PPT Slide
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The poem, whose musical representation premieres here today, is about Kythera.
Kythera is a Greek island and a mythological place.
After her birth from the sea, Aphrodite is supposed to have gone ashore there.
That is the reason why in ancient times a cult place for Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was established on Kythera.
The goddess was mortal, however, and was forgotten.
Afterward the island of love existed only as a topos which was elaborated and revitalized by paintings and literature of the eighteenth century. For example, the stately gardens and parks decorated with statues on Kythera, or some other Arcadia or paradise, where the pilgrims of love celebrated their chivalrous festivities.
Nothing of these outings remained, however, except for a few statues of Venus, in the now bourgeois gardens, by the gardens of childhood, which Baudelaire remembered wistfully.
Here Venus-Aphrodite was only a decoration, made of marble or plaster. No ocean in sight, neither the one she was born from, nor one you would have to cross by boat.
Love was no longer a gently swinging, swaying festival, but was instead something as futile as the effort of Baudelaire’s fool to win the affections of a stone Venus. The lover was lost and there was no sense of community anymore that would have sheltered him.
So the idea of the Kythera island has changed over time. Whenever social conditions changed, so did views on love.
The poem deals with a fantasy world and is the illustration of a pain. It shows the birth and existence of a landscape from that pain, if one wants to believe its chimera and deception. But be cautious, this dreamscape and scene of imagination has an enchanted undertow.
Kythera
the body pulled along as if on wheels The trees stand still
Out stretched arms multiplied suddenly entwined grown frozen
Behind it only left the turning between the trees
which grow while the body sinks (into the ground)
A landscape of longing is portrayed, which changes into a landscape of death. It is a landscape of mirroring and signs through which a body moves and into which it sinks.
Just as little is certain about the landscape; so too the body knows little about its physical existence. The body first finds itself in a trance and its movements are automatic and mechanical.
The outstretched arms prove to be a deception and an illusion. And there’s more: the multiply reflected embraces are suddenly affected by stiffness of death. An illusory place of love becomes a place of death.
The changing appearance of the hedge of embraces that is first alive, then dead, is the pivotal point of the poem.
The poem owes its genesis to a walk on a late autumn day about ten years ago. I saw then an unusual hedge that appeared to be strangely bare and almost as if it had been dreamed up.
It was a hedge that was formed along a fence from an ancient wistaria and whose branches and offshoots were tangled up and seemed, with its lack of flowers and leaves, to be frozen and stationary . At the same time, they seemed to be under a spell because the branches did not grow upwards as usual on a wall but were themselves a wall which appeared to be like a skeleton.
I remember standing in front of this hedge for a long time, and the following night I dreamt about a body walking through a landscape. But this walking was not really a walking but rather a rolling along on invisible wheels which I still knew were there.
Both images, the enchanted wisteria-wall and the peculiar movement of the body captivated me. I wanted to find a space for them, in which they would attain a meaning and a function.
The emotions they triggered required a fairy-tale setting and that was Kythera.
But as soon as I got there it changed, was no longer an island of love but an indifferent region in which longing was pursued ad absurdum.
No utopian place ruled by love and freedom nor an archeological site of whichever kind, be it one of excavated sculptures or findings from the realms of art and literature, would have fit the initiation images.
If one excavated the Kythera I imagined one might find the skeleton of a body, possibly even several. Perhaps the hedge of longing is nothing more than a bewitched and transformed burial mound.
The poem, which is set in a realm between appearance and reality, leaves all this open.
Since the origins of my Kythera lie in pain, the accompanying emotion for a love, its ambivalences and intangibility determine the hallucinatory character of my island, a place that becomes increasingly real, the longer one stays.
Emotions increase or decrease or change, are transformed into their opposites. They have a dramatic aspect. This is why my poem is structured like a drama, each of the five stanzas the equivalent of an act.
In each of the individual stanzas the relationship between reality and non-reality, appearance and being, is newly defined.
They are clearly separated in the exposition of the first stanza: pain on the one hand, on the other the illusion of a landscape.
In the second stanza unreality is illustrated with the help of the trees and thus becomes a space one could walk in. Pain seems to be forgotten, has made way for longing.
But as soon as the third stanza consolidates the contours of the landscape the sudden change occurs: happiness, which is here portrayed as nothing but a shadow of love, transforms itself.
The outstretched arms are all that is visible of happiness. Even before the arms freeze, they are transformed into an insurmountable barrier. They entangle themselves with other arms and block out any further approach.
At this point even the feelings which were so huge that they could create their own space, become in retrospect, uncertain and illusionary, whereas the landscape they invented becomes ever more deadly and thus ever more real.
In the 4th stanza, the dizziness and the turning of the body: The turning motion of the imaginary wheels at the beginning of the poem, now seizes the whole body. It falls to the ground, which finally gives way in the last stanza.
The deeper the body sinks into the ground, the higher the trees grow. The growing of the trees is an optical illusion, the swansong on the series of illusions, deceptions and futility, and their complex connections with each other in the poem.
The poem does not offer the reader or listener any support. It is like a dream in which someone gets lost, the dreamer being the reader or listener himself.
It is up to the reader whether he or she takes the body in the dream for his or her own, identifying with it, or whether it is seen as the body of a stranger. The poem allows both possibilities as it allows several interpretations.
It can be read as the story of an illusion of love, maybe even a betrayal of love, or as a parable of the impossibility and futility of love, or as one about being exposed and lonely in one's hour of death.
Alternatively, one could understand the poem simply as a reflection on and with images about the nature of emotions concerning love and death.
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