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Complete text of Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan''s 1976 poem 'An Observation, Revisited'
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Stephan Pickering
Jun 16, 2016, 11:47:34 AM6/16/16
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R. Zimmerman, 1976. An Observation, Revisited.
Photograph 1(1):9
The original text is in italics, the title -- (line 1) An Observation, Revisited, (line 2) by R. Zimmerman -- is in bold non-italics. There are two photographs: one by Nina Alexander of the young women alive; one by Herta Hilschner-Wittgenstein of the woman on a ?mortuary slab. After the last line, there is a black line, under which we read:
Robert Zimmerman [bold type] is a one-time kid from the mid-west. A poet and sometime musician, who has taken a sabbatical from his instruments and is writing in the seclusion of the woods.
This time photograph is not merely pictures,
Death on the walls, hung
floating and telling me "It's O.K."
No shivers.
Instead, an embrace.
"Wrong Mrs. Zimmerman!
You must have lied
when you told me
all those horrible stories
about the boogeyman."
Back to the white walls of the gallery.
Even the space becomes an illusion,
for one is carried away,
flown off
into the very inside of the mind.
Private territory that is,
and the gallery being nothing
but a one-way ticket.
A photograph:
double life-sized torso.
A torso ripped wide open by death.
The doctors who saw it got scared,
and quickly
as if for the benefit of those
walking by,
took needle and thread
and sewed it up in a hurry.
Next on the scene:
a photographer.
She must have asked Death to take a vacation.
Maybe she even ordered him
to come back in a new dress.
Clearly, something happened, for
the feeling of horror and fear
is gone now
and there is peace.
I can hear a lot of music in my mind.
Tunes, very fine turnes
from an instrument I've never seen.
I am being wrapped up in them.
I can't get a poem out of my head.
On the death of his father,
Dylan Thomas wrote it with piercing elegance:
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
Do not go gentle into that good night".
Suddenly the power
of the written word
is wiped out.
I can no longer empathize with
the expressed eternally insurgent spirit...
A photograph in front of me,
a beautiful young woman on the metal slab,
wearing a delicately embroidered nightgown.
But really,
she is dressed in a smile.
Looking at it, breathing it in
I cannot feel rage.
I feel light.
I welcome it.
This light transcends darkness.
Rage has made way for elation.
Am I crazy?
I am getting high.
High from looking at death.
More and more intense the music.
The poet in me becomes alive,
restless to celebrate rebirth.
The woman in those photographs isn't dead.
She died, yes,
but somehow that doesn't matter.
The finality is nothing more than a transition
into tomorrow's now.
More photographs.
All the way stations in space.
Pain, intense pain.
I can hear her scream.
I want to take her hand
off her aching belly.
I want to cover that wound
with a cool, wet towel.
I am involved.
Whenever one of my children gets hurt,
I try to turn the other way.
I'd hand over that Bandaid with
a rigidly extended arm.
Blood makes me sick.
And here I am, long
to be right in the middle,
want to take care.
Love
She is hugging her dauther.
Her hands totally encompassing.
Am I the next to be embraced?
I feel
Loneliness.
The photograph is much smaller than all the others.
It ceases to be a photograph.
A woman sits in a wheelchair by herself
in a seemingly endless corridor?
Where is that corridor?
I want to go there,
push her away.
We are friends now,
knowing each others secrets.
I am here, right here.
Why can't the image fade?
Death. Beautiful death.
I am drawn to it.
I am feeling joy.
"Man, you must be mad"
I hear someone saying.
But I am the only one in the gallery.
I look outside the window.
Below is West Broadway,
a parking lot across the street,
people strolling.
Am I a part of them?
Or am I part of what's going on
in these photographs?
Where's my music?
Death and Life cannot communicate.
Nonsense!
Unhatched chickens.
"Don't count them,"
my mother used to say.
I have always counted the eggs.
The photographs,
although not hung in chronological order,
fit together in perfect harmony.
No quibbling about chicken or egg.
In some of them, I'm not sure
if the woman is dead or alive.
One photograph in particular,
which, for lack of a formal title,
I'll name "shrouded head"
leaves room for everything.
I can see her as being alseep,
dreaming peacefully and happy.
At the same time, I detect traces of exhaustion.
It reminds me of my wife
who looked very much like that
after she had given birth.
Strange as it may sound,
I found the same expression on my babies' faces
after they had left their mother's breast.
I'm making scribblings.
I'm always making scribblings.
A minstrel collecting words
for an eventual song.
In my mind I keep humming Tom Paxton's
"Peace Will Come"
And all sorts of images
are flashing across the sky at once.
A friend of mine is battling death...
Film her while a group of white clad,
husky fellows stabbed gigantic needles
into our spine...Our visit
to the morgue together, where we'd watched
the waxen flesh being cut up...
Our conversations about dying,
sometimes late into the night...
Standing, looking at those photographs
feels funny, because it somehow took the
punchline out of what we concluded.
"Avoid dying, friend" I said often.
I could share her fears
no longer.
"Hypocrisy, Mr Zimmerman?"
No. Coincidence, and a part of growing up.
"Macabre," some will say.
An exhibition of someone dying...
"how could they have taken those photographs?"
To me, the work of the photographers is,
without reservation, a success.
After all, while marriage,
parenthood and a two car garage are
part of the lives of the fortunate,
death can be confidently expected
even by the most pessimistic.
Face It!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
Photograph 1(1):9
The original text is in italics, the title -- (line 1) An Observation, Revisited, (line 2) by R. Zimmerman -- is in bold non-italics. There are two photographs: one by Nina Alexander of the young women alive; one by Herta Hilschner-Wittgenstein of the woman on a ?mortuary slab. After the last line, there is a black line, under which we read:
Robert Zimmerman [bold type] is a one-time kid from the mid-west. A poet and sometime musician, who has taken a sabbatical from his instruments and is writing in the seclusion of the woods.
This time photograph is not merely pictures,
Death on the walls, hung
floating and telling me "It's O.K."
No shivers.
Instead, an embrace.
"Wrong Mrs. Zimmerman!
You must have lied
when you told me
all those horrible stories
about the boogeyman."
Back to the white walls of the gallery.
Even the space becomes an illusion,
for one is carried away,
flown off
into the very inside of the mind.
Private territory that is,
and the gallery being nothing
but a one-way ticket.
A photograph:
double life-sized torso.
A torso ripped wide open by death.
The doctors who saw it got scared,
and quickly
as if for the benefit of those
walking by,
took needle and thread
and sewed it up in a hurry.
Next on the scene:
a photographer.
She must have asked Death to take a vacation.
Maybe she even ordered him
to come back in a new dress.
Clearly, something happened, for
the feeling of horror and fear
is gone now
and there is peace.
I can hear a lot of music in my mind.
Tunes, very fine turnes
from an instrument I've never seen.
I am being wrapped up in them.
I can't get a poem out of my head.
On the death of his father,
Dylan Thomas wrote it with piercing elegance:
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
Do not go gentle into that good night".
Suddenly the power
of the written word
is wiped out.
I can no longer empathize with
the expressed eternally insurgent spirit...
A photograph in front of me,
a beautiful young woman on the metal slab,
wearing a delicately embroidered nightgown.
But really,
she is dressed in a smile.
Looking at it, breathing it in
I cannot feel rage.
I feel light.
I welcome it.
This light transcends darkness.
Rage has made way for elation.
Am I crazy?
I am getting high.
High from looking at death.
More and more intense the music.
The poet in me becomes alive,
restless to celebrate rebirth.
The woman in those photographs isn't dead.
She died, yes,
but somehow that doesn't matter.
The finality is nothing more than a transition
into tomorrow's now.
More photographs.
All the way stations in space.
Pain, intense pain.
I can hear her scream.
I want to take her hand
off her aching belly.
I want to cover that wound
with a cool, wet towel.
I am involved.
Whenever one of my children gets hurt,
I try to turn the other way.
I'd hand over that Bandaid with
a rigidly extended arm.
Blood makes me sick.
And here I am, long
to be right in the middle,
want to take care.
Love
She is hugging her dauther.
Her hands totally encompassing.
Am I the next to be embraced?
I feel
Loneliness.
The photograph is much smaller than all the others.
It ceases to be a photograph.
A woman sits in a wheelchair by herself
in a seemingly endless corridor?
Where is that corridor?
I want to go there,
push her away.
We are friends now,
knowing each others secrets.
I am here, right here.
Why can't the image fade?
Death. Beautiful death.
I am drawn to it.
I am feeling joy.
"Man, you must be mad"
I hear someone saying.
But I am the only one in the gallery.
I look outside the window.
Below is West Broadway,
a parking lot across the street,
people strolling.
Am I a part of them?
Or am I part of what's going on
in these photographs?
Where's my music?
Death and Life cannot communicate.
Nonsense!
Unhatched chickens.
"Don't count them,"
my mother used to say.
I have always counted the eggs.
The photographs,
although not hung in chronological order,
fit together in perfect harmony.
No quibbling about chicken or egg.
In some of them, I'm not sure
if the woman is dead or alive.
One photograph in particular,
which, for lack of a formal title,
I'll name "shrouded head"
leaves room for everything.
I can see her as being alseep,
dreaming peacefully and happy.
At the same time, I detect traces of exhaustion.
It reminds me of my wife
who looked very much like that
after she had given birth.
Strange as it may sound,
I found the same expression on my babies' faces
after they had left their mother's breast.
I'm making scribblings.
I'm always making scribblings.
A minstrel collecting words
for an eventual song.
In my mind I keep humming Tom Paxton's
"Peace Will Come"
And all sorts of images
are flashing across the sky at once.
A friend of mine is battling death...
Film her while a group of white clad,
husky fellows stabbed gigantic needles
into our spine...Our visit
to the morgue together, where we'd watched
the waxen flesh being cut up...
Our conversations about dying,
sometimes late into the night...
Standing, looking at those photographs
feels funny, because it somehow took the
punchline out of what we concluded.
"Avoid dying, friend" I said often.
I could share her fears
no longer.
"Hypocrisy, Mr Zimmerman?"
No. Coincidence, and a part of growing up.
"Macabre," some will say.
An exhibition of someone dying...
"how could they have taken those photographs?"
To me, the work of the photographers is,
without reservation, a success.
After all, while marriage,
parenthood and a two car garage are
part of the lives of the fortunate,
death can be confidently expected
even by the most pessimistic.
Face It!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
Willie
Jun 16, 2016, 12:40:20 PM6/16/16
to
http://www.creativecamerabooks.co.uk/detail_pages/photograph_detail.htm
Bob was certainly confronting the ontological conundrum you often mention, especial in these lines:
Below is West Broadway,
a parking lot across the street,
people strolling.
Am I a part of them?
Or am I part of what's going on
in these photographs?
Where's my music?
Stephan Pickering
Jun 16, 2016, 3:21:58 PM6/16/16
to
On Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 9:40:20 AM UTC-7, Willie wrote:
>
> Thanks for this, Stephan. By "The original text is in italics," you mean the whole poem, right? That is, Bob wrote all of this, didn't he? I see this was
Shalom & Boker tov, Willie...I have my copy of the magazine in front of me. Yes, the entire poem was in italics, and, yes, he did write it. And, for reasons only known to him, he has not republished it. He entered the Susan Caldwell Gallery in Manhattan in mid-June 1976, spending nearly 2 hours looking at the 'Toni' exhibition (which ended 23 June). The final 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue concert was 25 May, and he flew to New York shortly thereafter. The photographs of 'Toni' were taken over the last two weeks of the woman's life, ending with her in an open coffin.
>
> Thanks for this, Stephan. By "The original text is in italics," you mean the whole poem, right? That is, Bob wrote all of this, didn't he? I see this was
is that
The photographs were by Herta Hilschner-Wittegenstein' and Nina Alexander. Her real name was Herta Wittgenstein -- she claimed to be one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's granddaughters -- born 1942 in Austria, came to the US 13 August 1964, then stayed illegally for years. She used various aliases: Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, Herta Hilscher, Herta Christiensen, Herta Spitzweiser. Her photography at this exhibition was quite good. Then...well, to condense a lengthy story: she became an art forger in New Mexico, spent time in federal prison...the art world is/was fully aware of her history. As late as April 2002 she was claiming to be an Iraq-based physician with Doctors Without Borders (in 1986 she had been convicted for posing as a licensed physician)...
An excellent discussion of the exhibition is: Judith Goldman, 1976. The camera confronts death. The Village Voice 28 June:120. He returned to California later, and, of course, was at The Last Waltz 25 November 1976, not entering a recording studio (with Leonard Cohen et al.) until March 1977.
In my monograph-in-progress, I am reproducing the entire page.
Stephan Pickering
Jun 16, 2016, 4:05:14 PM6/16/16
to
An excellent overview of what, in retrospect, remains the cogency of the poem itself (not discussed in this source) is:
John Edward Horne, 2012. Representations of dying in contemporary visual culture and the ethics of spectatorship. M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1-174
John Edward Horne, 2012. Representations of dying in contemporary visual culture and the ethics of spectatorship. M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1-174
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