D-B Chirot: Before “Curveball”: The “After” Effects in Poetry of Baseball, Espionage & the Fire & A-Bombings of Japan
Free Download D-B Chirot: Before “Curveball”: The “After” Effects in Poetry of Baseball, Espionage & the Fire & A-Bombings of Japan at Here | by PNG and GIF Base
Before “Curveball”:
The “After” Effects Poetry of Baseball, Espionage & the Fire & A-Bombings of Japan
Moe Berg: Spicerian Catcher, Radio Star & Spy
One of the more truly strange and fascinating figures in the annals of
spydom, polylinguistics, newspaper and book addictions, a friend of the
rich and famous, of scientists, writers and social lights, is the
professional baseball player Moe Berg, of whom two adult bios and one
juvenile readers' accounts have been penned. (ESPN also made a good
video bio.)
Since he was a lifetime catcher, (after an early-in-career injury,
solely used as a backup, often third string; a weak hitter, with very good
defense, which, as with so many backup catchers, permitted him to have a long career), Berg may be thought of as one part of Jack Spicer’s Poetry battery
of pitcher and catcher.
As a member of a team of mainly All Star players sent to Japan in 1934
(he'd also gone in '33), Berg, while the team played in another city,
took a tour of Tokyo during which he ascended to the top of a building
and took movie camera footage of the harbor and important buildings of
the capital city. These images were later to be Berg’s entree into the early
days of the OSS, and proved invaluable for the targetings of Gen. “Jimmy” Doolittle’s firebombing raids over Tokyo. Berg’s espionage career culminated in another form of “bombing mission” when he was sent—armed with a gun for an assassination if necessary/possible--to attend a war time lecture by the great German Physicist Heisenberg in Switzerland and bring back a report of it. Berg’s understanding of German—and physics-- was considered good enough for him to be able to detect any evidence of Heisenberg’s working on a Nazi A-bomb.
Berg was a bizarre character who grew progressively stranger and more
deliberately "mysterious" in later life, letting it be thought that he
was still an agent, while actually having been let go after the OSS
began to turn into the CIA.
Due to his obsessive reading of newspapers--which he would not let
anyone else touch until he had read them, as until then they were
"alive"--and to his wide reading in obscure topics, Berg became famous in
the mid 1930's as a guest on "Information Please" Quiz Shows on the
radio. The weird combination of a baseball player with the knowledge
of a "professor" made him a huge favorite. To the end of his life he
was able to live off of friends and in their homes due to his early
celebrity and "connections" across many strati of society.
Berg always let it be known that he studied and mastered many
languages--though it is unclear how much he really knew or could
speak. He was able to create a myth about himself which gave him
freedom from a life of having to do much work (many years of his career he played
in very few games), and at the same a dependence on others, opening and
closing many strange doors during his life.
Berg was able to exist in seemingly disparate worlds
by the continual manipulation of his self-created image of a man who
was very good with words—“words for every occasion,”-- the vast vocabulary of the memorizer of
mountains of information, from the most trivial, obscure and dull to
the most significant, useful, and interesting. Adding to this his
self-created aura of a quick-study learner of a great number of
languages 'dead' and living, Berg was able to wow others impressed by
words, from sports writers and PR radio people to professional
lecturers, "experts," and his bosses in the OSS. These in turn
promoted him professionally and personally.
Berg literally became a man who lived by his wits via
the creation of a persona who existed only in language. His
biographers note that as the years went by, the chasm between his
outward persona, with its vast vocabularies, and his inner
"emptiness" as an actual person, grew ever wider. The illusions he
performed became ever harder to sustain, and the limits of his actual
world grew smaller and smaller.
Via the ambiguities of his actual knowledge of languages and
vocabularies, roots and grammars, long before he became a
professional spy, Berg had created such a niche for himself. When he
skipped a ball game to take clandestine films, he was in a sense
"projecting himself" via these images into his future role as a
surveillance-being, a hired listener and reader, a hired "catcher" of
(stolen) signs from the "pitcher" of the opposing team.
A graduate of Princeton, the third string catcher and radio star, the
ambiguous newspaper addict and obscure book collector Mr. Berg became
involved in the A-bomb saga begun by one of Princeton's
most famed future Professors, Albert Einstein.
And at the heart of all these events is the activity of words employed
in both a "foreign service" and in the service of the creation of a
persona who existed sporadically in the "Objectivist" poetry of
baseball box scores and much more of the time “under cover" among “shadowy” and “shadowing”
rhizomes, among the "Curveballs" of languages, words, and signs. Moving quietly on his huge flat feet among the "stolen signs" and "moving pictures” Berg was creating
interconnections between baseball diamonds and the fissioning of
atomic particles linking the USA and Japan. Interconnections whose fissionings find their particles emerging in poetries by a proliferating series of poets living, dead, fictional, ghostly and creating “translated” works “After” each other.
Walking quietly, listening closely in an impersonation of a person listening closely, Berg played the parts he had created for himself, which he watched himself performing, as though a witness to his own actions via the eyes of others, those who would be implanted in memory with the aura of his ever growing legend. The third string catcher who had enjoyed celebrity via the radio quiz shows, moved stealthily enough to be noticed by his “audience” of superiors, from studio and stadium to the greatest stage of all, the Theater of War. And, much more in keeping with his mysterious existence as a “professorial” as well as “professional” ball player, he performed the all important yet behind the scenes—as though on radio, unseen to the listeners-task of amassing the information to be divulged via the greatest quiz show of them all---that of espionage at the most critical and intellectual challenging level-- the as yet closely guarded “secret” of physicists and engineers, the Atomic Bomb.
Working to see if the Germans had the makings of a Bomb, Berg all
along carried within him the cinematic and linguistic seeds of the
Bomb's ultimate destinations in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, thanks to his All Star home movies, which functioned now as “projections” on to a screen not yet known to anyone.
In a strange way indeed, Moe Berg is actually a "deep cover" player in
the baseball/Hiroshima poetry connections found within Jack Spicer's
work, and made fully explicit by that would-be author of an "After
Spicer" work, the fictional Araki Yasusada, in the poem "Horsehide and Sunspot, 17
July 1968--Hiroshima Municipal Stadium."
On the diamond where a temple once stood.
As seventy thousand voices are fused by a sphere and.
{along margin, written horizontally Don’t forget shrimp for Shimpei
A corolla of screams ringing absence is viscerally real.
And, so, like a sunspot, is baseball.
ARAKI YASUSADA
From the baseball diamond of Princeton where Einstein later teaches,
via a clandestine film made while playing hooky from a ball game, to
the Candlestick Park of the pitchers and catchers of Spicer's radio
broadcast games, to the fictional poet attending a game in Hiroshima
Stadium, one finds the famously flat-footed radio star, spy and
catcher, language-obsessed, walking through the 20th century's atomic
Holocaust of fissioning, fusioning, fall out particles of atoms and
poetry, box scores, coded messages, screaming headlines, obscure and
trivial '"faits divers" and a landscape of writing in which the
"writing on the wall" is the physically embedded shadow of the last
living instant of a human being.
From a moving picture image to a shadow fixed in concrete by the light
flash of a never before seen sun. . .
Or does the flame cast shadows?
At Hiroshima, I hear, the shadows of the victims were as if
photographed into concrete building blocks.
Or does it flicker? Or are we both candles and fingers?
Or do they both point us to the grapheme on the concrete wall—
The space between it
Where the shadow and the flame are one?
(Jack Spicer, from Language, Graphemics 6)
/>
JACK SPICER
Baseball games seen by the eyes of a participant/ bench warming
player, heard on the radio by a poet of Outside, observed by a
fictional poet created by a pseudonymous "late" writer . . .
(The purported Author of the Yasusada texts is the pseudonymous “Tosu Motokiyu,” who is originally listed as an editor and translator of Yasusada’s works into English, and later on , when it is “revealed” that he is indeed the “real Author” of the fictional Yasusada Oeuvre, it is also revealed that he is already dead, and it that his Will to continue to exist posthumously as his pseudonym, his “real identity” to be kept secret by the inheritors of the MS.)
This trajectory of reading and writing moves through identities real,
imagined, covert, pseudonymous, dead, ghostly, Outside . . . writers
and readers that are themselves fissions, fusions, recorded images
and voices, receivers and transmitters of the ghostly, the Outside,
the dead, the living-dead, the imagined, the hallucinated, the
Shocked, the voluntarily or not covert . . . among forgeries and
doublespeak--propaganda and prayers--
a trajectory of energy, mass and light speeding towo/ards a shadow
embedded in concrete--
not a "writing ON the wall"--but a writing IN the wall--
a concrete shadow in three dimensions of a light eclipsing the sun in
broad daylight--
And in its --or "under cover" of its—Mushroom Cloud darkness are all the words ever
written so intermingled that they have become --unreadable--or are they now
being transmitted in an Other way from this cipher of/at the edge, of the
"last instant"-
What sounds come forth from the depths within the
wall--or have they all become at once both "concrete" and "shadow"- . . .
Concrete and shadow transmitting a language from the other side of silence and a flash of light—
A poetry without poets—which via the long long time of its Fall Out—scatters the radiated particles which begin to form into poets—
The “unknown poet” Moe Berg –who creates unwittingly a particle, a part, a role, which mysteriously and unnamed, unrecognized—finds itself in the ghostly exchanges of the dead Lorca and the Spicer who “translates” him and writes “After” him---and these ghostly particles radiating in turn into that fictional poet who creates works which contain Spicer as a “participant,” writes works written as an “After Spicer”—and which, like Spicer’s letters to the dead Lorca—contain the fictional Yasusada’s letters to the dead Spicer—
Concrete and shadow as one being—
Transmitting from the other side of silence and light—
Radio ballgames . . . haunting the American poets who are its catchers, its receivers--
“Nature is a haunted house,” Emily Dickinson wrote,” and Art a house that tries to be haunted.”
Are Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki poets—living within the haunted house—
Created by Americans—
Living in a Haunted House of Nature created by means which are “Unnatural”--
While American poets created by Fall Out are simply trying to be haunted?—
Or are the poets perhaps finding themselves via transmissions attending to, attentive with, the ghosts who are otherwise denied existence—
A haunting which appears and disappears in poetry—
A poetry without poets which via transmissions haunts a “receptive” being and creates in that being its own poets—
Themselves forms of concrete and shadow—communicating with the dead, with the “After Effects” of dead writers to whom they write—and which After Effects create fictional poets of pseudonymous origin in turn writing to dead poets—
Radio ballgames from which the slow footed catcher and radio star emerges,
Bearing within him the proto-poetries of the After effects which will by a “reverse engineering” find him as one of their own, a camouflaged and disguised play actor in a Theater of Real War—
An unrecognized “non- poet” poet who is a “real ancestor” ghost so to speak haunting the American poets and their colloquies with the dead . . .
A non-poet poet who unrecognized is inhabiting the poetry of poets real and fictional, dead and living—
The maker of clandestine home movies which when projected blast their way through screens and into the Fire Bombings of Tokyo (for which General Doolittle used them in planning the attacks) and the Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—
Stealing signs cinematic and verbal—the catcher is an undercover pitcher, a transmitter—a “receiving” camera turned projector—
Whose images turn into concrete and shadow—
Presence of absence of the being who is casting the shadow—
A flash of light which extinguishes a life and preserves its shadow--—
Bringing into contact absent and present poets—shadow and concrete—
Shadow and concrete of a poetry without poets whose transmissions make of its receivers -- poets—of “After Effects” --
“Concrete Wall-Shadow” --d-b Chirot
Spray paint, concrete mix, fire burns, figure made of outline of a photo of a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombings
“Post-Game Show” Notes:
Both the bios for adults of Moe Berg are very good, the other I have
yet to read. Moe Berg is also the only person one may find having
bios at such sites as Famous Jewish-Americans, the CIA website and
many baseball sites and some other espionage ones.
Catchers often later in life become radio announcers and managers. The
only one who is a kind of relative of Moe Beg is Bob Uecker, the Hall
of Fame broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers, also a star of the
Johnny Carson Show and the TV sit com Mr. Belvedere. Like Berg,
Uecker was a famously mediocre hitter--he had a "perfect”. 200
average--the only pitcher he could hit was, inexplicably, Sandy
Koufax-- --and also very good defensively. He, unlike Berg, was able
to use his gift with words as a stand up comedian and a writer--his
Catcher in the Wry is a fun read.
Part Two
MOE BERG Princeton man
Moe Berg grew up in Newark, NJ--(the Newark he knew and grew old
to feel an alien in of another poetry connection, The System of Dante's
Hell--of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones--and the old Jihad Record Label
from same city--)--his father and mother, Jewish immigrants from
Russia wanted him to be a lawyer or teacher. He did indeed pass the
Law Bar, attending Columbia part time--and briefly the Sorbonne, in
philology, but did very little work--as little as possible--in that
direction. His real ticket from Princeton, he was convinced, was
baseball. This he proved to be true--though his father never attended
any of his Professional games—ever.
A”print” connection with the baseball catcher-and-pitcher obsessed poet Jack Spicer is Berg's penning of an essay on
"Pitchers and Catchers" for the Atlantic monthly--
as well as the radio connection via Information Please--
those appearances on the air, answering questions like the meaning of
"loi" and the "Willie-Nicky exchange" (telegrams between the cousins
the Kaiser and Czar)--followed Our Man the rest of his life--people
always asking him some bit of trivia or the meaning of a foreign word
on a menu at a posh club--while you'd get wise guys from the stands
hollering--"recite Leviticus!"--
his boss at the OSS was the famous William "Wild Bill" Donovan--a name
not unlike those of the ballplayers Moe traveled among for fifteen
years--
Casey Stengel, one of the greatest spontaneous poets of baseball via
his "Stengelese" --called Berg--"the question mark
fella"--because of his studious practice of "mysteriousness"--
bizarrely and sadly, once no longer a spy officially, Berg made every
effort to appear to others as a spy--
the last thing an undercover spy would do--or would they?--maybe , he
let people know in a half hinted way--his cover was to be so obviously
a spy--
since it was all harmless, the OSS-turned CIA let Berg play along at
this for decades until his death in 1972
(his last words--perhaps in code?--were: "how did the Mets do tonight?")
the progression from Moe Berg the language-obsessed ball player and
spy to a name dropping hinter-at-being-a-spy straight out of a spy
comedy film--to Spicer with his radio ball games and Outside voices,
Martian Language--to Yasusada--the fictional Spicer-obsessed poet
writing a poem of baseball and the atom bomb present at the Hiroshima
Stadium during a game--
is a form of poetry created by the leakage of language through the
cracks and "fault lines," "between the lines of the bases" and "via
the air waves” among the continually proliferating anarkeyological
strati of time's erosions and corrosions of words among the
mineral-chemical deposits--
and their "after effects" whether it is Spicer's "After Lorca,"
Yasusada's "After Spicer" or oneself penning as it were an "After
Yasusada" encountering the figure of Moe Berg—
--skipping a ball game to
film Tokyo for an as yet non-existent spy service for whom he was to
be intimately involved in the story of the atomic bomb--(the films
later used by Gen Jimmy Doolittle for aids in the firebombing of
Tokyo)--
whose after effects as well known images of shadows of figures
embedded in walls in turn are found in Spicer and
Yasusada--traversing the real, the not yet real, the “After” Effects of
the real, its fall out-(including the radiation sickness which kills Yasusada’s daughter, and the cancer which later kills him)---and transmutation via a "real poet" of the
"real" Outside--into the poetry of a fictional poet created by a
pseudonymous "author"--
through these leakages, poetry moves, overflowing the "bounds of the
mighty world"--while at the same time maintaining a focus with the
clarity of a (baseball) diamond--a diamond cutter, cutting through
the glass separating the living and the dead, the real and the unreal,
the statistical and the fictional . . . within this diamond with its
ball games, called by Berg "my theater"--where the catcher "wears a
mask"--and by which theater Berg learned to wear also the rest of his
life kimonos at home--there are the other dramatis personae--the
masks donned and created by Spicer, Yasusada--in various of their
guises--in which history, espionage, come together in a flash
illuminated by the atomic explosion, raining death and particles (the
air so thick with them--atomic winds and rain, the sucking up of dust
to form the immense mushroom)--so that language itself is inhabited by
a Fall Out--and consequent "after effects of radiation"--producing
these writers of "After" books--now producing their own "After" books,
poems, and --this writing you are now reading, After effect itself of
these readings--with "cult" baseball players and "Occult" poets also
"cult" figures in themselves--congregating among the shadows in a
darkening room--
as it dawns on one suddenly--
is it any wonder to be found inside this leakage of language, physics,
radiations, --ball games played, radio-heard, fictionally observed--
as, after all, one's own, my own, father was a student of Heisenberg, the figure at
the center of the highlight of Berg's espionage career--
as Heraclitus writes in a surviving fragment that has leaked through
anarkeyological strati and time--
"one cannot hide from that which never sets"—
That New Sun whose rays eclipse those of the Old, and in so doing create shadows which are concrete, “embodiments” at once of “an instant” and “eternity”---
A literalization of Baudelaire’s formulation—the first—of Modernity as that which is eternal in the ephemeral; a concrete shadow as the notation of a light flash in which occurs the instant in which the ephemerality of life is
joined in union with the eternity of death.
And out of this union paradoxically created by fissioning, emerges a poetry of the “After Effects” of an organic, living body being “in a flash” changed into a concrete shadow. A Poetry in which the slow footed Catcher, spy, radio star, obsessive reader and sometime cameraman is “projected” into the
“radioactive half lives” of Spicer “After” Lorca and Yasusada “After” Spicer and now this present writing as an After Yasusada finding Yasusada After Spicer, Spicer After Lorca, as a series linking all Spicer and Yasusada via baseball, radio and Hiroshima with Moe Berg, whose links with baseball, radio and Heisenberg in turn link to this writer as an After Effect receiving and transmitting in turn these signals brought by the Fall Out of a concrete Wall shadow, the radioactive notation of an appearance of the New Extreme Experimental American Poetry----
A poetry in which the military origins of the “avant garde” rejoin their poetic and artistic “namesakes,” in which a Flash of Light illuminating a concrete shadow “sees, as through a glass, darkly” a New Extreme Experimental American Poetry in which Art is a House Haunted by basement torture chambers, just above which are the gilded literary salons of “radical” and “mainstream” poetries obsessed with formal arrangements, whose “liberatory openings” allow for an escape from the sounds of screaming just below their feet.
Before “Curveball”:
The “After” Effects Poetry of Baseball, Espionage & the Fire & A-Bombings of Japan
Moe Berg: Spicerian Catcher, Radio Star & Spy
One of the more truly strange and fascinating figures in the annals of
spydom, polylinguistics, newspaper and book addictions, a friend of the
rich and famous, of scientists, writers and social lights, is the
professional baseball player Moe Berg, of whom two adult bios and one
juvenile readers' accounts have been penned. (ESPN also made a good
video bio.)
Since he was a lifetime catcher, (after an early-in-career injury,
solely used as a backup, often third string; a weak hitter, with very good
defense, which, as with so many backup catchers, permitted him to have a long career), Berg may be thought of as one part of Jack Spicer’s Poetry battery
of pitcher and catcher.
As a member of a team of mainly All Star players sent to Japan in 1934
(he'd also gone in '33), Berg, while the team played in another city,
took a tour of Tokyo during which he ascended to the top of a building
and took movie camera footage of the harbor and important buildings of
the capital city. These images were later to be Berg’s entree into the early
days of the OSS, and proved invaluable for the targetings of Gen. “Jimmy” Doolittle’s firebombing raids over Tokyo. Berg’s espionage career culminated in another form of “bombing mission” when he was sent—armed with a gun for an assassination if necessary/possible--to attend a war time lecture by the great German Physicist Heisenberg in Switzerland and bring back a report of it. Berg’s understanding of German—and physics-- was considered good enough for him to be able to detect any evidence of Heisenberg’s working on a Nazi A-bomb.
Berg was a bizarre character who grew progressively stranger and more
deliberately "mysterious" in later life, letting it be thought that he
was still an agent, while actually having been let go after the OSS
began to turn into the CIA.
Due to his obsessive reading of newspapers--which he would not let
anyone else touch until he had read them, as until then they were
"alive"--and to his wide reading in obscure topics, Berg became famous in
the mid 1930's as a guest on "Information Please" Quiz Shows on the
radio. The weird combination of a baseball player with the knowledge
of a "professor" made him a huge favorite. To the end of his life he
was able to live off of friends and in their homes due to his early
celebrity and "connections" across many strati of society.
Berg always let it be known that he studied and mastered many
languages--though it is unclear how much he really knew or could
speak. He was able to create a myth about himself which gave him
freedom from a life of having to do much work (many years of his career he played
in very few games), and at the same a dependence on others, opening and
closing many strange doors during his life.
Berg was able to exist in seemingly disparate worlds
by the continual manipulation of his self-created image of a man who
was very good with words—“words for every occasion,”-- the vast vocabulary of the memorizer of
mountains of information, from the most trivial, obscure and dull to
the most significant, useful, and interesting. Adding to this his
self-created aura of a quick-study learner of a great number of
languages 'dead' and living, Berg was able to wow others impressed by
words, from sports writers and PR radio people to professional
lecturers, "experts," and his bosses in the OSS. These in turn
promoted him professionally and personally.
Berg literally became a man who lived by his wits via
the creation of a persona who existed only in language. His
biographers note that as the years went by, the chasm between his
outward persona, with its vast vocabularies, and his inner
"emptiness" as an actual person, grew ever wider. The illusions he
performed became ever harder to sustain, and the limits of his actual
world grew smaller and smaller.
Via the ambiguities of his actual knowledge of languages and
vocabularies, roots and grammars, long before he became a
professional spy, Berg had created such a niche for himself. When he
skipped a ball game to take clandestine films, he was in a sense
"projecting himself" via these images into his future role as a
surveillance-being, a hired listener and reader, a hired "catcher" of
(stolen) signs from the "pitcher" of the opposing team.
A graduate of Princeton, the third string catcher and radio star, the
ambiguous newspaper addict and obscure book collector Mr. Berg became
involved in the A-bomb saga begun by one of Princeton's
most famed future Professors, Albert Einstein.
And at the heart of all these events is the activity of words employed
in both a "foreign service" and in the service of the creation of a
persona who existed sporadically in the "Objectivist" poetry of
baseball box scores and much more of the time “under cover" among “shadowy” and “shadowing”
rhizomes, among the "Curveballs" of languages, words, and signs. Moving quietly on his huge flat feet among the "stolen signs" and "moving pictures” Berg was creating
interconnections between baseball diamonds and the fissioning of
atomic particles linking the USA and Japan. Interconnections whose fissionings find their particles emerging in poetries by a proliferating series of poets living, dead, fictional, ghostly and creating “translated” works “After” each other.
Walking quietly, listening closely in an impersonation of a person listening closely, Berg played the parts he had created for himself, which he watched himself performing, as though a witness to his own actions via the eyes of others, those who would be implanted in memory with the aura of his ever growing legend. The third string catcher who had enjoyed celebrity via the radio quiz shows, moved stealthily enough to be noticed by his “audience” of superiors, from studio and stadium to the greatest stage of all, the Theater of War. And, much more in keeping with his mysterious existence as a “professorial” as well as “professional” ball player, he performed the all important yet behind the scenes—as though on radio, unseen to the listeners-task of amassing the information to be divulged via the greatest quiz show of them all---that of espionage at the most critical and intellectual challenging level-- the as yet closely guarded “secret” of physicists and engineers, the Atomic Bomb.
Working to see if the Germans had the makings of a Bomb, Berg all
along carried within him the cinematic and linguistic seeds of the
Bomb's ultimate destinations in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, thanks to his All Star home movies, which functioned now as “projections” on to a screen not yet known to anyone.
In a strange way indeed, Moe Berg is actually a "deep cover" player in
the baseball/Hiroshima poetry connections found within Jack Spicer's
work, and made fully explicit by that would-be author of an "After
Spicer" work, the fictional Araki Yasusada, in the poem "Horsehide and Sunspot, 17
July 1968--Hiroshima Municipal Stadium."
On the diamond where a temple once stood.
As seventy thousand voices are fused by a sphere and.
{along margin, written horizontally Don’t forget shrimp for Shimpei
A corolla of screams ringing absence is viscerally real.
And, so, like a sunspot, is baseball.
ARAKI YASUSADA
From the baseball diamond of Princeton where Einstein later teaches,
via a clandestine film made while playing hooky from a ball game, to
the Candlestick Park of the pitchers and catchers of Spicer's radio
broadcast games, to the fictional poet attending a game in Hiroshima
Stadium, one finds the famously flat-footed radio star, spy and
catcher, language-obsessed, walking through the 20th century's atomic
Holocaust of fissioning, fusioning, fall out particles of atoms and
poetry, box scores, coded messages, screaming headlines, obscure and
trivial '"faits divers" and a landscape of writing in which the
"writing on the wall" is the physically embedded shadow of the last
living instant of a human being.
From a moving picture image to a shadow fixed in concrete by the light
flash of a never before seen sun. . .
Or does the flame cast shadows?
At Hiroshima, I hear, the shadows of the victims were as if
photographed into concrete building blocks.
Or does it flicker? Or are we both candles and fingers?
Or do they both point us to the grapheme on the concrete wall—
The space between it
Where the shadow and the flame are one?
(Jack Spicer, from Language, Graphemics 6)
/>
JACK SPICER
Baseball games seen by the eyes of a participant/ bench warming
player, heard on the radio by a poet of Outside, observed by a
fictional poet created by a pseudonymous "late" writer . . .
(The purported Author of the Yasusada texts is the pseudonymous “Tosu Motokiyu,” who is originally listed as an editor and translator of Yasusada’s works into English, and later on , when it is “revealed” that he is indeed the “real Author” of the fictional Yasusada Oeuvre, it is also revealed that he is already dead, and it that his Will to continue to exist posthumously as his pseudonym, his “real identity” to be kept secret by the inheritors of the MS.)
This trajectory of reading and writing moves through identities real,
imagined, covert, pseudonymous, dead, ghostly, Outside . . . writers
and readers that are themselves fissions, fusions, recorded images
and voices, receivers and transmitters of the ghostly, the Outside,
the dead, the living-dead, the imagined, the hallucinated, the
Shocked, the voluntarily or not covert . . . among forgeries and
doublespeak--propaganda and prayers--
a trajectory of energy, mass and light speeding towo/ards a shadow
embedded in concrete--
not a "writing ON the wall"--but a writing IN the wall--
a concrete shadow in three dimensions of a light eclipsing the sun in
broad daylight--
And in its --or "under cover" of its—Mushroom Cloud darkness are all the words ever
written so intermingled that they have become --unreadable--or are they now
being transmitted in an Other way from this cipher of/at the edge, of the
"last instant"-
What sounds come forth from the depths within the
wall--or have they all become at once both "concrete" and "shadow"- . . .
Concrete and shadow transmitting a language from the other side of silence and a flash of light—
A poetry without poets—which via the long long time of its Fall Out—scatters the radiated particles which begin to form into poets—
The “unknown poet” Moe Berg –who creates unwittingly a particle, a part, a role, which mysteriously and unnamed, unrecognized—finds itself in the ghostly exchanges of the dead Lorca and the Spicer who “translates” him and writes “After” him---and these ghostly particles radiating in turn into that fictional poet who creates works which contain Spicer as a “participant,” writes works written as an “After Spicer”—and which, like Spicer’s letters to the dead Lorca—contain the fictional Yasusada’s letters to the dead Spicer—
Concrete and shadow as one being—
Transmitting from the other side of silence and light—
Radio ballgames . . . haunting the American poets who are its catchers, its receivers--
“Nature is a haunted house,” Emily Dickinson wrote,” and Art a house that tries to be haunted.”
Are Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki poets—living within the haunted house—
Created by Americans—
Living in a Haunted House of Nature created by means which are “Unnatural”--
While American poets created by Fall Out are simply trying to be haunted?—
Or are the poets perhaps finding themselves via transmissions attending to, attentive with, the ghosts who are otherwise denied existence—
A haunting which appears and disappears in poetry—
A poetry without poets which via transmissions haunts a “receptive” being and creates in that being its own poets—
Themselves forms of concrete and shadow—communicating with the dead, with the “After Effects” of dead writers to whom they write—and which After Effects create fictional poets of pseudonymous origin in turn writing to dead poets—
Radio ballgames from which the slow footed catcher and radio star emerges,
Bearing within him the proto-poetries of the After effects which will by a “reverse engineering” find him as one of their own, a camouflaged and disguised play actor in a Theater of Real War—
An unrecognized “non- poet” poet who is a “real ancestor” ghost so to speak haunting the American poets and their colloquies with the dead . . .
A non-poet poet who unrecognized is inhabiting the poetry of poets real and fictional, dead and living—
The maker of clandestine home movies which when projected blast their way through screens and into the Fire Bombings of Tokyo (for which General Doolittle used them in planning the attacks) and the Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—
Stealing signs cinematic and verbal—the catcher is an undercover pitcher, a transmitter—a “receiving” camera turned projector—
Whose images turn into concrete and shadow—
Presence of absence of the being who is casting the shadow—
A flash of light which extinguishes a life and preserves its shadow--—
Bringing into contact absent and present poets—shadow and concrete—
Shadow and concrete of a poetry without poets whose transmissions make of its receivers -- poets—of “After Effects” --
“Concrete Wall-Shadow” --d-b Chirot
Spray paint, concrete mix, fire burns, figure made of outline of a photo of a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombings
“Post-Game Show” Notes:
Both the bios for adults of Moe Berg are very good, the other I have
yet to read. Moe Berg is also the only person one may find having
bios at such sites as Famous Jewish-Americans, the CIA website and
many baseball sites and some other espionage ones.
Catchers often later in life become radio announcers and managers. The
only one who is a kind of relative of Moe Beg is Bob Uecker, the Hall
of Fame broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers, also a star of the
Johnny Carson Show and the TV sit com Mr. Belvedere. Like Berg,
Uecker was a famously mediocre hitter--he had a "perfect”. 200
average--the only pitcher he could hit was, inexplicably, Sandy
Koufax-- --and also very good defensively. He, unlike Berg, was able
to use his gift with words as a stand up comedian and a writer--his
Catcher in the Wry is a fun read.
Part Two
MOE BERG Princeton man
Moe Berg grew up in Newark, NJ--(the Newark he knew and grew old
to feel an alien in of another poetry connection, The System of Dante's
Hell--of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones--and the old Jihad Record Label
from same city--)--his father and mother, Jewish immigrants from
Russia wanted him to be a lawyer or teacher. He did indeed pass the
Law Bar, attending Columbia part time--and briefly the Sorbonne, in
philology, but did very little work--as little as possible--in that
direction. His real ticket from Princeton, he was convinced, was
baseball. This he proved to be true--though his father never attended
any of his Professional games—ever.
A”print” connection with the baseball catcher-and-pitcher obsessed poet Jack Spicer is Berg's penning of an essay on
"Pitchers and Catchers" for the Atlantic monthly--
as well as the radio connection via Information Please--
those appearances on the air, answering questions like the meaning of
"loi" and the "Willie-Nicky exchange" (telegrams between the cousins
the Kaiser and Czar)--followed Our Man the rest of his life--people
always asking him some bit of trivia or the meaning of a foreign word
on a menu at a posh club--while you'd get wise guys from the stands
hollering--"recite Leviticus!"--
his boss at the OSS was the famous William "Wild Bill" Donovan--a name
not unlike those of the ballplayers Moe traveled among for fifteen
years--
Casey Stengel, one of the greatest spontaneous poets of baseball via
his "Stengelese" --called Berg--"the question mark
fella"--because of his studious practice of "mysteriousness"--
bizarrely and sadly, once no longer a spy officially, Berg made every
effort to appear to others as a spy--
the last thing an undercover spy would do--or would they?--maybe , he
let people know in a half hinted way--his cover was to be so obviously
a spy--
since it was all harmless, the OSS-turned CIA let Berg play along at
this for decades until his death in 1972
(his last words--perhaps in code?--were: "how did the Mets do tonight?")
the progression from Moe Berg the language-obsessed ball player and
spy to a name dropping hinter-at-being-a-spy straight out of a spy
comedy film--to Spicer with his radio ball games and Outside voices,
Martian Language--to Yasusada--the fictional Spicer-obsessed poet
writing a poem of baseball and the atom bomb present at the Hiroshima
Stadium during a game--
is a form of poetry created by the leakage of language through the
cracks and "fault lines," "between the lines of the bases" and "via
the air waves” among the continually proliferating anarkeyological
strati of time's erosions and corrosions of words among the
mineral-chemical deposits--
and their "after effects" whether it is Spicer's "After Lorca,"
Yasusada's "After Spicer" or oneself penning as it were an "After
Yasusada" encountering the figure of Moe Berg—
--skipping a ball game to
film Tokyo for an as yet non-existent spy service for whom he was to
be intimately involved in the story of the atomic bomb--(the films
later used by Gen Jimmy Doolittle for aids in the firebombing of
Tokyo)--
whose after effects as well known images of shadows of figures
embedded in walls in turn are found in Spicer and
Yasusada--traversing the real, the not yet real, the “After” Effects of
the real, its fall out-(including the radiation sickness which kills Yasusada’s daughter, and the cancer which later kills him)---and transmutation via a "real poet" of the
"real" Outside--into the poetry of a fictional poet created by a
pseudonymous "author"--
through these leakages, poetry moves, overflowing the "bounds of the
mighty world"--while at the same time maintaining a focus with the
clarity of a (baseball) diamond--a diamond cutter, cutting through
the glass separating the living and the dead, the real and the unreal,
the statistical and the fictional . . . within this diamond with its
ball games, called by Berg "my theater"--where the catcher "wears a
mask"--and by which theater Berg learned to wear also the rest of his
life kimonos at home--there are the other dramatis personae--the
masks donned and created by Spicer, Yasusada--in various of their
guises--in which history, espionage, come together in a flash
illuminated by the atomic explosion, raining death and particles (the
air so thick with them--atomic winds and rain, the sucking up of dust
to form the immense mushroom)--so that language itself is inhabited by
a Fall Out--and consequent "after effects of radiation"--producing
these writers of "After" books--now producing their own "After" books,
poems, and --this writing you are now reading, After effect itself of
these readings--with "cult" baseball players and "Occult" poets also
"cult" figures in themselves--congregating among the shadows in a
darkening room--
as it dawns on one suddenly--
is it any wonder to be found inside this leakage of language, physics,
radiations, --ball games played, radio-heard, fictionally observed--
as, after all, one's own, my own, father was a student of Heisenberg, the figure at
the center of the highlight of Berg's espionage career--
as Heraclitus writes in a surviving fragment that has leaked through
anarkeyological strati and time--
"one cannot hide from that which never sets"—
That New Sun whose rays eclipse those of the Old, and in so doing create shadows which are concrete, “embodiments” at once of “an instant” and “eternity”---
A literalization of Baudelaire’s formulation—the first—of Modernity as that which is eternal in the ephemeral; a concrete shadow as the notation of a light flash in which occurs the instant in which the ephemerality of life is
joined in union with the eternity of death.
And out of this union paradoxically created by fissioning, emerges a poetry of the “After Effects” of an organic, living body being “in a flash” changed into a concrete shadow. A Poetry in which the slow footed Catcher, spy, radio star, obsessive reader and sometime cameraman is “projected” into the
“radioactive half lives” of Spicer “After” Lorca and Yasusada “After” Spicer and now this present writing as an After Yasusada finding Yasusada After Spicer, Spicer After Lorca, as a series linking all Spicer and Yasusada via baseball, radio and Hiroshima with Moe Berg, whose links with baseball, radio and Heisenberg in turn link to this writer as an After Effect receiving and transmitting in turn these signals brought by the Fall Out of a concrete Wall shadow, the radioactive notation of an appearance of the New Extreme Experimental American Poetry----
A poetry in which the military origins of the “avant garde” rejoin their poetic and artistic “namesakes,” in which a Flash of Light illuminating a concrete shadow “sees, as through a glass, darkly” a New Extreme Experimental American Poetry in which Art is a House Haunted by basement torture chambers, just above which are the gilded literary salons of “radical” and “mainstream” poetries obsessed with formal arrangements, whose “liberatory openings” allow for an escape from the sounds of screaming just below their feet.
1 comment