(get) the OVERLOOK (hotel) ...

 

If you drive for about one hour south east of Portland (Oregon), the road starts rising up to hills. The trees will become bigger and the hills turn into giant grey rocks hiding the blank sky. Then it is time to enter the steep slim side road to the left up to the top of a blinding white cone shimmering in the the strong sunlight of a clear autumn day.   

When you finally arrive over the clouds you will soon understand that you are standing on an old vulcano which is part of a chain called Cascadia. In the south you see Mt Jefferson, to the north there is Mt St Helens (last outbreak May 1980). And you are, somewhere inbetween, on Mt Hood. Welcomed by a raven who was waiting for you for a very long time.

And then you see something that seems very familiar to you although you could have never been here before. It does not look nice or friendly at all, so you start wondering why you feel so much at home on a place that you definitly have never been before. Its a giant wooden house, squatting on the stony side of the vulcano.

Not understanding how something absolutely new can feel so very well known you enter the entrance of this broad wooden building ...

It is a special spirit all around. 

A house haunted by people who never were here.

 

 

A photo of a new years night suddenly tells you why your memory believes you have been here before. You know this place from a movie. From a very special movie.

AND THEN YOU REMEMBER.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

 This is the place of the fictive fiction writer Jack Torrance. You never forgot him.

Welcome to the Overlook hotel.

You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave.

Roberto Yanez in Berlin ...

On Friday, Nov 1st, the German-Chilean poet and painter Roberto Yanez from Santiago de Chile visited our literary salon at Kollwitzplatz in Berlin. He read some new poems on the occassion of launching his first German poetry book "Frühlingsregen" (Insel Verlag/Suhrkamp 2013) which is illustrated by his own paintings. (He also launched an exhibition of his pictures later in Berlin.) The special thing about Roberto: He is the grandson of Margot an Erich Honecker, last heads of state of the GDR until the time of the fall of the wall in 1989. Of course Roberto is tightly related to his grandparents until today but in a personal not in a political way. (Erich Honecker died in Chile in 1993, Margot is still alive an in a constant contact with him.) Roberto abruptly left Berlin with his family and went to Chile for good when he was 15 years old.

  Now it was for the first time that he came back to Germany and his hometown Berlin. As a poet who was pursued by the socialist secret service of the GDR (Stasi) at this time it was a pleasure for me now, after 23 years, to invite Roberto, who became a poet too in the meantime, for a reading to our salon ... (HERE a link to a song i wrote about his grandfather in 1989...)

And THIS is his song about his personal reunion with Berlin ...

JONI MITCHELL is a POETRY GODESS

Watch her story here ...

and listen:

The horror of beauty

Everybody yearns for beauty, everybody is afraid of horror. Ok, not everybody… Talking about beauty and horror means to talk about emotions and aesthetics. For some reason, our theme is not beauty OR horror, but the two are connected by an AND. Both, beauty and horror, have several layers of meaning: biological, cultural and moral ones. We all remember: The Trojan War was caused by the perfect beauty of Helena. Beauty signifies something blooming in its ideal state. Still, horror is not the opposite of beauty. Like evil descends from something good that is hindered to flourish, horror is a later state of beauty. Horror is prevented, lost or destroyed beauty. „Beauty is nothing but the beginning of horror” - as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote. Horror is beauty in its state of decadence.

I will never forget one of the biggest moments of horror I experienced as a young man. It occurred when watching just a great movie, but it was a sudden and deep understanding of a shocking truth of real life that was symbolised in this movie-scene. Maybe you know the film The Shining made by Stanley Kubrick (a real expert of horror and beauty). In one scene at the closed Overlook Hotel, the lonely writer Jack Torrance enters the empty room 237 because he has heard a noise inside. To his surprise, an unknown beautiful young woman is having a shower in the bathroom. She stares at him without any fear (although she is naked). Jack, the crazy young writer, does not think long, carefully takes her into his arms without a word and tries to kiss her. But when he catches a glance into the big mirror behind them she breaks out in a loud laughter. He sees himself holding an old and ugly virago disfigured by disgusting skin diseases in his arms.

When I saw this scene for the first time I was at least as shocked as the main character of the film (played by Jack Nicholson). It was not the surprising effect of the scene or the sudden change in the lady. I was also not confused by the missing connection of the scene to the main plot of the film. I was shocked because in this second I understood the truth in this symbolic scene: That beauty and horror are no opposites but different states of the same power; that the young beauty and the sick ugly virago are only different aspects of it.

(Watch this scene only if you have strong nerves ...)

Buranovo!! (... Udmurtia?)

In the year of 2005, I elaborately wrote (in the book "My Song - Texts about the Soundtrack of Life") about the fateful meaning of the worldwide summer hit of 1977: Hotel California... In 2008 I was guest at a writer's congress in Yoshkar Ola, the capital of the Autonom Russian Republic of Mari El - a region near the river Wolga, where an enchanting finno-ugric tribe dwells, about whom not even my friends in only 800 km distant Moscow had ever heared. There I also got to know something about the Udmurts, another finno-urgic tribe in the range of the Wolga region with an astonishing culture as well - and I even met a young fascinating Udmurt poetemme (see below). That is why I am emotionally involved in many respects and recommend: the Voices of the grandmothers of Buranovo!

 

The young Udmurt poet Mush Nadii (2008). 

An Edition of her poems in Urdmurt, Estonian, Russian and English 

was published 2006 with the titel "barefoot" by KIRJASTUSKESKUS (Tallinn). 

(I own the book!)