Berlin Wall fragment

Berlin Wall fragment at Imperial War Museum, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

A piece of the Berlin Wall, preserved at the Imperial War Museum.

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Rilke? In English?

[michael schmidt]

Is the Imperial War Museum a war museum for the empire, or a museum devoted to wars of empire?

[Porlock Junior]

Neither. It's Bedlam.
(No kidding, the building used to be Bethlehem hospital where they locked up crazy folks and mucked up the name in traditional fashion.)

[Vance Maverick]

The fact that it doesn't stick is surely the point. The words are uttered, or suggested, by an "archaic torso of Apollo" -- an unchanging artifact. If the poet were really to change his life, then on the next visit to the museum, the torso would tell him the same thing again. (Rather like bjk's inadvertent multiple postings.)

This is the paradox of art as a message: if a piece is really effective at delivering a message, it's not art. "News that stays news" can't literally be news at all. (Yet of course it must be like news in some important way, metaphorically perhaps, or the idea wouldn't have such traction.)

It wasn't the graffiti that brought down the wall....

[Vance Maverick]

Hmm, I see my comment no longer makes sense, because some comments before it were deleted. Anyway, "bjk" had remarked that he/she often quotes this line to him/herself, "but it doesn't stick". Then there were some accidental repetitions of the comment.

The pithiest line expressing what I meant to say is of course "Poetry makes nothing happen" -- which of course comes from a serious eulogy for a poet.

[bjk]

That was pure inadvertant internet poetry. It couldn't last.