Hummmm.... I'm a bit sad actually, with the sadness of a kid. I and wife had our meeting this am, black tea, clouds of smoke, etc. I think she was a bit cranky from the sleeplessness of the night, I on the other hand was in my best, very childish and fresh. I reminded her she was still owing me that note about Anne Frank, she looked at me almost in despair and started to write.... it seems it's not easy for grown up people like her to talk about the books of their childhood, and about the childhood at all. I enjoyed every line of what she wrote although I felt all the time it was riping off my guts but I decidedly pushed her forward; it was probably one of the most interestingly intimate notes ever written in these pages.
Still the note was way too heavy, way too personal, too daring.... at a certain point near the half of it (I know for sure there was a lot more to go) the modem failed and we tried to resume our adventure. The press of the wrong bottom would send 1.5 hours totally astray.
That note, which ressumed the universalism of wife through 3 different stages in her life (even as Ari the kid) disappeared and we were unable to retrieve it. It saddened me very much, I laid on the bed with no possible content and covered myself pretending to sleep but the bad mood just didn't let me.
This is one of those "muss-sein" we have every once in a while, yet wife is asking me in tone of protest "muss es sein?" and I, simply Ari... with the content youth gives me in the uncertainty of things shall answer with a despotic "ja, es muss sein". Thus I shut her up. She's clinging down. Despite herself, pathos was bigger than her.
The note was lost just like were lost the napkins in which I used to write poems in a certain Rotterdamer café, just like I burnt my poetry writings up to the age of 15 one cool night in our old yard, just like I forsook my books at some storage book accross the Ocean and started another completely new set of volumes, bringing over only 2 useless books. A German dictionary and some cheap basic skills coaching book. There's a need for useless stuff in my life, it's a vicious constant of art, a vicious obsession of the art. Needy of the unfound, needy of the unheard and unsatisfied with his own holdings. Just to give an example, in 2002 I shifted from one language to the other, to a point in which it's already difficult for me to rephrase a couple of educated sentences in my own language. As I said, needy of the unfound, needy of the unheard, with no content.
In that order of ideas the loss of the note constitutes nothing but a "muss sein", and who if not Ari or Teresa to explain it, even Elliot would protest I'm sure or the justice-filled Antigone. The note wasn't meant to be written as such pain can't be beared all at once; that kind of stories must be written in weekend chapters to be published in a village newspaper, where people still dies of love. Not even Icelanders would read it I'm sure; for it is a cheap and extremely melancholic and musty version of the Dutch boy and the finger in the dam, also an androginous version. And the wife herself claims her attitude against everything that is musty, being herself a walking library of dead knowledge. In my next life please remind me to skip Goethe and Holderlin, nothing has come out of it but a rather diseased condition. A condition that would wed Elliot and me, even Elliot herself would pour benzedrine and vokda down her throat upon reading our former forlon note.
After the disappointment and the muss-sein I and wife refused to be Odysseus and understood we could have been better off with some Demetrian ode. The Homeric hymns... hummmm... still carry them with me as if they were in my pocket.
It was a total dare to dive into Anne Frank these days though, after all in this country we eat hot dogs with mustard right after our pilgrimage through the dreadful camps of death in Poland, so why would we want to crave into Anne? Probably because Anne and me had an unavoidable bon, just like Elliot and me have at the moment. But somehow I think I'm able to bear that bond, the wife herself isn't. To read the pages of the diary these days was like reading Hesiodic tales, reading about a past long gone by yet as present as the present. It was to read about open wounds.
For now wife and I have agreed to put the book asides for sometime, we're better off among computer investigations, modulus functions, syntagmic associations and combinatorics. It doesn't mean we've neglected our heaviness, for it's impossible. Once your suitcase is loaded with certain books, you'll have to bring them all over. Even to the your wedding bed. I think Elliot, wife and I will spend some time on the Bible this year and stuff our library with a few more novels, it's always interesting to read novels, they can be so truely deceiving...
At last I hit the shower with the pretension to leave the house (not sure when that will happen though) and dressed up with wife's clothes still bearing my newborn smile. A smile that only the fresh skin of the phoebus can bear.
I read in some magazine that people dressing all in black are trying to hide themselves; today I'm all dressed in black, my favourite colour and in such delicate taste of wife. Don't take me wrong, I've learnt a few things from her, those kind of things only an old Jewish woman can teach. Today wife and I are beautifully radical, let us be that way. The day will bring something, the day will take us on.
Ari
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