Short Story Monday: A Poem About Truth

A POEM ABOUT TRUTH 

May 18, 1944. At Hitler's war conference he is told that the enemy has carried out two spy operations during the night on the heavily defended French coastline. At one place, near Calais, German troops have found an orange peel, an empty flask and a shovel lying on the beach. Years later they would say that they also found a landscape painted on driftwood, a finely crafted homemade flute and a dagger. In the estuary of the river Somme, two British commandos were discovered in the late afternoon. "They came ashore in a rubber raft," General Jodl, chief of Wehrmach operations, tells Hitler. "They claim to know nothing."

Illustration by Gemini

The scene changes to a French restaurant once frequented by Napoleon. The restaurant serves excellent Italian fare. Three nights have passed. A stout German woman makes pasta in the kitchen. Two French chefs argue about how to make croissants. They are smoking cigarettes and sipping wine. They know that Hitler is a madman, but it does not affect their cooking. The taller chef, thinnest of the two, is also a writer. At night he composes poetry in the same way that a garden produces flowers. The effect is dazzling. His mother also was a poet, as was his grandfather. He does not believe in war or death. He is restless, anxious about love, and lives alone. If he had a lover, he knows that he would write less poetry, since he writes only to fill his piteous empty hours. When he reads his poems, he cries, then burns them. He is brutally honest with himself.

The following evening he overhears a Nazi under-lieutenant commenting on Britain's secret operations. He seizes the opportunity to become part of an adventure. He never again sees his home. Later that night the chef is captured in a forbidden zone near the Seine whereupon he fakes an English accent and says he is a spy. He is blindfolded and driven to a chateau where he must stand before Rommel. He makes up a story about a wife and daughter in Britain. The details are vivid, but Rommel loses interest and orders him to be shot. That night he writes a poem about the event and leaves it in his cell. The German officer who reads it laughs at the insipid rhymes and melancholy metaphors. He shares it with his friend who notices that the word "mayhap" is misapplied and that "appenage" would have been a better choice of words than "freehold."

By week's end a hundred eyes have beheld the poem. Many jokes are made of it. Heinrich (we do not know his last name), a company agent from Stuttgart, makes a copy of the poem, then translates it into German. In the translation he improves the meter and resolves the problematic third stanza. He sends it to his mother who does not understand it, but keeps it in a small wooden box on the bureau next to a framed photo of the Fuhrer.

It is possible the original poem is still in existence somewhere, but no one knows for certain. My cousin, who married a German woman, says that her father saw the poem, the original version, and remembers that it was called Truth Is A Fire That Burns. We do not know if this was the same poem, or if he saw the poem at all. After the war many German soldiers say they saw the poem, and many more say they made copies of it to send to the Fatherland. We know that most of them are lying. Over the years versions have appeared in journals, some superior to others, all of them improvements on the original. I have seen it thrice in English literary journals -- once, I believe, in the Antioch Review, though it may have been one of the other college publications that begin with an A. Someone told me that it has been translated into 57 languages. In Thailand, the mountain peoples now say that it is the Word of God.

No one remembers the French chef who gave his life to produce the poem. His unknown name has been swallowed up by history, but his poem lives on in human hearts.

- 30 -

Translated 8-22-98
E. N.

Brief Analysis of "A Poem About Truth" by Grok, the X.com LLM.

This compact metafiction (under 800 words) masquerades as historical footnote, but its true engine is the immortality of bad art. The French chef—unnamed, lonely, self-immolating—writes a single poem titled Truth Is A Fire That Burns. He dies for it; the poem survives, mutates, and metastasizes. The story’s genius lies in never quoting the poem. We witness only its reception: Nazi ridicule, linguistic nitpicking, unauthorized edits, postal journeys, apocryphal sightings. By withholding the text, E. N. forces us to confront how meaning accretes through transmission, not origin. The poem’s value is not aesthetic but mythic: it becomes relic, rumor, scripture.

The narrative’s tone is deadpan fabulism, blending WWII intel briefs with restaurant banter and word-choice debates (“appenage” vs. “freehold”). This collision of the mundane and the fatal undercuts heroic spy tropes; the chef’s “adventure” is a lark that ends in a bullet. Yet his disposable life seeds an undying artifact. The final twist—that Thai hill tribes now call it the Word of God—echoes Borges and Calvino, suggesting truth is whatever outlives its teller.

Structurally, the piece is a Chinese whispers game: each retelling “improves” the original until the chef vanishes and the poem ascends. The dated translation tag (“Translated 8-22-98 E. N.”) implies even this story is a version, not the source. In 180 words, E. N. distills a parable: mediocrity, copied enough, becomes scripture; anonymity, amplified, becomes authorship. The chef’s real espionage was against oblivion.

* * * 

Did you enjoy the story? What did you think of Grok's analysis?

Feel free to leave a comment.

A Post-Modern Effort to Create a Blog Post in the Classical Tradition

A Postmodern Man

This past year I came to realize that blogging had begun to become passé. It dawned on me that I must return to the roots of blogging and attempt to create a blog post in the classical tradition.

To return to the classical spirit means leaving behind the human beast and naturalism. Even Flaubert, if it were possible. It was time to return to Marivaux, Beaumachais and Moliere. It was an ambitious goal, but I must point out that the other way only led to a most dismal series of rabbit holes. To quote Renoir, "When choosing masters, it's best to choose a plump one." This does not mean you are comparing yourself to them. It simply means you're trying to learn something from them. 

And so it is that I tried to create a classical work that incorporated classical music. I had to perform it in something of a comedic fashion in order to lift some of the heaviness that has saturated our times. The result was something of a pantomime. 

In this post I determined to place some extremely simple characters who carry their ideas through to their natural conclusions, who go as far as the development of their thought takes them. They are frank and straightforward. It's a portrait of this society, albeit a society in decline, though we love it because it wears no mask.

When this blog post was originally produced, it came across as ill-conceived and even controversial. The comments were interesting, though. A few could not be published. No harm done. There were no threats on my life, only insults.

As is well-known the 20th century was one of deconstruction, which I'd hopde to see followed by an era of reconstruction. To my dismay, we've become heirs to an era of destruction. Nothing is sacred to the destroyer-technicians who have turned values on their heads. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. 

To shine a light on this zero sum game was never my intention. I had a different story to tell, and it was only later that I was rewarded. But then, that is another story.

Sensitive hearts, faithful hearts, who shun love whether it does range
Cease to be so bitter, so bitter. Is it a crime to change?

* * * 

AFTERWARD
Many, if not most, of the sentences were transcribed and repurposed from Jean Renoir's introductory remarks to his 1939 film The Rules of the Game. It's similar to the technique I used in the short story Harry Gold, or the opening of A Poem About Truth. 

A Poem About Truth

May 18, 1944. At Hitler's war conference he is told that the enemy has carried out two spy operations during the night on the heavily defended French coastline. At one place, near Calais, German troops have found an orange peel, an empty flask and a shovel lying on the beach. Years later they would say that they also found a landscape painted on driftwood, a finely crafted homemade flute and a dagger. In the estuary of the river Somme, two British commandos were discovered in the late afternoon. "They came ashore in a rubber raft," General Jodl, chief of Wehrmach operations, tells Hitler. "They claim to know nothing."

The scene changes to a French restaurant once frequented by Napoleon. The restaurant serves excellent Italian fare. Three nights have passed. A stout German woman makes pasta in the kitchen. Two French chefs argue about how to make croissants. They are smoking cigarettes and sipping wine. They know that Hitler is a madman, but it does not affect their cooking. The taller chef, thinnest of the two, is also a writer. At night he composes poetry in the same way that a garden produces flowers. The effect is dazzling. His mother also was a poet, as was his grandfather. He does not believe in war or death. He is restless, anxious about love, and lives alone. If he had a lover, he knows that he would write less poetry, since he writes only to fill his piteous empty hours. When he reads his poems, he cries, then burns them. He is brutally honest with himself.

The following evening he overhears a Nazi under-lieutenant commenting on Britain's secret operations. He seizes the opportunity to become part of an adventure. He never again sees his home. Later that night the chef is captured in a forbidden zone near the Seine whereupon he fakes an English accent and says he is a spy. He is blindfolded and driven to a chateau where he must stand before Rommel. He makes up a story about a wife and daughter in Britain. The details are vivid, but Rommel loses interest and orders him to be shot. That night he writes a poem about the event and leaves it in his cell. The German officer who reads it laughs at the insipid rhymes and melancholy metaphors. He shares it with his friend who notices that the word "mayhap" is misapplied and that "appenage" would have been a better choice of words than "freehold."

By week's end a hundred eyes have beheld the poem. Many jokes are made of it. Heinrich (we do not know his last name), a company agent from Stuttgart, makes a copy of the poem and translates it into German. In the translation he improves the meter and resolves the problematic third stanza. He sends it to his mother who does not understand it, but keeps it in a small wooden box on the bureau next to a framed photo of the Führer.

It is possible the original poem is still in existence somewhere, but no one knows for certain. My cousin, who married a German woman, says that her father saw the poem, the original version, and remembers that it was called Truth Is A Fire That Burns. We do not know if this was the same poem, or if he saw the poem at all. After the war many German soldiers say they saw the poem, and many more say they made copies of it to send to the Fatherland. We know, of course, that most of them are lying. Over the years versions have appeared in journals, some superior to others, all of them improvements on the original. I have seen it thrice in English literary journals -- once, I believe, in the Antioch Review, though it may have been one of the other college publications that begin with the leter A. Someone told me that it has been translated into 57 languages. In Thailand, the mountain peoples now say that it is the Word of God.

No one remembers the French chef who gave his life to produce the poem. His unknown name has been swallowed up by history, but his poem lives on in human hearts.

Translated 8-22-98
E. N.

A Poem About Truth is one of the stories I posted on my original website in the 1990s.  The story owes its existence to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose work I had been captivated by for many seasons. Several sentences employ devices that could be labelled Borgesian. The story was included in my short eBook titled Newmanesque, which is available on Kindle.

The Journey

When we walk through the world with our eyes open we never know what we'll stumble upon next, but for sure there are just so many interesting people in the world doing so many interesting things that we know we'll not be bored.

While in San Francisco two years ago, we (my family and I) found ourselves in a little store that had some really interesting art with little stories accompanying. Turns out, they had cards made by this artist, and books, too.

His name was Brian Andreas, and the company this very original man created was called StoryPeople. About a year ago, after I had been receiving his daily StoryPeople email drawing and story for a while, I attempted to interview Brian for Ennyman's Territory. He expressed interest, but it was not to be at that time because his wife, Ellen Rockne, was in the midst of a battle with cancer.

One evening this past month, while randomly visiting other blogs I stumbled upon Ellen's blog, Unexpected Songs: The Writings and Music of Ellen Rockne. I loved the title so I had to take a bit of it in. It was like finding a piece of hand-crafted jewelry in a field. Knowing that Ellen had been through the cancer ward, this poem especially moved me.


Friday, June 5, 2009 at 6:05PM
(What is the loss that you carry, like an anchor, weighting you to the past?
Sometimes we must be willing to embark before we are certain we are ready).

The Journey
I row my boat over the open sea, no land in sight,
Longing for home. The current carries me awhile,
Then settles to rest alongside my resolve.

Many shores have come and gone in my time on the ocean.
Many dreams have faded to nothing, not
For lack of wishing, but for lack of will.

I sleep a bit, respite from the wonderings
That wash like waves across my tidy craft: Where am I going?
What guiding star have I missed, under cover of cloud?

The night is long (as nights can be).

Then at last, and as always, the sun rises,
Sometimes in mist, sometimes calling to the huge blue sky
Saying, I am come. I am here, the light you waited for in the dark.

Then I take my oars, and breathe the deep salt air,
And begin to row.

Formative Experiences

Life, in its fundamental essence, is a series of experiences. Fingertips pushing keys on a keyboard. Driving a car to work in the morning. Organizing photos on one's laptop. Talking to a friend on the telephone. Paying bills. Walking out to the mailbox to get the morning paper. Our days are filled with such ordinary things most of the time.

Then, there are the extraordinary moments, those unforgettable experiences outside the norm.

I was talking with my brother Don about my grandparents this morning. We were sharing memories, and it somehow came up how I used to talk with my grandmother for hours about mystical things like whether the Egyptians had been in contact with alien life (as evidenced by their remarkable understanding in the design of the Great pyramid) or whether psychokinesis is really possible. That is, can people bend metal simply by the power of their minds? Or levitate objects? The Russians were purportedly researching these things during the Cold War.

Don was a bit surprised by this side of my grandmother, and it became apparent that much of what I knew about my grandmother was not common knowledge. My grandmother had always been a highly intuitive person and read extensively along a wide range of interests that far exceeded what you might expect from a rural West Virginia housewife. This was all before the formative experience that gave birth to the following poem.

I'm not sure of the year but it was sometime in the early Sixties, an out of body experience. Without hallucinogenics. Rather, she'd had a stroke and while undergoing surgery left her body. For what she believes was a period of twenty minutes she hovered over the operating table, watching as doctors and nurses labored over her semi-lifeless body.

The Greek-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff once stated that our life experiences are like food. Some foods take more time than others to digest. My grandmother's long talks with me were an effort to process this experience she'd undergone.

So it is that some powerful experiences move us in deep places. The loss of a loved one. The unexpected death of a friend. A profound mountaintop experience. It is not only grief that takes many moons to process. Sometimes other kinds of experiences make such impact that people spend years seeking to better understand what happened to them.

The following is a poem which originally appeared in my grandmother's chapbook of poems titled Helping The Sun Grow. No mention here of the mystical, but a remarkably luminous and upbeat snapshot of that moment in time...

Aftermath Of A Stroke

Here I lie, tight packed as in my Mother's womb
I laid with restlessness a full lifetime ago.
But still entirely I, altho I have no room
To move about and at my will to come and go.
But now -- I wander, freely in my mind
The long road thru the crowding mists of time,
And pause in my journeying now and then
To live the happy times again
Made bright indeed by sunset's glow!

by Elizabeth Sandy

A Poem About Truth

Short Story Monday.... this one is perhaps unusual in style, written at a time when I was captivated by the South American short story writer Jorge Luis Borges. It's one of my favorites, though often misunderstood being somewhat satirical and mystical at the same time. Enjoy.

A Poem About Truth

May 18, 1944. At Hitler's war conference he is told that the enemy has carried out two spy operations during the night on the heavily defended French coastline. At one place, near Calais, German troops have found an orange peel, an empty flask and a shovel lying on the beach. Years later they would say that they also found a landscape painted on driftwood, a finely crafted home made flute and a dagger. In the estuary of the river Somme, two British commandos were discovered in the late afternoon. "They came ashore in a rubber raft," General Jodl, chief of Wehrmacht operations, tells Hitler. "They claim to know nothing."

The scene changes to a French restaurant once frequented by Napoleon. The restaurant serves excellent Italian fare. Three nights have passed. A stout German woman makes pasta in the kitchen. Two French chefs argue about how to make croissants. They are smoking cigarettes and sipping wine. They know that Hitler is a madman, but it does not affect their cooking. The taller chef, thinnest of the two, is also a writer. At night he composes poetry in the same way that a garden produces flowers. The effect is dazzling. His mother also was a poet, as was his grandfather. He does not believe in war or death. He is restless, anxious about love, and lives alone. If he had a lover, he knows that he would write less poetry, since he writes only to fill his piteous empty hours. When he reads his poems, he cries, then burns them. He is brutally honest with himself.

The following evening he overhears a Nazi under-lieutenant commenting on Britain's secret operations. He seizes the opportunity to become part of an adventure. He never again sees his home. Later that night the chef is captured in a forbidden zone near the Seine whereupon he fakes an English accent and says he is a spy. He is blindfolded and driven to a chateau where he must stand before Rommel. He makes up a story about a wife and daughter in Britain. The details are vivid, but Rommel loses interest and orders him to be shot. That night he writes a poem about the event and leaves it in his cell. The German officer who reads it laughs at the insipid rhymes and melancholy metaphors. He shares it with his friend who notices that the word "mishap" is misapplied and that "appendage" would have been a better choice of words than "freehold."

By week's end a hundred eyes have seen the poem. Many jokes are made of it. Heinrich (we do not know his last name), a company agent from Stuttgart, makes a copy of the poem, then translates it into German. In the translation he improves the meter and resolves the problematic third stanza. He sends it to his mother who doesn’t understand it, but keeps it in a small wooden box on the bureau next to a framed photo of the Fuhrer.

It’s possible the original poem is still in existence somewhere, but no one knows for certain. My cousin, who married a German woman, says her father saw the poem, the original version, and remembers that it was called Truth Is A Fire That Burns. We don’t know if this was the same poem, or if he saw the poem at all. After the war many German soldiers say they saw the poem, and many more say they made copies of it to send to the Fatherland. We know that most of them are lying. Over the years versions have appeared in literary journals, some superior to others, all of them improvements on the original. I have seen it thrice in English literary journals -- once, I believe, in the Antioch Review, though it may have been one of the other college publications that begin with an A. Someone told me that it has been translated into 57 languages. In Laos, the mountain peoples now say that it is the Word of God.

No one remembers the French chef who gave his life to produce the poem. His unknown name has been swallowed up by history, but his poem lives on in human hearts.

The End

Copyright 1998 ~ Ed Newman
PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED if attribution is cited.

A Poem About Truth

The opening paragraph is derivative. The story is original.

“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

May 18, 1944. At Hitler's war conference he is told that the enemy has carried out two spy operations during the night on the heavily defended French coastline. At one place, near Calais, German troops have found an orange peel, an empty flask and a shovel lying on the beach. Years later they would say that they also found a landscape painted on driftwood, a finely crafted home made flute and a dagger. In the estuary of the river Somme, two British commandos were discovered in the late afternoon. "They came ashore in a rubber raft," General Jodl, chief of Wehrmach operations, tells Hitler. "They claim to know nothing."

The scene changes to a French restaurant once frequented by Napoleon. The restaurant serves excellent Italian fare. Three nights have passed. A stout German woman makes pasta in the kitchen. Two French chefs argue about how to make croissants. They are smoking cigarettes and sipping wine. They know that Hitler is a madman, but it does not affect their cooking. The taller chef, thinnest of the two, is also a writer. At night he composes poetry in the same way that a garden produces flowers. The effect is dazzling. His mother also was a poet, as was his grandfather. He does not believe in war or death. He is restless, anxious about love, and lives alone. If he had a lover, he knows that he would write less poetry, since he writes only to fill his piteous empty hours. When he reads his poems, he cries, then burns them. He is brutally honest with himself.

The following evening he overhears a Nazi under-lieutenant commenting on Britain's secret operations. He seizes the opportunity to become part of an adventure. He never again sees his home. Later that night the chef is captured in a forbidden zone near the Seine whereupon he fakes an English accent and says he is a spy. He is blindfolded and driven to a chateau where he must stand before Rommel. He makes up a story about a wife and daughter in Britain. The details are vivid, but Rommel loses interest and orders him to be shot. That night he writes a poem about the event and leaves it in his cell. The German officer who reads it laughs at the insipid rhymes and melancholy metaphors. He shares it with his friend who notices that the word "mayhap" is misapplied and that "appanage" would have been a better choice of words than "largess."

By week's end a hundred eyes have beheld the poem. Many jokes are made of it. Heinrich (we do not know his last name), a company agent from Stuttgart, makes a copy of the poem, then translates it into German. In the translation he improves the meter and resolves the problematic third stanza. He sends it to his mother who does not understand it, but keeps it in a small wooden box on the bureau next to a framed photo of the Fuhrer.

It is possible the original poem is still in existence somewhere, but no one knows for certain. My cousin, who married a German woman, says that her father saw the poem, the original version, and remembers that it was called Truth Is A Fire That Burns. We do not know if this was the same poem, or if he saw the poem at all. After the war many German soldiers say they saw the poem, and many more say they made copies of it to send to the Fatherland. We know that most of them are lying. Over the years versions have appeared in journals, some superior to others, all of them improvements on the original. I have seen it thrice in English literary journals -- once, I believe, in the Antioch Review, though it may have been one of the other college publications that begin with an A. Someone told me that it has been translated into 57 languages. In Thailand, the mountain peoples now say that it is the Word of God.

No one remembers the French chef who gave his life to produce the poem. His unknown name has been swallowed up by history, but his poem lives on in human hearts.

- end -

Translated 8-22-98 by ennyman

“There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Editor's Note: Short Fiction Monday has fallen on a Tuesday this week due to Labor Day.

EdNote 2: Borges is to be credited for the inspiration that produced this strange tale, not to be blamed for its failings.