XXIII/2 A cluster of parental images in the text is here echoed by an image-cluster of my own. Virgil, Dante's acknowledged father-figure, snatches him up to save him from the pursuing devils; the poet compares this action to a mother rescuing a child from a burning house. The two poets have here their moment of greatest mental and physical intimacy; Virgil has become both father and mother. I here quote, via a watercolour copy after a reproduction, the mother and child from Guernica which Picasso was working on the day I was born (one of the drawings for this figure is dated 25. 5. 37). The relevance is also underlined by the fact that Guernica is the work of an artist in political exile commenting on the fate of his divided homeland. The other quotation that completes the ensemble is from my own work Ein Deutsches Requiem (after Brahms) and is from the part of the work that illustrates the text (a section of the composition which Brahms dedicated to the memory of his mother) 'Ich will euch trosten wie einer seine Mutter trostet. . .' and shows a mother seeming to be in flight with her child from a dark wood. It was of course German planes which bombed Guernica. The work of art, which celebrated that carnage and has become the embodiment of its myth (Guernica was not in fact totally destroyed), was itself put in exile by the artist until dictatorship in Spain should end: ironically enough it is now exhibited behind bullet proof glass with an armed guard. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.