And then Andi and I were leaning back against a big boulder across from Federman.
Listening.
The sun fading.
Federman’s voice echoing around us.
McCaffery becoming a thumb-sized stirring above us.
:::: I just memoried on myself a little.
:::: Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, is daughter of a Lutheran minister and a teacher of English and Latin. She received a doctorate in quantum chemistry, the same field her second husband, Professor Joachim Sauer, teaches. Angela doesn’t like children or dogs.
In the context of German politics and media, it is inconceivable anyone cares about her religious beliefs.
:::: A hefty, baggily dressed man in his sixties, who in another life might have been a professor, but who in this one had misplaced himself, enters the train to Potsdamer Platz.
He’s talking loudly to no one. After a while he approaches a young woman reading a book whose title I can’t make out. From the fall of paragraphs on the page, I imagine it’s a novel. There is an empty seat next to her. The man asks her to move so he can sit down. His legs, he says, are killing him. His capacity requires two seats. She looks up, indicates the one next to her, looks down.
Die sind Kindersitze, he says. Those are children’s seats. Now he’s angry. The young woman looks up, says leider, sorry about that, looks down.
She reads on, expressionless, unruffled in a way I could never aspire to be, as the large lost man thumps up and down the car, explicating something repeatedly, for emphasis, to his invisible associates.
:::: When the Wall became a museum, large numbers of East Berliners moved west, leaving hundreds of empty apartments behind them. A year, and about 200 buildings had become the center of a squatter’s movement in Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, and Kreuzberg. By 2005 most of those buildings had been forcefully cleared by police and imposed rents had risen by more than 20 % to make way for gentrification creep. Over the last five years, real estate prices have amplified another 32 %.
Sexy, Berliners maintain, but no longer poor.
:::: All knowledge is a border problematic: what’s kept in, kept out, by whom, why?
:::: Get going, go away, head for, migrate, proceed, push forward, roll, skip out, ship off, traverse, walk, jog, journey.
Run.
:::: The MaerzMusik festivaclass="underline" 10 days of aural innovation every March, and Andi is filming rehearsals.
Beat Furrer’s Xenos III: the percussionist recites haunted language particles by the Austrian author Händl Klaus (who was born, inverted, as Klaus Händl) into the timpani while the orchestra presents itself as a miscellany of instrumental tremors, scratching sounds, long tones, and mini-gestures designed to make you think about what we mean when we say the words instrument, hearing, music.
Isabel Mundry’s Depuis le Jour: 15 strings and two percussionists allow the contrapuntal music of Late Renaissance Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck to swell among an atonal mulligan, all about making difficult the idea of spatial and temporal locality, how the memory of art’s past remains detectable in art’s present, the concept of the truly unique, the new, invariably amounting to defective back-fence talk.
:::: Art’s metempsychosis, Joyce called it, malapropped via Molly Bloom as met him pike hoses: the transmigration, not only of souls, but also of texts and genres, from one body to another, across
:::: The instant the upper edge of the sun appeared above the eastern horizon in Berlin on 3 January 2013, the day we arrived:
8:17 a.m.
:::: Lethophobia: the fear of forgetting.
:::: Oliver Schneller’s Polis, a sound installation that generates the aural illusion of being in four places at once by producing ambient noise from a quartet of geographically separate locations through a quartet of speakers: 11:00 a.m. in Cairo, 11:00 a.m. in Beirut, 11:00 a.m. in Jerusalem, 11:00 a.m. in Istanbul.
What does sonic identity sound like, if it sounds like anything at all?
:::: On 26 March 2013:
5:55 a.m.
:::: On 30 April 2013:
5:37 a.m.
:::: Music, then, as performance art. Why does it never occur to me to buy an album by one of Cage’s children? Because a key to the experience of their work is being there, learning to listen in an ever more nuanced way to sonics that refuse to become melodic, repeatable, albumizable.
:::: Which is to say David Clark’s hypermedial 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein: To Be Played with the Left Hand juxtaposes (mostly audio, augmented by visual and textual) narraticules about the Austrian philosopher with those about his pianist brother, Paul, whose right arm was amputated during the First World War, the Twin Towers’ undoing, astronomy, architecture, movies, Hitler and Charlie Chaplin.
These last two born in 1889, the same year as Wittgenstein.
:::: Or how this morning is so bright, the snow outside my window so glaringly white, that floaters keep sliding up into my field of vision in a ceaseless Brownian motion as I sit by the bureau in the corner of my bedroom with a computer in my lap.
I pretend I’m not paying attention to the shadow flecks, but their proteinaceous facticity will have none of it.
:::: Because my books would never have been themselves, in other words, without Andi most of all, her artist’s eye, her ability to teach me daily how to unlearn certain ways of seeing.
Every single sentence in every single one is dedicated to her.
:::: In part the outcome of Clark’s project is an investigation into the problematics of language, and hence of representation, how the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us that we are as flies trapped in a bottle called Western thought, how the words that that thought deploys to build various logical systems bear no relationship to, say, the apples we eat, the kisses that celebrate our visit on this planet.
How the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us — by making us aware of the bottle’s presence, and thus its inherent limitations into which we are forever bumping our foreheads — the means by which to get out, or, perhaps closer to the point, the means by which we can’t get out, no matter what we do, because the top is sealed, because we can’t think beyond language’s glass grammars, because our perceptions are mediated by what we imagine verbs, nouns, and the rest can do.
How one gets out (by not getting out), not through applying a single philosophical method to all the linguistic knottinesses, but by moving from topic to topic every which way in an ongoing calisthenics of inquisitiveness and alertness.
:::: Embarked, en route, bound for, in passage, on the road, on the way, bug out, light out, move out, cruise, decamp, depart, get going, get lost, hightail it, hit the road, on the lam, make a break for it, pass through, push on, push off, quit, set off, shove off, take off, skip out.
Split.
:::: Because 88 Constellations is about how Wittgenstein gave us a bricoleur philosophy that unfolds like an abundance of mini-therapies.