A poem about Vietnam by Oswald LeWinter

[Ralf Anders]

In the 2002 edition of "The Family", his book on the Manson Family, Ed Sanders talks about meeting a millionaire interested in celebrity porn flicks found at the Polanski-Tate residence. Some thirty years later, Sanders learned that the man had been Oswald LeWinter and, at least in 1970, quite possibly a CIA agent. See chapter 89 of "The Family" for a vivid description of the meeting. There are some people that turn up near the centre of more than one deep politics event: Ronald Stark (LSD, Strategy of Tension), Elio Ciolini (probably CIA, disinformant on the Bologna massacre, Gladio in Belgium), but LeWinter definitely takes the cake. Ralf

[Jan Klimkowski]

In the 2002 edition of "The Family", his book on the Manson Family, Ed Sanders talks about meeting a millionaire interested in celebrity porn flicks found at the Polanski-Tate residence. Some thirty years later, Sanders learned that the man had been Oswald LeWinter and, at least in 1970, quite possibly a CIA agent. See chapter 89 of "The Family" for a vivid description of the meeting. There are some people that turn up near the centre of more than one deep politics event: Ronald Stark (LSD, Strategy of Tension), Elio Ciolini (probably CIA, disinformant on the Bologna massacre, Gladio in Belgium), but LeWinter definitely takes the cake. Ralf

Ralf - I have a copy of Sanders' original "The Family", but had forgotten - or never made the link - to this.

There's a lot of Manson material and hypothesizing on DPF, eg MK-ULTRA Iceberg, Operation Chaos and ONI MK-ULTRA hippies.

Here's a wanton thought.

Oswald Le Winter blew the whistle on the Strategy of Tension in Allan Francovich's Gladio triology as part of the Strategy of Tension.

[Ralf Anders]

It seems that Oswald LeWinter is dead: http://thetandd.com/news/local/obituarie...f887a.html Somehow, I was under the impression that LeWinter was living in Portugal... Best, Ralf

[Jan Klimkowski]

It seems that Oswald LeWinter is dead: http://thetandd.com/news/local/obituarie...f887a.html Somehow, I was under the impression that LeWinter was living in Portugal... Best, Ralf

Ralf - thank you.

Dukes Harley Funeral Home & Crematory
3379 Columbia Road Orangeburg, SC 29118 803-534-6621


Oswald Le Winter 81, of Holly Hill, S.C., died peacefully Wednesday, February 13, 2013 after an extended illness. His loved ones will hold a private memorial service in San Francisco.

Mr. Le Winter was born April 2, 1931 in Vienna, Austria a son the late Louis and Regina Mandel Le Winter. He received a B.A. Degree from University of California, Berkley and a Master Degree from San Francisco State College. Mr. worked as an English instructor at Penn State University. In 1969 he was named vice president and director of marketing at Systems Simulations, Inc. He was an accomplished author and poet having written a number of books including Shakespeare in Europe (1970), Desmantelar a America (2001), Democracia e Secretismo (2002), Ages of Chaos & Fury (2005) & More Atoms of Memory ( 2006). He received the International Rilke Prize in Poetry (1997) and appeared in two Allan Francovich movies, Gladio (1992) & The Maltese Double Cross (1994).

He left behind a grateful family that will always cherish his memory.

South Carolina!?!?!

I thought Oswald Le Winter was an international fugitive and a threat to American and British national security.....

[Magda Hassan]

Would love to be a fly on the wall at his funeral and see who turns up for it...

[Carsten Wiethoff]

South Carolina!?!?!

I thought Oswald Le Winter was an international fugitive and a threat to American and British national security.....

My latest info on his whereabouts was southern California, with one of his daughters.

• 
  
• Oswald Lewinter
  Age: 82
  Location: La Quinta, CA
  

So many questions will probably never be answered.

RIP


Oswald LeWinter
My Hands


From Body Parts

My hands, cupped, can't hold air,
not even tiny doses. They have been fists,
when young, that sometimes struck strange faces.
They've also loved, caressed breasts, fondled
children, wiped away indignities of bruises
and picked up newborn sons to hold up
to the sun. They've had a full life, rich
with friends like the ten fingers that reached
out to the world. They've held a violin,
a gun, a hunting knife, the steering of a mountain
bike, the wheel of new car, proudly.

They've palmed pistachios, holding the exotic
odors to my nose, and held dollar notes
in their grip, while letting coins slip
through their crevices. Choices of ties
and colored shirts might have remained closeted
thoughts without them but they never asked
for more than to belong to wrists with wrinkled skin.
No sense of their cardinal importance,
they demonstrated great humility and clasped
whatever hands reached out to them in peace.
They have no voice, yet they are capable
of fashioning the most eloquent gestures, and casting
shadow images of small bird's heads on empty walls.
I will be proud of the fine lines that crease their palms
until the day they rest, one on the other, on my chest.

[David Guyatt]

It is not uncommon for notorious spooks to fake their deaths, so they can live in peace - rather than rest in peace.

[R.K. Locke]

Okay, regarding this Rainer-Maria-Rilke prize I have exactly five persons: Karl Krolow (1975), Hilde Domin (1976), Ernst Meister (1977), Christoph Meckel (1978) and Nicolas Born (1979). All German. Nothing before or after. The chance that there is another such prize and that the same Karl Krolow who got the German version in 1975 would hold the Laudatio for LeWinter in 1997 is zilch.
That "He follows Yvan Goll, Giuseppe Ungaretti and the first recipient, Fernando Pessoa" is funny. Fernando Pessoa died in 1935, Yvan Goll in 1950 and Giuseppe Ungaretti in 1970.

Oswald LeWinter never got this prize. Assurance level 99.9%.

How big are the chances that he ever was in Vietnam?
:thumbsdown:

This is quite the joke, methinks. A look at the biographies of the three poets that he "followed" is instructive.


Yvan Goll:

As Nazi persecution grew in Germany during the 1930s, the theme of the wandering Jew became central to Goll's poetry. In 1936, he published an epic poem entitled La chanson de Jean Sans Terre (the song of homeless John), with illustrations contributed by Marc Chagall. Jean Sans Terre was likely a play on the name of Jean Sans Peur, the medieval Burgundian who missed out on an inheritance because he was the youngest son of Henry II of England.[1] The central figure, who wanders the earth in 69 smaller poems, belongs everywhere and nowhere. He looks for love and identity and yet the absence of these things also acts as a kind of freedom. From 19391947 the Golls were exiles in New York, where friends included Richard Wright, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, Piet Mondrian, and William Carlos Williams who translated some of Yvan's poems. Between 1943 and 1946, Goll edited the French-American poetry magazine Hémispheres[2] with works by Saint-John Perse, Césaire, Breton ... and young American poets.

In 1945, the year he was diagnosed with leukemia, he wrote Atom Elegy and other death-haunted poems collected in the English language volume Fruit From Saturn (1946). This poetic language of this final phase in Goll's work is rich in chthonic forces and imagery, the disintegration of matter - inspired by the atomic bomb - alchemy, and the Kabbalah, which Goll was reading at the time.



Giuseppe Ungaretti:

During the interwar period, Ungaretti was a collaborator of Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession),[1] as well as a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d'Italia and La Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed Hermeticism as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career. His Fascist past was the subject of controversy.



Fernando Pessoa:

In 1912-14, while living with his aunt "Anica" and cousins,[27] Pessoa took part in "semi-spiritualist sessions" that were carried out at home, but he was considered a "delaying element" by the other members of the session. Pessoa's interest in spiritualism was truly awakened in the second half of 1915, while translating the theosophist books. This was further deepened in the end of March 1916, when he suddenly started having experiences where he became a medium, which were revealed through automatic writing. In June, 24, Pessoa wrote an impressive letter to his aunt, then living in Switzerland with her daughter and son in law, in which he describes this "mystery case" that surprised him.

Besides automatic writing, Pessoa also had "astral" or "etherial visions" and was able to see "magnetic auras" similar to radiographic images. He felt "more curiosity than scare", but was respectful towards this phenomenon and asked secrecy, because "there is no advantage, but a lot of disadvantages" in speaking about this. Mediumship exerted a strong influence in Pessoa writings, who felt "sometimes suddenly being owned by something else" or having a "very curious sensation" in the right arm, which was "lifted into the air" without his will. Looking in the mirror, Pessoa saw several times what appeared to be the heteronyms: his "face fading out" and being replaced by the one of "a bearded man", or another one, four men in total.[28]

Pessoa also developed a strong interest in astrology, becoming a competent astrologist. He elaborated more than 1,500 astrological charts, of well-known people like William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Robespierre, Napoleon I, Benito Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Leopold II of Belgium, Victor Emmanuel III, Alfonso XIII, or the Kings Sebastian and Charles of Portugal, and Salazar. In 1915, Pessoa created the heteronym Raphael Baldaya, an astrologist, and planned to write under his name "System of Astrology" and "Introduction to the Study of Occultism". Pessoa established the pricing of his astrological services from 500 to 5,000 réis and made horoscopes of costumers, friends and also himself and, astonishingly, of the heteronyms.

Born on June, 13, Pessoa was native of Gemini and had scorpio as rising sign. The characters of the main heteronyms were inspired by the four astral elements: air, fire, water and earth. It means that Pessoa and his heteronyms altogether comprised the full principles of ancient knowledge. Those heteronyms were designed according to their horoscopes, all include Mercury, the planet of literature. Astrology was part of his everyday life and Pessoa kept that interest until his death, which he was able to predict with a certain degree of accuracy.[29]

As a mysticist, Pessoa was an enthusiast of esotericism, occultism, hermetism and alchemy. Along with spiritualism and astrology, he also paid attention to rosicrucianism, neopaganism and freemasonry, which strongly influenced his literary work. His interest in occultism led Pessoa to correspond with Aleister Crowley and later helped him to elaborate a fake suicide, when Crowley visited Portugal in 1930.[30] Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan"[31] into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's library shows that he possessed Crowley's books Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral.[32]

[Carsten Wiethoff]

As I said, his placing himself in a line with Pessoa, Ungaretti and Goll is funny, as well as their alleged connection to Rilke.
On the other hand, other details of his biography can be verified, like his German doctorate in Psychology. It still remains a mystery to me what made him involve himself into so many deep political events at the level he did, and what were his sources of information.

[R.K. Locke]

As I said, his placing himself in a line with Pessoa, Ungaretti and Goll is funny, as well as their alleged connection to Rilke.
On the other hand, other details of his biography can be verified, like his German doctorate in Psychology. It still remains a mystery to me what made him involve himself into so many deep political events at the level he did, and what were his sources of information.

Oh, I agree with you and share your interest. I just thought that it was worth drawing attention to the black humour that he appears to share with so many of his ilk. A fascinating character (or cast of characters) indeed.