:::: Because standing among a group of tourists in the poorly lit gas chamber at Auschwitz, taking in the more-or-less-one-foot-by-more-or-less-one-foot hole in the ceiling through which the executioners used to spill waterfalls of light green-blue Zyklon B pellets on the terrified men, women, and children screaming below, you feel a tremendous wave of cognitive dissonance: repugnance and disbelief, of course, empathy, too, but also a grim fascination before this black wave of depravity, a torture-porn thrill you don’t believe those clicking their cameras around you would quite admit to but nonetheless are certainly experiencing, a blossom of comfort at the distance between where you are, where you could be, and where you inevitably will be — in 396 months or the following nothing flat.
:::: Addendum: achievement of full presence is, according to Derrida, another way of saying I’m dead.
:::: On a large enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
Clarified Chuck Palahniuk.
:::: Optimist: the name of the small, single-handed sailing dinghy that doesn’t stand a chance in a heavy wind.
:::: My dying friend: A lot of the brain motor difficulties that I was expecting after the first surgery seem to be appearing now. My left hand feels more or less like a stroke patient’s unable to do very much except spill a glass of water on a computer keyboard or leave A. walking two blocks behind me because I had no sensation that I let go of his hand. For about two weeks there I was having some real palsy tremors, what they’re calling mini-seizures.
:::: Or watching Marlene Dietrich sing Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt in Der Blaue Engel, the first major German sound film, at the Kino Delphi, which used to show silent ones, and in whose neighborhood The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was shot in 1919. The humorless communists stripped the venue to bare cement walls and closed it completely in 1959. Now all that remains is a vaulted cement cavern, at one end of which lifts a cement stage, in front of which is sunk an orchestra pit, in which 13 musicians used to accompany Metropolis and Nosferatu. Tonight the Berlin Film Society has rented the place, set up tables, manned a bar selling absinthe, supplied a pre- and post-film D.J., bathed it all in a rich blue light, and created a cabaret ambience where young women wear tails, top hats, and drawn-on Hitler mustaches, men shiny three-piece suits.
There is no heat, so you huddle in your winter coat, scarf wrapped around your neck, picking at a pretzel, sipping a beer whose brand name is Bier (and whose motto is TASTE NEEDS NO NAMES), absorbing the fact that life gets no better.
:::: Because the birds are back today without warning, the sculling team slicing redly across the lake’s reflections, the small white triangle of a single sailboat gliding offshore.
:::: Which is to say it is as if someone flipped a switch. Two days ago it wasn’t spring, but this morning it is, and a team contracted by railway operator Deutsche Bahn has just defused a Russian-made aerial bomb weighing 220 pounds unearthed six feet from a train track leading into the Hauptbahnhof. More than 800 people were evacuated before said team moved in, which, it turns out, is nothing compared to the 45,000 evacuated from Koblenz in 2011 as bomb squads dealt with a 1.8-metric ton British device that could have wiped out the entire city center.
It’s always yesterday here, and yesterday can always bite.
:::: Which is to say in Walter Abish’s How German Is It the flourishing postwar community of Brumholdstein (named after the philosopher Ernst Brumhold, a fictive proxy for Heidegger) is built over the remains of a concentration camp and mass grave, the country’s preconscious forever churning just beneath the patina of la vie quotidienne, the museum by nature containing incomplete pasts, parallel universes, investigations into the impossibilities of full presence.
Abish, whose family fled Austria in the thirties, had never stepped foot inside Germany before his novel appeared.
:::: Because exile, Edward Said argued, is a permanent state. It isn’t something that can be gotten over, cannot be restored. It’s like the fall from Paradise. You can’t really go back. In that case, what is it that exile affords you that wouldn’t be the case for someone who always stayed at home, went through the daily routine? I think the essential privilege of exile is to have, not just one set of eyes, but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been. Therefore, instead of looking at experience as a single, unitary thing, it’s always got at least two aspects: the aspect of the person who is looking at it and has always seen it, looking at it now and seeing it now, and the person who remembers what it would have looked like from that other place. There is always a kind of doubleness to that experience, and the more places you have been, the more displacements you’ve gone through. . the more experiences seem to be multiple and complex and composite and interesting for that reason.
:::: The weather warming and bluing. Rectangular daffodil rugs appear in the garden down by the marina. Andi and I move out onto our balcony overlooking the Wannsee for breakfast. Two spindly chairs, a small round rust-red table. Early greenness fuzzing the trees.
We take a moment to make a little toast to the villa across the lake where that conference convened 71 years ago.
:::: Because back in Salt Lake City two large framed photographs hang on the walls of my study, both by Joel-Peter Witkin. They are the only ones by an established artist Andi and I have ever felt it imperative to purchase.
Each is a still life, a nature morte, a dead nature, constructed from corpse parts the photographer found and posed in morgues in Mexico and France.
:::: How, in the end, inside always becomes outside.
:::: That which separates us, exiles us, from the rest of the world — our sphincterial control, our skin, our existential spacesuit — gradually goes away as we become something other than what we are.
:::: The second video released from Bowie’s The Next Day is the Lynchian The Stars (Are Out Tonight). Tilda Swinton and Ziggy Stardust’s father play an older bourgeois couple whose comfortable existence dislocates when a pair of rockers (one a version of the earlier androgynous Bowie) follows them home from the neighborhood grocery store and commences haunting their physical and emotional space. Yet the predictable erotic/demonic alien invasion narrative perverts by the video’s conclusion: the older bourgeois couple turns out to be the opposite of what we anticipate. They begin haunting the younger couple even as they are haunted. Interpretive absonance erupts, unmooring the comment Bowie and Swinton exchange at the video’s outset: We have a nice life.
[[We]] [[have]] [[a]] [[nice]] [[life]] [[.]]
:::: The existence that the older couple performs/deforms disarranges their younger disruptors even as the heavy-energy vintage-Bowie soundtrack complicates any simple reading of Where are We Now, that first vulnerable video from The Next Day.