Und warum denn ist dieser Raum noch nicht aufgeräumt worden?

Nichts ist hier vorhanden --
eine Absurdität, zu denken, dass etwas ist!
Andere haben uns etwas ähnliches schon tausendmal und tausendfach gesagt,
gesungen, gemalt
und ausgewrungen.
Dann ist der schlechte Reim das Einzige, was übrig bleibt,
und vielleicht der Rhythmus, der Atem und die Lust dazu.
Zusammen gewickelt mit unseren Adern
drängen sie in uns hinein und fordern:
Heiligkeit! Reichtum! Blut!
Wer kann das ertragen:
die Haut, die nachlässt, das Taubheitsgefühl, den Schlag?
Zuletzt resigniert der Mund; zuvor war es das Bein; der Arm; die Hand; der kleine Finger.
Ja, da fing es alles an: mit dem kleinen Finger nur.

Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten.

Opening the door to the women's washroom had never been quite so disturbing. The air was rotten, like Bergkäse gone bad. Just walk past the sink, ignore it: there is something there, it is dirtier than usual, that is all. But nearer the stalls the stench is stronger and you realise it must be coming from the woman struggling to use the toilet, half-barricaded in her stall with the aid of her two violent green suitcases and travel pillow; she's trying to maintain her balance, the skin on her leg looks diseased: is that where the smell is coming from? Instinct says: leave her alone, she probably does not wish to be seen, open like that and vulnerable. Or maybe instinct is really simply saying: bad air, bad air. Close the door to the stall, find your balance again, try not to linger too long on the image of the woman struggling in the other stall, breathe through the mouth, not the nose. Open the door again, yes, she's still there. The sink, the sink is absolutely filthy. There is something moving, something alive in there: maggots.
It is hard to breathe.
The question: am I hallucinating?
Is this a strange migraine manifestation? No one else seems to notice her. But then I probably seem not to notice her as well.

For several days after there is an odd smell in the women's washroom, like cheap perfume covering over the stench.

Some sentences take and make time

Woraus hätte der unerschöpfliche Osten in ungeheuren Träumen, an denen, wie an riesigen Stickereien, Tausende mitgeträumt, woraus hätte er nicht Form geschaffen?



Merci à Hofmannsthal pour cette phrase.

März

manchmal ist deine Freundschaft leiser, stiller, als dass ich sie spüren kann --
nun dann kann ich nur hoffen, dass das, was ich nicht spüre, tiefer ruht

passing mood

It was Sunday evening and everything that needed to be done by then was done. And yet, putting pen to paper, drawing a line through the words on the list: this rendered it all insignificant. The accomplishment -- insignificant. The task -- insignificant. The purpose -- insignificant.  This list, initially a prideful gesture, took every mental activity and made it mundane, codified and commodified it, but shared it with no one. And at the end of the day what was left after all, when everything has already been silenced and finished?

The warm spring breeze blows away the dust and laughs. 

Sober reminders

Yes.

What I remember

That camera was magic.  A simple 35mm SLR, Praktica LB, I think I was using Fujifilm I'd bought in Russia that summer.

Chicago: hometown, two generations removed. My grandfather never really lost his accent and at 97 still says: "And I says to him, I says..." That's the generational and geographical gap. I'd just turned 19 and was visiting the city for the first time with my mother. It felt more like home than the city I'd spent 18 years of my life in: more chaotic, darker and brighter at the same time, more colourful, but indifferent about that fact. Certain parts of New York, too, had this quality. The wall of the Jewish bakery in lower side Manhattan, 5 in the evening, late autumn, papered over with old news paper clippings. This photo came later. But at some point, the two photos mean the same thing.

Manhattan had a way of being unintenionally colour-coordinated, a lot like Paris, and sometimes Boston. Or at least I always managed to find those secret spaces of spontaneous order.

Like the luck I had with buying wine, or earlier, buying classical music CDs I'd never heard before, selecting them based on intuition and whim. I always managed to find good ones. Brahm's 4th symphony and the Deutsches Requiem; Tristan & Isolde; Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto and the Isle of the Dead with the corresponding Böcklin painting gracing the cover of the CD-booklet.

Charon... maybe we do not need Charon. Maybe we need only the green light in the subway on the other side of the world.

The Woodpecker-Woman

If Ovid were alive today he might be inspired to add another story to his Metamorphoses: The Woodpecker-Woman. This strange hybrid creature must, like all the rest, have formed out of a kind of intractable Necessity, set-off, I can only imagine, by anxiety. What the particular circumstance(s) was or were are not terribly important. But maybe it happened in her schooldays; perhaps at that time speaking quickly and with an artificially higher tone of voice was the best way to be overheard. Perhaps, in mid-stride of a sentence and gasping for breath, the young girl was struck by Necessity and transformed into half-woodpecker, half-human; the woodpecker form is of course more gracious, more organic than the alternative: the jackhammer. It was out of mercy and kindness that Necessity lent her the form of the head-banging bird.

Now, fully grown and social, she is always eager to be heard, but always -- perhaps because of her curious form -- afraid of being lost in the sea of voices. Always gasping for breath, she creates shockwaves of sound around her and does injury to the poor listeners' ears as well as those of innocent bystanders. In her wrath, like a Fury, she hacks at the air and behind every word the desperate sense manages to leap out: 'Mine! Mine! Mine!' Or maybe it's 'Me! Me! Me!', but they amount to the same, for she is cursed with the desire to present herself, to take up space and sound, to get your attention and win -- by deafening force -- your benumbed acquiescence. As with other Ovidian metamorphoses, she is cursed with a kind of stasis, for although she wants to move forward with every peck of the air, she is stuck, petrified in her desire -- the mask for her fear.

 

Of course, Ovid's version would have been much more entertaining!

Von den Menschen möchte er sich nicht absondern -- aber von den Menschen möchte er sich absondern können. Es geht um die Selbstbeherrschung, aber auch um die teils narzisstische teils wohlmeinende Kommunikation dieser Selbstbeherrschung. Denn ich existiere nicht ohne Dich -- ein furchtbarer Gedanke! Und ein heilsamer.

Wieder ein Blatt von Goethe

Weil das eines der schönsten Bücher ist, und weil es manchmal schwierig ist, sich zurecht zu finden, wenn man das abgrundslose, herkunftslose Bedürfnis hat, Wörter hinzugeben, denn man weiß sonst nicht: wie beten?




Geständnis
Was ist schwer zu verbergen? Das Feuer!
Denn bei Tage verrät's der Rauch,
Bei Nacht die Flamme, das Ungeheuer.
Ferner ist schwer zu verbergen auch
Die Liebe: Noch so stille gehegt,
Sie doch gar leicht aus den Augen schlägt.
Am schwersten zu bergen ist ein Gedicht:
Man stellt es untern Scheffel nicht.
Hat es der Dichter frisch gesungen,
So ist er ganz davon durchdrungen;
Hat er es zierlich nett geschrieben,
Will er, die ganze Welt soll's lieben.
Er liest es jedem froh und laut,
Ob es uns quält, ob es erbaut.

sometimes an image of that glass city on the water seems doubly far away.

Letter to a contemporary

Dear W,

I don't  know who you are really, but today I realised I've returned to your blog periodically, usually around this time of year, for over a decade now. It is one of few things that has remained, though I notice I check less often -- and you write less often too. But for whatever reason I typed in the address and clicked on the humbly small word 'blog' in the hopes that you had written something new there, or drawn something -- to give my repeated action new meaning. At what point does that become ritual?

My thoughts at times only approach yours, asymptotically almost, at most. I have to think of this geometrically and I don't know why. Contemporaneity is a funny thing, because it is a bit like that, always approaching, never meeting.

Is that why I still read your blog? I appreciate the approach, though it is often sad. It is sad but never mean; it is beautiful, like hands reaching, stretching out, each finger pointing towards infinity in its own meagre way, growing older and shaky with time and anticipation. We really would like to rest, all of us, wouldn't we? But we don't know what this means -- especially this.

More than once you've written about the struggle with language. It is also a struggle of language. And as Hofmannsthal has been my companion (even if not my contemporary) for a few years now, I can't help but draw his writing into the conversation: this writing which again and again bows before the image, before the sound, before the stone, the scent, the thought that flirts with articulation, La Gioconda's smile.

Language does not walk upright: its spine is curved, like most of Spenlove-Spenlove's portrayals of the human figure (N.B.: another blogger to whom I owe my thanks for introducing me and many others to images and words that insinuate themselves, always in unexpected ways, into my inner dialogues: here, Jane Librizzi's the blue lantern). Its body is too small for its song, it is imperfectly constructed; as an instrument, it is difficult to play and frustrating, it limps along and sometimes it often does not sound quite right, but when it does resound --- with the right pressure, the right constellation of forces -- it cannot be compared to anything else and sings for itself.  Haven't you sensed this before? Yes, it is rare, it's that all-too-elusive, pseudo-mystical moment that gives us such a strange perspective, that makes us doubt the way we experience the rest of the world, that makes us bow down in tears for no real reason; and it seems for that moment that the asymptote has lost its tension, has taken flight.

It is New Year's day. New Year's is my favourite holiday, maybe the only one that means anything to me, though usually I end up feeling more contemplative than celebratory.  In the middle of the street, in the middle of the fireworks and firecrackers (I am in Germany for a little while and Silvester here is something special, something North America, sadly, does not embrace), the overwhelming colour and light and noise, is the single silent cigarette, the half-empty glass of champagne, the solitude in the midst of celebration. Here language comes to rest for a little while, and that is okay too.


To my contemporary somewhere in New York City: Happy New Year.