Gottfried Benn
Standing in line yesterday to gain admittance to the paradise that is Trader Joe's, I looked up and beheld The Salesforce Tower, its top floor glittering in the distance like a Mormon Temple. But instead of the Angel of Moroni with his horn ready to proclaim the kingdom of heaven I could see Rashann Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateep setting up mics for the free feel-good concert to be held later in the afternoon.
Perhaps I have been drinking too much of Trader Joe's Sancerre from the Loire Valley. At $12 a bottle it's a value. And eating too many pistachio nuts dusted with chili powder and lime. I'm also having trouble sleeping, my body doesn't seem to be able to breakaway from my mind enough for it to forget itself the way it once did. I admit my diet's changed since the pandemic. I now eat my main meal at 2 am--an open face turkey sandwich--and read Gottfried Benn.
They say nothing good happens between 2 am and 6 am, but I disagree. It's the best time to read Gottfried Benn; it's as if Benn created those hours just so he could be read. Where else can you savor the delights of two world wars as reported from the morgue by a world-class poet who dressed corpses' for burial, and then went home and wrote about it? The prose too is sublime. Imagine a poet who is also a journalist, or a journalist who is also a poet, living in his native land, Germany, contending first with the Kaiser and then Adolph Hitler. This sort of writer seems to have vanished by the late 1950s--survivors of war, students of world history, having a long-standing architectural relationship with civilization, knowing how fragile the whole structure always has been, how change-ably changeable it is, how it all ends and how it all goes on, product after post-war product. I can recommend Gottfried Benn as a fine wine to be sipped, paired with a a sandwich composed of oven baked turkey slices found in the deli section at Trader Joe's
Not to be philosophical, but soon the sun will rise once again in the east. It's almost 6 am est. The president, sitting in his monogrammed terrycloth robe, is beginning his nasty little tweets in broken English, so lacking in common-sense, compassion or coherence that it's a marvel he can write at all. I sit in the half-dark, a bit stunned after reading Gottfried Benn, yet reassured that yes, the sun is coming up, so to speak, right before my eyes, just as promised. Benn is a writer we need to read if we hope to survive.