Ladies and Gentlemen, The poem, whose musical representation premieres here today, is about Kythera.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The poem, whose musical

representation premieres here today, is about

Kythera. 

Kythera is a Greek island and a mythological

place. 

After her birth from the sea, Aphrodite

is supposed to have gone ashore there. 

That is the reason why in ancient

times a cult place for Aphrodite, the goddess of love,

was established on Kythera. 

The goddess was mortal, however,

and was forgotten. 

Afterward the island of love existed only as a topos

which was elaborated and revitalized by paintings and literature of the eighteenth century.  For example, the stately gardens and parks decorated with statues on

Kythera, or some other Arcadia or paradise, where

the pilgrims of love celebrated their chivalrous

festivities. 

Nothing of these outings remained,

however, except for a few statues of

Venus, in the now bourgeois gardens, by the gardens of childhood, which

Baudelaire remembered

wistfully. 

Here Venus-Aphrodite was only a decoration, made

of marble or plaster.  No ocean

in sight, neither the one she was born from, nor one you

would have to cross by boat. 

Love was no longer a gently swinging,

swaying festival, but was instead

something as futile as the effort of

Baudelaire’s fool to win the affections of a

stone Venus. The lover was lost and

there was no sense of community anymore

that would have sheltered him.

So the idea of the Kythera island has changed over time.

Whenever social conditions changed,

so did views on love.

The poem deals with a fantasy world and is the illustration of a pain. It

shows the birth and existence of a landscape

from that pain, if one wants to believe its

chimera and deception. But be cautious, this

dreamscape and scene of imagination has an enchanted undertow.

Kythera 

A region of painclaiming to bea landscape

the bodypulled alongas if on wheelsThe trees stand still

Outstretched armsmultiplied suddenlyentwinedgrown frozen

Behind it only leftthe turningbetween the trees

which grow whilethe body

sinks (into the ground)

A landscape of longing is

portrayed, which changes into a

landscape of death. It is a landscape of mirroring and signs

through which a body moves and

into which it sinks.

Just as little is certain about the landscape; so too the body knows little about its

physical existence. The body first finds

itself in a trance and its movements are

automatic and mechanical.

The outstretched arms prove to be a deception and an

illusion. And there’s more: the multiply reflected embraces

are suddenly affected by stiffness of death. An illusory place of

love becomes a place of death.

The changing appearance of the hedge of embraces that is first alive, then dead, is the

pivotal point of the poem.

The poem owes its genesis to a walk on a late autumn

day about ten years ago. I saw then an unusual hedge that

appeared to be strangely bare and almost as if it had been dreamed up.

It was a hedge that was formed along a fence from

an ancient wistaria and whose branches and

offshoots were tangled up and seemed, with its lack of

flowers and leaves, to be frozen and stationary . At

the same time, they seemed to be under a spell because the branches did not grow upwards as usual

on a wall but were themselves a wall which

appeared to be like a skeleton.

I remember standing in front of this hedge for a long time, and the following night I dreamt about a body

walking through a landscape. But this

walking was not really a walking but rather a

rolling along on invisible wheels which

I still knew were there.

Both images, the enchanted wisteria-

wall and the peculiar movement

of the body captivated me. I wanted to find a

space for them, in which they would attain a meaning and a function.

The emotions they triggered required a

fairy-tale setting and that was

Kythera.

But as soon as I got there it changed, was no longer an island of love but

an indifferent region in which

longing was pursued

ad absurdum.

No utopian place ruled by love and freedom nor an

archeological site of whichever kind, be it

one of excavated sculptures or findings from the realms of art and literature, would have fit the initiation

images.

If one excavated the Kythera I

imagined one might find the skeleton of

a body, possibly even several.

Perhaps the hedge of longing is

nothing more than a bewitched and

transformed burial mound.

The poem, which is set in a realm

between appearance and reality, leaves all

this open.

Since the origins of my Kythera lie in pain, the

accompanying emotion for a love, its

ambivalences and intangibility determine

the hallucinatory character of my

island, a place that becomes increasingly real, the longer one

stays.

Emotions increase or decrease or

change, are transformed into their opposites.

They have a dramatic aspect. This is why my

poem is structured like a drama, each of the five stanzas

the equivalent of an act.

In each of the individual stanzas the relationship

between reality and non-reality,

appearance and being, is newly

defined.

They are clearly separated in the exposition of the

first stanza: pain on the one hand, on

the other the illusion of a landscape.

In the second stanza unreality is illustrated with the help of the trees

and thus becomes a space one could

walk in. Pain seems to be forgotten, has

made way for longing.

But as soon as the third stanza

consolidates the contours of the landscape the sudden change

occurs: happiness, which is here portrayed as nothing but a

shadow of love, transforms itself.

The outstretched arms are all that is

visible of happiness. Even before the arms

freeze, they are transformed into an

insurmountable barrier. They entangle themselves with other

arms and block out any further approach.

At this point even the feelings which were so huge that they could create their

own space, become in retrospect, uncertain

and illusionary, whereas the

landscape they invented becomes

ever more deadly and thus ever more real.

In the 4th stanza, the dizziness and the

turning of the body: The turning motion of the imaginary wheels at the beginning of

the poem, now seizes the whole body. It falls to the ground, which finally gives

way in the last stanza.

The deeper the body sinks into the ground, the higher the trees grow. The growing of the trees is an optical illusion, the swansong

on the series of illusions, deceptions and futility, and their complex connections with each other in the

poem.

The poem does not offer the reader or

listener any support. It is like a

dream in which someone gets lost, the dreamer being

the reader or listener himself.

It is up to the reader whether he or she

takes the body in the dream for his or her own, identifying with

it, or whether it is seen as the body of a stranger. The poem

allows both possibilities as it allows several

interpretations.

It can be read as the story of an illusion of love, maybe even a

betrayal of love, or as a parable of the impossibility and

futility of love, or as one about being

exposed and lonely in one's hour of

death.

Alternatively, one could understand

the poem simply as a reflection on and with images about

the nature of emotions

concerning love and death.