφοί })