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POETRY

WORD & IMAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1K views

‘Language is much closer to film than painting is.’

Sergei Eisenstein, A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO FILM FORM

 

We are watching a subtitled crime series

taking place in Central European Time,

and set in the three Slavic, post-Soviet

cities of Odessa, Prague and Warsaw –

though when the three protagonist detectives

meet they must speak in English, entertainment’s

international lingua franca.

 

It is the usual tale of murders

and mobiles, of kidnapping and corruption,

where we may find, in the last reel, that we had

already spotted the villain in episode three

– that sinister photographer with sunken eyes,

and a Germanic surname, perhaps?

 

It is a series using stock shots like Warsaw’s

Palace of Culture & Science and Prague’s

Charles Bridge, and action taking place in cut-price

locations – except for this current scene

taking place on the Potemkin Stairs:

two hundred steps cut from grey-green sandstone

bordered with granite, forty feet at the top,

seventy at the foot, built in the reign of Tzar

Nicholas I, giving the Odessa

elite gracious access to the harbour,

and its cosmopolitan cargoes;

famous for the collage in BATTLESHIP

POTEMKIN of the baby carriage bouncing

down the steps through the carnage wrought by the Tzar’s

soldiers in their white caps and tunics;

a paragraph of silent terrors and distress,

each sentence an icon of horror.

 

In the scene we are now watching a witness

is being interviewed half way down the steps

by a Ukrainian detective.

Behind and above is a group of what

appear to be co-educational

sea cadets posing for selfies. Judging

from the manner of their movements they have been

recruited from a school of physical theatre.

The director presumably thought this

scene shot from at least two camera angles

a suitable homage to his predecessor,

the master, the maestro of montage,

one of its Soviet begetters.

 

The crime series was made, of course, before Russia

invaded Ukraine. However, and

nevertheless, by chance or design, the stairs –

with their iconic place in Russia’s public

memory – have remained untouched by war.

 

 

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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read1.9K views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A TOKEN OF A COVENANT: MARCH 16TH 2018

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.4K views

And suddenly there, through the high sash window,

is a rainbow – lit by the westward sun –

from behind the church and over the park’s

leafless, lichened trees to the gated, faith school.

 

This is the season of illusion and sleight

of hand; the season of the braying bluster

of blinkered donkeys spooked by mayhem

in a cathedral city; the season

of the wet slap of the laundering of money

on the banks of the gun metal Thames;

of clownish mendacity; of useful

idiocy; of media stooges.

 

Some wars start with an ear, some with a lie.

Some wars are fought for oil, some for dogma.

There is always foolishness, and cruelty.

 

One hundred years ago, the German army

was readying for Kaiserschlacht, yet one more

battle across the wastelands of the Somme –

yet one more throw of human dice. Meanwhile

the rest of Europe’s Foreign Offices

were watching neutered Russia’s reddening skies.

 

Fifty years ago today US soldiers

murdered the villagers of My Lai –

five hundred men, women, children, infants.

The three soldiers who had tried to keep them safe

were shunned when the crime was uncovered.

 

The rainbow has gone. The sun’s beam transforms

a neighbour’s window into a shield of brass.

 

 

 

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POETRY

RESURRECTION

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago

on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing

for history to note here – only births, deaths,

the occasional fire and break-in,

and marriages at the Methodist Church

almost opposite us. Empires collapsed

from within – Austro-Hungarian,

British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,

and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,

and bed-sits, then gentrification.

 

Now the St Petersburg Resurrection

A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev

to sing the liturgy in concert halls –

performs this autumn night in the church feet

from our front door. So powerful is this octet

the first three rows are kept entirely empty.

The utilitarian space fills with that

Russian Orthodox polyphony

guaranteed to make even an infidel’s

neck hairs tingle – plangent, sonorant, soulful.

I think of Tolstoy’s novel ‘Resurrection’,

his last – the hypocrisy of suppression,

the injustices of poverty,

the long path to redemption through cold, dull wastes.

 

During the interval, like a scene

from some implausible cold war movie

three Russian men in DJs – the two basses

and the conductor/founder of the choir

quietly, almost surreptiously, leave

the building, and go into the shadows

of the small, bushy garden. Matches flare.

Three cigarette ends glow.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE BOURBAKI PANORAMA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.4K views

Lenin, to leaven his exile in Zurich,

would sometimes weekend in Luzern and,

after kalberwurst with onions and gravy

at the Wilden-Mann on Bahnhofstrasse,

would always visit the Panorama

in the Löwenplatz – or so it is said.

 

Panoramas were popular before

the illusion of photography,

still or moving, became reality.

They were cycloramas painted in oil,

typically fifteen metres high, one hundred

metres in circumference – often

with a three dimensional aspect:

in this case, for example, an empty

railway wagon – Huit chevaux, Quarantes hommes.

 

General Bourbaki’s beaten L’Armée de L’Est

in Bismarck’s Franco-Prussian War

sought asylum with the nascent Red Cross

of the now united cantons. In deep snow

eighty seven thousand men, twelve thousand

horses crossed the border that January.

 

An escapee from a school trip to the town

in the year of Hungary and Suez,

I wandered in by chance. The custodian

that day knew no English. My schoolboy French

struggled with his German-accent. But

I still remember the images

of the aftermath of some great battle

my history lessons had not mentioned.

 

Imagine if Lenin had learned from this –

the stumbling soldiers; the dead horses; the piles

of discarded, expensive rifles;

the woman with her basket waiting to help

whoever it might be lying in the cold.

 

He certainly learned from the railways.

Disguised as a worker, he returned

to Russia via the Finland Station.

But maybe he also learned from William Tell –

marksman and anti-imperialist –

or, rather, the apple.

 

 

Note: The piece was first published as LENIN AND THE BOURBAKI PANORAMA on the site in July 2016.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE RUSSIANS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

A week before Easter our Cyprus hotel

hosted the season’s last two conferences –

‘Moscow Niardmedic’, ‘Nestlé in Russia’.

The spacious, tiled, white walled lounge, the free bars,

the terraces with pergolas were filled

with Big Pharma salespersons on a jolly –

the many ethnicities of Russia,

all seemingly impassive, inscrutable,

seemingly suspicious of strangers.

 

April 3rd on the St Petersburg metro

a bomb was detonated between stations…

April 7th the US Sixth Fleet,

below the horizon due south from here,

launched its missiles against Syria…

That afternoon an Uzbek exile

drove a lorry at a crowd in Stockholm…

 

One evening, in the resident pianist’s break,

a Russian improvised – then played a slow,

soft melody all his compatriots knew.

They sang sotto voce, suffusing the space

with a wistful murmur.

 

 

 

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