The End of the Trial of Man
The Endof the Trial of Man
PAUL STUBBS
2015
Published by Arc Publications Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright © Paul Stubbs 2015 Design by Tony Ward Printed by Lightning Source, UK 978 1908376 01 5 (pbk) 978 1908376 02 2 (hbk) Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Arts Council England for a generous grant towards the completion of this collection. Special thanks go to Eden Kane whose support existed before there were any poems to support, and to Rosa Richardson for her unconditional friendship and support. Also to the following people: the author’s parents, Blandine Longre, Michael Lee Rattigan, Mark Wilson, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Alex Pearce, John and Hilary Wakeman, Rhiannon Shelley, Will Stone and Peter Oswald. This collection is dedicated to the memory of the poet Matt Simpson (1936-2009) who, despite his own frequent critical bewilderment when reading these poems, was always warm and above all (the rarest thing) non-tutorial in his comments of praise. Some of these poems appeared in the following magazines: The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald, The Shop, Le Zaporogue, The Wolf, Les Carnets d’Eucharis and Spolia and in the anthology The Wolf: A Decade (Poems 2002-2012). Cover image: Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2015 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications. Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke
Contents
The Paralytic Child / 11 The Ascetic Attempts to Speak / 15 God-Body Problem (resolved?) / 19 Afterworldsmen / 20 The Birth of the Third Reich / 23 The Priest Kept Alive in Public / 25 En Route to Bethlehem / 29 Since the Death of Yeats / 30 The Birth of God / 34 Two Figures, 1933 / 37 Three / 41 An Adam (and an Eve) / 42 The Awakening (Evolution of the Pious) / 46 Pope II, 1951 / 49 The Pope Departs his Heaven / 50 Evolution / 54 The New Birth of Man / 55 Bandaged Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion / 58 Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957 / 62 Figure in Movement, 1976 / 63 Monkey and the Atheist / 66 Lying Figure, 1969 / 69 The Unsaved / 71 Lost Tale from the Apocrypha / 72 Religious Man Prepares for Paradise / 73 The Apostate / 77 The Abstract Crucifixion / 78 Paralytic Child and the Flood / 82 The Three Final Phases of Perdition / 83 Head I, 1948 / 86 Death of Utopia / 90 The Scream / 91 Men on High-pulley Contraptions in Mid-air / 95 The Adam Resurrection / 96
Return of the Image / 100 Elysium / 101 The Last Days / 103 The End of the Trial of Man / 104 Parousia / 105 Biographical Note / 109
All the paintings which are referred to in the titles of the poems are the works of Francis Bacon.
For my Blandine “till the agony of nonspaces and the wreckage of erasing times.� Blandine Longre
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ “…Then, however, he saw something sitting on the pathway shaped like a man and yet hardly like a man, something unutterable.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra “Long after the days and the seasons, and people and countries.” Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations
The Paralytic Child
after ‘Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours’ 1961 “Le Paralytique se leva, qui était resté couché sur le flanc, et ce fut d’un pas singulièrement assuré qu’ils le virent franchir la galerie et disparaître dans la ville, les Damnés.” – Arthur Rimbaud
– On the day when man he fell back onto all fours and crawled, the seed for you was born: two failed cells dividing in the mud, to produce what here, now, today, we see here before us: the lone spent eel of a child; without explanation, world,
or tail… crawling into and out of yourself, as if your creator had removed it your backbone like a pick from between his teeth. For you have been born of all human deaths, even, yes, those wormeaten parts of you, (still visible) that died, when, in you, a religion lost its faith… – yet half-gutted, and partly atrophied, it seems
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as though you have just crawled clear of heaven? (before God he removed it the face-mask of Darwin) for devolution has forced you free of the membrane of history – The poise and the grace and the gait of all ancient men, demolished by the one single revolution of your hip; species after species, by the portent in your eye… – So, is there perhaps some undiscovered tribe or people, who, in their pockets, still guard (religiously) a small wooden fetish in your image? carved perhaps in the first few days after the passing of sin, once, in a church’s vault, it was discovered: the microfilm of a gospel too supernatural to view?
12
– Yet having now already seen the last earth-bound creature crash into the sea, and the eagle grow ill with flying, and with all of the languages of the world now but unwanted pulp at the back of your throat, towards what new destination can you imagine yourself now heading? – You, our planet’s only anthropological first-born! (as, in your mind, when you move, the unused flesh from your limbs, it is hurled like clumps of wet clay onto some celestial grid, where, unrolled again, it is stretched back onto fresh bone…) – So what in Nietzsche’s or Blake’s mind prevents you from ever again standing up? Your body that forces every extraneous muscle to twitch, day after
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day, when as a child beast, you crawl, crawl out from the landscapes, into the now abandoned churches, temples of the world, where your ‘presence’ explodes like spittle onto the icon’s lips! and where the tilt of your head drops all known stares to the ground… Until on that day when your death it gives birth finally to our last belated truth, on some dusty and deserted road, or high plateau, where, in mournful rhetoric, all past experiences of man are resolved, resolved, and never to be mentioned again.
14
The Ascetic attempts to speak
after ‘Portrait of George Dyer Talking’ 1966
– Since the epoch of belief it ended you have been sat here, uninjured by thorns, and with theology’s lapsed lesions beginning now to fall from your palms; (and with the dials on all of your biblical breath-canisters working now on ‘empty’) as faith to a lost lunar reef returns… While your tongue, a syntactical stump, it continues to de-alphabet the world and root you always deeper into the mud of man’s mind; you, silent and God-mauled, passing again from atom to atom in prayer… yet uninterrupted for centuries, it seems, by nothing but the bone-bullets of your own slow religious death… – So what possessions, if any, are left here about you? only the few torn scraps of papyrus at your feet, on which are written the last words you’ve needed to say; you, today, wearing Adam’s own first ears as headphones, and with 15
his imaginary dummy-torso sat upright onto your knee, as if to ventriloquize yourself back into biblical speech; as, for you, all that exists is perfection and your eternal failed search for it – So what have been the results of such a painstaking wait? Only the daily build-up of phlegm beneath your tongue of the gutturals of Yeats’ rough beast, that, and the volume of sand passed through the hourglass to match the concentration of your face… – Yet every hour of every day you’ve been attempting it, speech, while stretching the flesh of Christ’s last look across your skull, like a balaclava, so as to disguise yourself from yourself when prowling the church-sized silences of your mind; while those who still believe in you on mountain tops and in secret caves (in meditation) they hold it their breath, not wanting to inflate (too early)
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your diaphanous and postworld lungs… – Whole civilizations clearing their throat to allow you to speak; so, for you to ever actually speak again just how many new gods will need first to be discredited? and age-old churches boarded up? (as, at night, a no-bibled mannequin, you push past yourself
where
into the dreams of the deaf,
onto the high hushed hills of Golgotha, you hand back to him Christ your microphone and lost ear-plugs for the cross…) – Your tongue, a brake then on theology? Yes, and on epochs; for when you do eventually speak again the flags of the countries who listen will shred inside of your fist, the icon-heads of their leaders shatter, as
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at your feet finally all nations bow… – So on what day then might you actually speak? On the day when God he hauls in finally the human nets and (to his surprise), amid the heaped-up rubber skeletons of the saved and the trapped, yet still flying skins of the poor, he relocates it: the still mouthing contraption of your jaw…
18
God-Body problem (resolved?)
after ‘Fragment of a Crucifixion’ 1950 “Beginning and end greatly deceive us.” – Friedrich Hölderlin
Hooked up high above the window, a torso (failed by every congenital language) swings; it is the final allegorical act: to switch off its soul-filament, at last! to remove in man (briefly?) the necessity of either birth or death; (to trap the wick of the sun between the wrought mental-pincers of the worm and cast off man’s extinct shadow onto the moon…) Man who ploughs on still regardless into the street below; bowdlerized by sin, the dayto-day, the herd! Until this moment when God he attaches wings finally to the human mouth and flies back home the word…
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