through

Published: 2013, 2016 (revised)
8.25″ x 6″ (20.955 x 15.24 cm)
Full color bleed on white paper
198 pages

Bertolt Brecht’s 1922 poem “Of Poor B.B.” (Von Armen B.B.), written on a night-train ride between Munich and Berlin by a poet in his mid-twenties, is a human bedbug’s vision of a fallen world awaiting purgative annihilation.

Of Poor B.B.

I
I, Bertolt Brecht, come from the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities
When I was in her belly. And the chill of the forests
Will be in me till my dying day.

2
The asphalt city is my home. Furnished
From the outset with every sacramental perk:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
Distrustful and idle and contented to the end.

3
I am friendly to people. I put on
A top hat because that's what they do.
I tell myself: They are animals with a particular smell.
And I tell myself: What of it, so am I.

4
In the morning I like to set a woman or two
In my empty rocking chairs
And I look at them casually and say:
In me you have someone you can't rely on.

5
Towards evening it's men I gather round about me
And we address each other as "gentlemen."
They park their feet on my table
And say: Things are looking up. And I don't ask: When?

6
In the grey light before dawn the pine trees piss
And the verminous birds start to scream.
At that hour I empty my glass in the city and throw away
My cigar end and anxiously go to sleep.

7
We have settled, a trite tribe,
In dwellings it pleased us to think of as indestructible
(Thus we built the tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And the thin antennae that undergird the Atlantic).

8
Of these cities there will remain only what passed through them, the wind.
The house makes glad the eater: he strips it bare.
We know we are provisional,
And that after us will come: nothing worth mention.

9
In the coming earthquakes I trust
I will not let my Virginia go bitter on me,
I, Bertolt Brecht, removed to the asphalt cities
From the black forests in my mother in the early times.

In through, I articulated the four verses of the eight stanza, letter by letter, across 183 pages, turning the boundaries of each letter into the frame of an image. The images were generated by keywords lifted from a dream journal and plugged into Google’s image search. The mating of letter and image frames and alienates details that in isolation acquire an intensity that surpasses that of their mundane sources. Complex correspondences and collisions between individual letters and images and between words and image sequences emerge.

Complementing this reconstruction of Brecht’s text, a collection of five oneiric vignettes, titled “The Permeable City,” add to Brecht’s particular use of the image of urban desolation to suggest nihilistic indifference (je-m’en-foutisme), the possibility of similar imagery functioning in dreams as metaphor for the psychoanalytic demolition of the ego’s (mis)identifications.

A limited number of signed and numbered copies are available. Please contact me if you’re interested.

A hard copy is available from Amazon.

The PDF version is available in the Store.