I’m still alive, The Stars (Are Out Tonight) song and video argue. You’re still et cetera.
:::: Melancholia: the condition of perpetual mourning, the refusal to be done with death(s).
:::: How do I live the violence of my formation?
Wondered Judith Butler.
:::: Sitting in the audience at Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, the 1983 operatic conclusion to his trilogy about three visions (Einstein’s and Gandhi’s form the first and second: i.e., ones concerning science and politics; this one concerns religion) which altered the age in which they lived, and remembering how remote, how exiled from any sonic homeland, his music sounded when you first heard it, how harmonic and melodic it sounds tonight, how everything you’ve heard since then has taught you how to rehear what you [[heard]] in the early eighties, how what you [[heard]] in the early eighties as [[avant-garde]] you now hear as some stepbrother of something distantly pop.
With nearly 2500 fans at more rock concert than classical performance in massive hangar two at Tempelhof airport, defunct since 2008, whose aerial layout resembles an eagle in flight, its semicircular hangars spread wings, intended by the Nazis who built it to serve as gateway to Germania and the new post-war Europe.
:::: The irony of man’s condition, advanced Ernest Becker, who as an infantryman during the Second World War helped liberate a concentration camp, is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
:::: Is there no way out of the mind?
Inquired undone Sylvia Plath.
:::: In Kafka’s prose poem, the Emperor on his deathbed whispers an urgent message to his herald, who immediately strikes off to deliver it to you. Yet it takes him forever to make his way through the crowd jamming the palace. And even if he were to succeed in reaching the exit, which he won’t, he would simply find more stairs, more courtyards, a second palace surrounding the first, and the infinite capital city beyond. So you are left alone, sitting at your window, dreaming of a dead man’s message that will never arrive.
Being a brief parable about how religion, exile, language, hope, reading, writing, and the idea of travel function.
:::: Postmodern allegories, Charles Jencks used to call such narratives, because they seem to point to another level of meaning, but what that level is is made hazy, multiple, conflicted.
:::: The first Witkin photograph on my walclass="underline" a plump old woman, the top of her head missing, her skin blotched, her body supported by wires, propped next to a table in a sparse room. On the table is a book. Her finger holds her place, although the arm to which the finger is attached is no longer attached to her torso.
Interrupted Reading, the photograph is entitled.
:::: Today’s laziness consists in lifeless motion.
Maximed Ludwig Hohl.
:::: Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Apothegmed David Foster Wallace.
:::: Roland Barthes, redux: In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
:::: How my own mother, a startlingly good-willed, strong-minded woman who grew up on a cotton farm near Ganado, Texas, exiled herself to New York City as soon as possible, working as a visiting nurse, a hospital nurse, a humanities teacher. In the early seventies she exiled herself from Unitarianism into a New-Agey take on Eastern religions in search of the inaccessible land that lies beyond the horizon we think of as living.
How she primly waited to die in her living room in suburban Dallas, where my father (now dead himself) and she had retired (much to her chagrin) almost 20 years before. Also cancer, this time of the breast metastasized to spine, liver, brain.
Inventorying the clutter that took her nearly 74 years to quilt around her, she says unexpectedly, almost casually, as we sit together, to no one in particular:
All these things will forget their stories the second I’m gone.
:::: Because every once in a while Ron stopped talking, shifted in his electric wheelchair, increasingly banished from his own anatomy, looked out his picture window at the river glistening far below, glided back to alight on what we were saying, and we would pick up where we had left off. I drank bourbon, he tea through a straw. He was having trouble swallowing, was becoming tired very quickly. You could see it.
:::: The second Witkin photograph: a stuffed monkey slipping artificial flowers into (or perhaps out of) the unskulled top of a woman’s untorsoed head, its eyes closed, atilt on some dark surface.
Let’s call that surface a table.
Let’s not.
:::: You will never have seen such a lush, green city, promised a friend several weeks ago. Just you wait.
:::: Excuse my dust.
Reads Dorothy Parker’s epitaph.
:::: One of my fellow fellows at the Academy, who had lived in East Berlin for years when younger, expressing her heartfelt disappointment that, when she petitioned to find out after the Wall came down, she was told the Stasi possessed no secret file on her.
:::: One morning just under a month before we leave, Andi shows up in the living room with three packing boxes and begins to collect the winter clothes and books we no longer need.
That moment, and we’re traveling again.
:::: During the Cold War, a friend explains to me over dinner at Mao Thai in the gentrification creep of Prenzlauer Berg, those living in West Berlin were exempt from the Federal Republic’s compulsory military service, and so young radical artists, writers, and musicians spewed into the city.
Being a brief parable about how Berlin, a country subsisting inside another country, has happened for more than 100 years.
With, of course, a handful of notable exceptions.
:::: I want to enjoy my death, Beckett once wrote.
Presumably with some irony.
:::: Out of Print.
Being what Raymond Federman, whose parents and sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, along with more than a million others (including, of course, Kafka’s sister), wanted his epitaph to read.
:::: Rebecca Solnit, noch einmaclass="underline" Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
:::: I would add, too, a simultaneous understanding, at least in the form of some abstract proposition, about how abridged each item on Solnit’s list is, how it is precisely that understanding that infuses each instant of travel with its idiosyncratic radiance.
:::: And so, as our last month at the Academy unfurls around us, everything becomes as shimmery as it had on that first drizzly day our taxi crawled through the heavy black iron gates toward the Italianate villa in which I’m now sitting at my desk.
:::: Standing on a corner, waiting for the red Ampelmann to turn into a green Ampelmann, my German friend grows impatient and steps out into the street, telling me over his shoulder: