Looking east across the summer theater stage, Syretsky Park, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024, 5:54 a.m. Photo © Tracy Danison
The morning of 15 August, the feast of the Assumption (of the mother to the father and son), at dawn, in the summer theater of Syretsky Park in Kyiv, Ukraine, I performed my Song of Self and Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin.
The video is on my YouTube channel @TracyDanison beginning 24 August but you can also find it now on Instagram or Facebook. The written version of the poems figures below. Thanks for sharing Song and the Exorcism. Thanks for doing a Song of Self yourself. As for an exorcism, I can think of more than one – How does Sting put it? – “priest, poet or politician” that might benefit from an exorcism, can’t you?
The video recording is only a memento to an act of Real Presence, an artefact of a moment or place created in space and time by my performance and recorded by an imperfect technology.
In an effort to get as much self into the words as possible, I used rapidity and hoped for spontaneity, hoped to give a glimpse of my a-temporal, a-spatial, existence-making, entanglement with Other, ideas and things: I wrote the poems, printed them and put them in my pocket.
Many tropes and words from poets and writers and thinkers I love fell into place as I tried to put my intentions on paper, so I put them in, just like that. For Black Nail, the poem that initiates the (1975) movie Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller, summed up for me pretty well that truth is irony. I was then quite distressed to learn of it:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And, in those days, reading Germinal excited me so, I had to jump up and pace around every couple pages. I’ve realized since that nothing signifies something beyond words.
Oh, yeah.
Mirror field audio visual installation with television tower just behind. Babi Yar memorial site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison
The evening I was writing Song of Self and Black Nail, the evening before I was to begin my train trip to Kyiv, my son, now partnered and a father himself, told me he’s been diagnosed with the same psychic disorder I had to put up with until recently.
He’s getting medicine for it, though.
And with that, I am consoled – thanks to time and the experience and the well-marinated thoughts and ideas contributed to me by Lina Wertmüller, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare, among others too numerous to thank.
He told me just last night that he was going through a whole day feeling well: “Dad, I think it’s working”, he said.
Reading what are essentially drafts from printouts, I performed Song and recited Black Nail once, without rehearsal or revisions.
In the evening after my performance, there was a drone and missile attack on Kyiv.
There is a very big and important television tower in among the woods not too far off where I was staying. I saw a drone or some drones get shot out of the air, as it seemed, just outside the window. Maybe that tower was the target; there was, I am told, a hard fight for it during the battle for Kyiv. From what I saw, I think the defenders used some sort of Gatling gun against the drone/s. The building trembled when it/they exploded.
I conclude from this experience that, given that I got the proportion of toad’s tongue to virgin’s first menstrual blood correct, my Exorcism does not take immediate effect.
I picked Syretsky Park at random, pointing a green space on the map when I got to Kyiv. Madame Google indicated it was within walking distance of where I was. The evening before I walked to the park to check it was open in early morning. The next day, I arrived at the park just before the break of day.
The Black Nail inside Moloch’s brain: Contemporary colorized photograph of a killing trench lodged in a shard of granite near the child memorial at the Babi Yar site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison
I noticed the summer theater where I performed when I walked through the park gate.
Before going there for my performance, I did not know that Syretsky Park was just across the street from the Babi Yar memorial or that the park was the site of a camp for various captives from 1942 until the end of German occupation or even that the place is part of the physical and moral topography of what we call “Babi Yar”.
I chose Kyiv for the Song of Self and Black Nail because the war against Ukraine has been made into a war against those who believe, as I do, that each person is a person, equal in fact to all other persons, no conditions, no exceptions.
The world begins where self begins, I believe.
It was coincidence that I found myself at the Babi Yar site. The television tower that might have been the target of the coming evening’s drone attack is located there. Off the paths, there are signs of deadly fracas and firing positions.
The Babi Yar memorial is made up of reminders that the thousands murdered there were, in the locution of the poet and Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders, a human being, individuals, persons. Their voices whisper on the wind, rustle and sigh in the bushes and boughs of the trees. Literally. Never forget, never forgotten.
Stanczyk, court jester, broods on the victory of Moscow, by Jan Matejko (1838-93), Warsaw Museum of Art. Photo © Tracy Danison
As I was walking up through the park, avoiding a crowd of oblivious joggers and dog walkers, I had a vision. I don’t remember if I had read the description somewhere before or how the vision came to me.
It is of a guy standing over a little pile of not-quite-dead-enough human being and, with a submachine gun, shooting into the pile, an idiot spattering himself with flesh and bone, spreading superfluous terror and suffering. As he goes a-murdering from pile to pile, in his mind, this guy is obsessively scrolling “I am a German. I am a German. I am a German”.
This awful vision reminded me that Black Nail, murder-love, begins with how a person believes they exist.
These days, wherever you go, there is much encouragement for this sad guy’s belief that being part of some group or movement lets him exist. In some form or another, I’ll be trying to take Real Presence on the road and do some counter-encouraging, including in Ukraine, a lot of whose people are, thanks to the anguish of cultural discontinuity and war and the efforts of Putin and his allies to conjure Black Nail, teetering on the edge of “ethno-national” hysteria.
By the way. “Firstest with the mostest” and fastest to the rightest place, Ukraine is set to win, and soon, the war that the neither the Germans, nor Swedes, nor Turks could do, confining Russia to the north and bringing down its empire for keeps. Russia’s defeat will almost certainly generate Babi-Yar-shaped moral and practical consequences. Dread them.
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Song of Self
Waking as like from a fretful dream,
Here I am!
There are You!
Here I am!
I celebrate myself.
Still air, wind, cool, heat, light, dark.
I celebrate a blade of grass, the head of a dandelion
I celebrate a sharp green blade of grass,
I mourn the frowsy fragile head of a dandelion
Up down this that, heart side, mind side, before, behind, yonder
And soon. Past and Present. Future Perfect.
And what I assume, You assume too.
For every atom belonging to Me, the same belongs to You.
And not quite.
Mud shapes according to its water.
In light dust may beguile different. Yet.
Be, the finale of me,
You, the disciple of me!
Me, the disciple of you!
We, the apostle of You.
Smile or Spit. Up to you.
We want is finale of seem
We be Imperators of ice cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
Girls that dawdle in such dress.
Boys that whip, those muscular ones.
And who remains take that bedsheet
And spread it so as to cover the mouth that is dumb.
I celebrate Me.
There. There is there.
That is. There.
A swell in a wave and a speck in the dust.
Plus B + I + [ ~≠U/speck and wave]
Makes here, where I and You are.
Thus, plus I + [ ~≠U], a place, a door.
Before the door we are there.
Gone through the door, we are here after.
To maintain attitudes, hold your position
To die bravely on yonder hill
And much should blind you,
Much must evade you.
All. At the cost of a bedsheet
And You left behind.
Breathe in. Breathe out
What a song to sing!
Birds and flight. Fish and swim,
Look and sky.
See and horizon.
A fine song!
Sing this song and never go home
Sing this song and everywhere is home
Sing this song and there’s no home
Take note before we sing
We cannot know where we’ll go
Only that I will wind up here with You.
Celebrate me.
- Tracy Danison/13 August 2024
Black nail
You. Minds of my generation.
Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!
Russia. Listen. Vladimir. Listen.
Banqueted on sweet, sticky lies
Raise your eyes. Fine omens. Firefly signs.
Crackling Portents.
Curlicues of alchemical anatomy Nobody understands.
And Nobody was the fiction of a blind man. Now dead.
Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!
Your bright eyes fixed everywhere but on the Other
You knot stories babbled by babies in blindfolds
Truth is plain to see but too hard to say.
So say something, anything.
Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Saint Nick! A young man!
Lord, Christ Christmas, Beejesus! A young man!
Say it again! Say it again! And again.
To win is to succeed.
And to lose?
An inspiring late night movie
Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man! Listen.
Vladimir. Listen Russia.
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
When will we end the human war?
Listen! You have it all!
The power of the kingdoms. Like Binyamin says.
The murder, the pain, the stink of the dead.
All the bewildered motherless bitches with the thousand yard stare.
Fast-firing cannons, rocket bombs
And jellied gasoline and rattling guns
Tiny drones like dragonflies hurling potato mashers.
Thrilling. Exciting. Powerful. Emotional
Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!
But. To succeed is not to win.
You have to win to win. Listen. Russia.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
I still haven’t told you what you must to win winning.
I’m addressing you.
Those who believe.
Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!
To win, you’ve got to love it.
The Murder, the pain, the horror, I mean
The Moloch stink in Vlad’s nostril.
Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!
Fill your libraries full of tears.
Look at yourself through the grave
You’ve got to love the stink, I mean.
Santa Claus is Jesus as an old fella!
Those who want to believe. Listen
Russia. Those who want to take off your clothes.
Listen. There is a narrow sliver of steel, a black nail
Just here, at heart’s gate.
Embossed along the barbed rim:
“who love murder in their heart
Die.”
Russia when will you be an angel?
Vladimir wants to touch it,
Press on it a bit
As if you really were a prisoner
And it were only your limp prick.
Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as young man
Kris Kringle is Beejesus as an older guy
Christ Christmas is Saint Nick in drag
Thursday falls next Tuesday
Russia. How can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
Russia, Vladimir is quite serious.
This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
Russia is this correct? Are you naked?
Is your prick limp ?
Quick. Reach out. Take my hand
Or die.
You have been told.
- Tracy Danison/13 August 2024