Requiem For Christian Loidl 1957 – 2001

People who are afraid of heights are not afraid of accidentally falling. They are terrified of their inexorable urge to jump, to fly, an abyss merge craving as a triumphant exit strategy to the highest region. Chris called himself an “airpoet,” he leapt at life – in the faith that he could grab it. He believed: Let’s be realistic and demand the impossible; and, The only thing worth contemplating is that which cannot be contemplated.

A lot of people loved Christian Loidl. “Imagination is not a State,” said the visionary British poet William Blake, “it is Human Existence itself.” And Chris owned this airy realm of dreams in his daily life with concentration and generosity, with a guileless chivalry. He was one of poetry’s natural troubadours, a post-modern wandering minstrel.

We first met in Vienna, near the famous Ferris wheel of the Prater. I had just come from Lithuania. I had been there to do readings at the Autumn Festival in Druskininkai, an enchanting once fashionable, Middle-Earth-type spa town surrounded by a mushroomed primeval forest. Moreover, in downtown Vilnius for the very official book launching - at the baronial Writers’ Union - for my collected poems translated into Lithuanian, Kas pavoge vištyti? (Who Stole the Chicken?). It seemed like no coincidence that Chris likewise knew this haunting Baltic country. A spontaneous connection. We fell immediately into an extreme discussion about the spirit of that place. Its hidden mysteries, its careless beauty, its spiky vibrato light and weary eerie unforced pagan mood, the paintings and the music of M.-K. Ciurlionis, sonatas of the stars, samovars - so began our fruitful communion that lasted the next four years until his passing on.

When I got back to Amsterdam, we exchanged language - printed matter and sounds. Our brains felt well fed and apoetized by each other’s gems. A couple of months later, a German publisher wanted to do my book The Night Before Charisma: The Rise & Fall of Otto Muehl, an essay about the imprisoned artist, sex philosopher and communard. I asked Chris to do the translation. During the winter--spring of 1998, we were in constant intense contact over this by letter and seriously long telephone calls. Unser Freund Otto Mühl: Eine Studie zum Kulturschock, appeared that summer and Chris flattered me with: “Should you ever consider a similar job, it’s fine with me.”

Over the next few years, we saw each other only one other time. When Chris came to Amsterdam to perform well-tempered Mongolian overtone chanting at a presentation for a book of Balkan tales by a Dutch author. Then the next day Chris came to my house, early, for dinner. We spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret. Chris mentioned, I remember hazily, a poetry festival he had been to in Medellin, Columbia: “Where lots of gente have fun, share visions, bask in powerful green mountain winds and where erotic friendliness and sensitivity charge everyday dealings.” All of a sudden, it was two o’clock in the morning. The conversation was so good, so buoyant, that after noshing on the assorted seafood hors-d’oeuvres, lamb meatballs in sweet and sour sauce, dark bread and salads, I completely forgot to serve the steamed ginger chicken with shiitake mushrooms. It wasn’t missed though since that evening invisible language had been nourishment enough.

Although we didn’t see each other again, I continued featuring Chris’ latest verse and tunes on my weekly Dr. Doo-Wop radio program. He continued to send me his own stuff as well as diverse rare and remarkable tapes. A recording of the last hours and death moment of Timothy Leary; the wonderfully preposterous songs of Helmut Qualtinger; Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer, doing the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. But also, other great maestros - from Germany, Austria and Switzerland - deluged me with their new audio works with a covering note, that said: “I got your address from Christian Loidl” or “My friend Christian Loidl told me to send.” Few poets promote someone else’s accomplishments. Chris did! And in solidarity with him, in every case I found a place to give them airtime, in airplay to transmit something of these embers of the heart on the airwaves. Übertragung. Chris was always trying to get artists to be part of a conspiracy, to conspire, con spirare, breathe together.

But Chris was not a quietist: he worried about politics. After the chauvinistic Jörg Haider-led Freedom party (FPÖ) entered government, he wrote me: “Now those twerps have unearthed patriotism as a weapon against dissent. People like us are traitors of the Fatherland.” And in another card he wrote: “Yes, Austria’s in deep shit.” Yet went on with his infectious optimism, always seeing the sunny side. “On the other hand, there’s an awakening,” he noticed. Chris recognized that: “Resistance brings people together; there are smiles in the streets in the shadow of the frowns. There are spine-amputation clinics now, particularly for people in culture politics. Underground makes sense once again.”

Here is something from one of Chris’ letters to me I would like to share. Written in 2000, at the very beginning of the fresh millennium, it seems to be an answer. An answer, I think, to my family’s annual New Year’s report. Although in prose, I have made it into a short poem that I hope finds its way into Chris’ oeuvre. In his own words….

Narses, an intriguing eunuch bureaucrat
in Constantinople
at the court of Justinian
                  sixth-century AD
Being a eunuch is a job you have to be cut out for
But Narses had balls
                 At the age of sixty
He undertook to lead an army
Annihilated the Vandals in Africa
The dog-headed Ostrogoths in Italy
                 At the battle of Vesuvius
And the Mediterranean was again a Roman lake.
And what was the outcome?
                 From the Euphrates to the Pillar of Hercules
War, fiscal oppression and religious persecution
Accelerated the decay of life
Prepared – pale, emaciated, miserable –
For the event of Muslim conquers.


We are all crippled warlords
Doing our best to force the end
We are all enemies of the stars
Confronting the darkness
as a spiritual act
Demonstrating that the outward action
Harmonizes invisibly with
The structure of the cosmos
We are all creative nihilists
Doing our best to force the end.

Timur, or Tammerlaine, or Timur the Lame
Became crippled as a result of an accident
During a robbery in his youth
             Say Western observers
More likely the result of a ritual assault
A form of sacred lameness
             The eight sign of royalty;
Tammerlaine who believed all human settlement
to be against God’s will
Like the yellow serpent
inhaled wheat fields and exhaled dust bowls
passing over the face of Asia like a fire storm
leaving behind him desolation and wilderness
where had once been fertile plains;
Tammerlaine, a paradoxical balance
                    Of heroic virtues and savagery
                    Of cruelty and love of art and philosophy
Slaughtered a million people in Baghdad
And stacked their heads in a gigantic pyramid
                    for his own memorial
Yet spared the libraries, the mosques, the hospitals
Spared the scholars who he sent to his capital
Tammerlaine taught that warfare is part of Nature’s purpose
That strife should be the law of our souls.

We are all crippled warlords
Doing our best to force the end
We are the scourge of God, the spawn of the devil
and the punishment to the world
Doing our best to fit those terms
Blood, Frog, Vermin, Infectious diseases
Noxious beasts, Boils, Hail
Locusts, Darkness, the Killing of the First Born
We are all crippled warlords
Doing our best to force the end.


Rising out of Bohemia like a yeast ghost virus
With the image of the chalice on his flag
Calling for a universal dispensation
                Communion in both kinds to rich and poor;
John Žižka, a blind general of the Hussite reformation
                 A fifteenth-century chiliast fundamentalism
Told his followers to make every effort to see
That anyone who could swing
A club or hurl a stone is up in arms
At every hour of the day
Using mobile nomadic circles of wagons as fortresses
He defeated warriors from all over Europe
Sightlessly directed his armies in glorious raids
Against all that was
                  Holy, Roman, Imperial
In certain parts of Austria even now
Five centuries later cows are kept indoors.
Seeking the truth unto death
Žižka’s last will and testament commanded:
                  “my body be flayed, the flesh
                   thrown to the birds and beasts
And a drum made from my skin”
And with this drum beating a sound
His Orphans should continue the war
                  Prophesying their enemies would turn
To flight
As soon as they heard
the voice of his skin.

We are all haunted warrior priests
Following a harsh creed
Doomed to survive a tragic hunted past
In a fanatical drive for destruction
Advancing on a broad front
Through flames of consciousness
Braving the winter cold of being shunned
Crossing watery obstacles of success
And smashing fortifications of healthy desire
With redemption just one sin away
The end of days
Promised us as equally
A judgment and a favor.

Cutsie pie Lord Byron with a club foot
A literalists who fought the war
                  For Greek independence
Thinking he was reviving classical ideals
When he was really a dupe for Russian
                  warm water expansionism
But fortunately for everyone
He spent most of his time limping around
Limping around blind drunk
Looking like
               Looking like
An an-an-gel.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
Queen Victoria’s favorite grandson
Had a withered arm, the left I think;
After he sacked Bismarck
Statesmanship was conspicuously lacking
               Crisis followed crisis
               The road to war
Depressingly smooth and well-signposted
And the influence of the first of the world wars
Equally cataclysmic on the victors
                 and victims alike:
Most of Europe of 1000 years was shattered
Three empires tumbled to dust
Wilhelm ended his days a commoner
Chopping wood
With his good arm
In the center of Holland.

We are all crippled warlords
Doing our best to force the end
We are always on the lookout for something
Hostile to the order
We are all ever on the side
Of any wild force
Mystical Redemption with Visible Historical Change!
We accompany each other into deathliness
Though only one may return to report it
Mystical Redemption with Visible Historical Change!
Not one, nor the other, but both
We are all crippled warlords.

It took an alliance of two crippled warlords
To defeat Nazi Germany
                The first
Joseph Stalin taught Hitler the techniques of tyranny
Got people arguing over two lies
Had whole nations in slave labor camps
Introduced periodic purges of officials
as state policy
For the purpose of uplifting the moral of survivors
Stalin was born with nine toes
And went to school with Gurdjieff.
               The second
Franklin Roosevelt was struck with polio
It left his legs paralyzed
But being confined to a wheelchair
Like the Vietnam veteran of a later date
Did not prevent him from having lovers
Wouldn’t you?
If you were married to a pious cow like Eleanor?
Soul in the Earth
Soul in the Blood
My liver shall sing praises to the water and air
And in the end the soil of Europe
                    was renourished by the blood
Of fifty-nine million people
And the Russian and American armies
By prior agreement
Stood facing each other on the Elbe
Waiting for the bell to ring
Beginning the next round.


We are all crippled warlords
Trying our best to cover the sky
Ye Ye, O lay eye
God on high
Man on earth
Ye Ye, O lay eye
God is God
Man is man
Everyone in his house
Everyone for himself?
We are all crippled warlords
Waiting for the sun to die.

John Kennedy, former President
was drugged to dull the constant pain
and shakes from Addison’s disease
Had a self-inflicted back injury
Gotten from crashing his PT boat into a dock
On a bet, he lost
Demanding yet another galaxy of medication
JFK
                   Botched the Bay of Pigs invasion
                   Botched killing Castro
Conspired with Cardinal Cushing of Boston and
                   Cardinal Diem of Saigon
To send Americans into Vietnam
Satisfying Pope John XXIII’s request to protect his interest
In the heroin business
         Finally Old Joe
His father bumped him off
The sacrificial son had his brains
Hamburgered in Dallas:
As a result of what Jack Kennedy started
but couldn’t finish
There was a Cuban army in Africa
And 1500 Soviet “technicians” in Laos
Controlling Golden Triangle opium production
When the USA lost this concession
They no longer had the gold
To pay for oil
Only the bad die young.

Nothing is more powerful than a crippled warlord
Who sees history as a series
               Of improbabilities
               Of incongruities
Who has the angry readiness to throw
Everything overboard
A willingness, a longing
To become part of dissolution
We are all crippled warlords
Doing our best to force the end.

We are now all under obligation to enter the abyss
Let us surrender ourselves
“Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones” - Psalm CXXXVII
Let us descend together into the abyss
               before shuts again
Let us cram the mouth of impurity
with the power of holiness
               until it bursts from within
Bo-rooch at-to A-do-noy
E-lo-hay-noo me-lech ho-o-lom,
               matt-sir is-u-rim
Blessed art thou O Lord our God
King of the Universe
Who permittest the forbidden
               Who loosens all bounds
We are all crippled warlords
The Word
               that heals and
The Word
               that kills
Dwells in our mammal flesh
               and grows.