Alles Gute zum Geburtstag

Heute geht es ums Weiterleben. Eigentlich ist es jeden Tag so, aber Geburtstage, Todestage, Jahrestage sind noch ausgeprägter in dieser Hinsicht.

Ritual gehört dazu. Seit fast zwanzig Jahren zünde ich eine Kerze an, und trotz der Mangel an Religion gibt es keinen Mangel an Ritual, oder an Erinnerung. Dies verbindet mich mit meiner Familie.

Das Porträt meines Ururgroßvaters hängt auf der linken Seite. Eli Holland. Den Namen fand ich immer mysteriös. Ein Jenseitsname war er mir.

Auf der rechten Seite sitzt die Gegenwart -- und die Zukunft. Ich weiß nicht, was das Kind noch zu erleben hat. Heute haben wir Basketball gespielt. Heute haben wir gelebt.

Reference No. 120911 Empire Baking Company

Item description: Jewish Rye
Tax: 8.25%
Total: 3.79
Tendered: 4.00
Change: 0.21

This receipt comes from 12:20 PM some 8 years ago. I don't recall whether I went there to buy the bread alone, or with my father – we shared a love for good bread, especially rye – but either way the piece of paper holds in its folds more than it really needs to. It was held secure in The Man Without Qualities – did I read that book that year, or earlier? – folded inattentively. I was then unaware of its fate.

Silly, that a simple piece of paper can have the power to distract one from reading all about things... things and theories thereof, and new materialisms and object-oriented-ontologies and speculative realisms. All vibrant matter, or material for our projections, or something else entirely. The paper is a little yellowed, but the ink was remarkably good: it's still legible. The paper smells oddly sweet, not at all like bread. That must be from the slowly ageing pages in the book.

I used to love going there. The bread was something we shared; going there and smelling the freshly baked bread and deliberating and eventually, finally, after a sample or two, choosing one.

I remember him having a coffee one morning ( I think I had a chocolate milk) at some corner restaurant long since gone, after we'd stopped in at Eckerd to buy my mother a gift for mother's day. It was special. That was before we started going to Empire, but it's all in the same vein.

The receipt didn't have a note in it, like my great grandfather's wallet did, detailing the contents. No World War One medals here, but the receipt might as well be a sign from Meuse-Argonne, it's wrinkled like that old particoloured ribbon.

And its silence puts my words to shame.   

Red-brown things

The apple browns unchecked
Half-eaten, yet another thing on the desk
Next to the little wooden buddha, the inedible chestnut
One might think this were still life
Painting, or a hollow stroke of time

Was ist das für ein Ding?
Ein Namenloses, Heimatloses,
Solche Bezeichnungen sind nicht von Belang.

Das Lächeln eines Dinges
Ist viel bestimmter als ein Wort,
Das weiß, es kann die Welt zur Rede stellen.

Dein Los ist dies:
Den bittren Saft erst einatmen
Und dann den Trunk genießen.

Dein Los ist dies:
Von Dingen lernen, was es heißt,
Ein Leben auf die Welt zu bringen.

J.J. Abrams' "Force Awakens" & Werner Herzog's "Herz aus Glas": Skellig Islands Connection

I do wonder if the end of Herzog's Herz aus Glas with its outward spiraling camerawork and back shot of a man in robes atop Skellig Michael was an influence on J.J. Abrams' end of The Force Awakens. The set-up is remarkably similar. Watch this old YouTube video, which, I am very thankful, is still available as of Christmas 2015.

Without giving away anything of the latter film, it's interesting to note that both feature a painterly shot of a solitary, long-haired man looking out onto the water from nearly exactly the same point of the same island as the man portrayed in Herz aus Glas. Their dress and stance, the camerawork, and the shared sense of futurity seem either to spring from the same inspirational source, or else the later film deftly quotes in homage the 1976 German film.

As Jeffrey L. High in Who is This Schiller Now has pointed out, Lucas was probably influenced by Schiller (I had the privilege of hearing a talk he gave on Star Wars and Don Carlos a few years ago in Heidelberg). Maybe Abrams is, in a way, following in Lucas' footsteps and citing another – contemporary – German source: Werner Herzog's film – which further, as giulianocinema showed, echoes that famous Caspar David Friedrich painting every student of German Romanticism and the long 18th century knows so well. I'm using giulanocinema's image here:

Happy Holidays. And may the birds be with you.

Mit heiterem Blick sitzt er immer noch und sagt mir heimlich: Lass Dein Schicksal sein wie ich: Unerforschlich fremd und Deins zugleich. Zu früh Dreschen ist schädlich und zersetzt eine verheißungsvolle Ernte. Eine Prise Eitelkeit nur reicht völlig.

Mantras that stay

Fugitive hours stare blankly from the coloured bindings of the books on the desk. Writing seems to be a task with no telos, a flight with no aim but the snatch of blue between the clouds. A little Buddha holds up his alms bowl and smiles and behind the cheap figurine I hear the real croaks of the handless woman on the corner, in her wheelchair, tirelessly chanting her mantra: Spare Change. She'll haunt us into the ground.