The Ideal of Leni R.
‘You ask me to say sorry, but of what am I guilty?’
Of being an artist, an artist obsessed
with the attainment of the ideal?
I saw my ideal run the marathon, do the long-jump,
hurl the discus, putt the shot.
I saw my ideal pole-vault into air (we shot
from pits, you know; we were the first).
I saw my ideal launch from springboards into space
and I turned them into birds.
We thought we could coast with the elements, ride with the gods.
Did we not all raise our arms to point at the clouds?
Hitler chose me for my art. Or perhaps
we chose each other, like lovers or fate.
You can say that I gave him what he wanted:
that it was for him, for the Fuehrer and my country
that I invented techniques, edited miles of film,
worked an eighteen-hour day for the epic production.
In truth it was for myself.
That I might distil perfection.
And those other things, the dreadful things,
of those I knew nothing, believe me.
Much of the time I was abroad, and my head,
my heart, my will - they were concentrated
on my work. So how could I have possibly known?
In America I told them: those camps -
they are a nonsense. An invention, a propaganda.
Perhaps I was naive.
Ninety now, and the oldest scuba-diver on earth
I enter the lower kingdom and stroke with love
the undulating back of a giant sting-ray
which flaps lazily, a smoothly-mown pasture
of shallow island adrift and going nowhere.
The tiny eyes marooned on the broad expanse
glint expressionless into a camera lens no longer mine.
Alongside this creature, I tread water with care.
Page(s) 48-49
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