from Mozart's Third Brain
CXXX
For Machiavelli, too, the greatest political crime was
the banishment, the eradication of peoples, as practiced by Philip of Macedon
The cease-fire came on the third day Gas and electricity
have been restored in Sarajevo The Bosnian-Serb
breakaway republic caves in, over its mass graves
What kind of peace will come? One dictated by the empire
I wish this were a defeat for the ethnic principle
and a triumph for democracy But the contagion of darkness goes deeper
Machiavelli saw the horrors of war, his own images corresponding exactly
to television's icons, trenches full of human bodies
He pleaded for an armed peace, in readiness for a just war
to preserve the sovereign state, its empire,
because the alternative, devastation, bondage, would be worse
On what level is sovereignty defined? In what kind of violence?
Innermost in the brain death, too, exists Its point of
crystal, dark, blinding But death's smile
also exists It does not yield There are no compromises
This also pertains to music One day music shall die—
Heart-shaped crystal, sounding, pulsating We go off
en merveille! Or die only by slow extinction
Reduction I am cut down from the tree, where I'm climbing, in its
finer and finer branches, sometimes near its luminous boundary Out-
side there is darkness, the blue, darkening sphere
The tree at my side Are we the same tree? Or a chimera?
We are not the same Nothing has the same location, not even
in growing together How big is your location? We move through
one another's sites In the synaptic leap In the ontic
For we are also hypostases, living, for one another. . .
There is the grace of shitting and the grace of pissing We are in this
falling, toward no bottom We fall through one another
We cannot set ourselves above anyone Neither thieves nor murderers
Not prostitutes Not those whose souls are evil Not even those
who, trapped in hubris, set themselves above others In this we are all sinners
And shall thus be stuck with our own kind We read one another
in the single brain Here I go again There's no difference
The form of the brain's hubris is a kind of exclusion Where is the formalization
that is not too rapid? Inside myself I see your love—
Do you hear the destruction of language? Yes, I hear! I hear it inside
myself, all around, everywhere It is in its creation
In its monster form In its highest form I listen to this
in utmost fear In order to find my courage With no guarantees
Maybe it's just cowardice that hits me But I want
to be in prayer, to what I don't know In a song to infinity
The third trial nears its end Then maybe
a fourth comes, and a fifth No one knows the result
beforehand I am in this This is also life This is also
confrontation When I look death in the face, it has
no features either But it is not the same It is not alive
The degraded and the downtrodden Inside me Under the foot
of my own fear That's where I am Where I no longer am, even if I know
I will return, again and again Maybe Nothing is
the same, except for tautologies And maybe not even there either
because according to Whitehead all functions, including logical
or mathematical, play out over time And thus every kind of logic also
has its time, which is not eternity Perhaps there is never any logic without
a substrate! I am the substrate Not even Dostoevsky forgave Stavrogin
In furnaces, in hotbeds, we test the intensity of extremes But the step
can be very small Executioners are people The grinding down
in the mental automata goes on without cease Without respite
No one is immune What is waiting for us comes regardless of our will
I will not have this! Then it's part of what is waiting for me
All the more deeply in In what? In the invisible What is the invisible?
There is only further penetration Space after space Time after time
And so peace came at last, imposed, a PAX AMERICANA
But I think: This is better than no peace at all
The alternatives are much worse Justice will have to come later
If it comes at all I see the stone faces of the three presidents
in front of the cameras, they don't know what to do with their hands
Light snow also fell in Dayton From Sarajevo faces
full of joy; some people already spoke of new wars From those
indicted for crimes against humanity no comments
I speak with A, just home from Tuzla, she has misgivings
Extensions in time Thresholds rise clear as glass, from below
What we perceive as counterpoint, in our brains or in the real
