"Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830) - Wilhelm Waiblinger

Now if one were to step into this unfortunate man's house, he certainly would not expect to meet a poet who had merrily wandered along the Ilyssus with Plato; but the house is not ugly, it is the dwelling of a prosperous carpenter; a man who has an uncommon degree of culture for a man of his standing, and who speaks about Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Tieck and others. One inquires after the room of Herr Librarian - for Hölderlin still enjoys being addressed by title - and then comes to a small door. Talking can already be heard inside, and one assumes that Hölderlin already has company, but is then told by the honest carpenter that H. is completely alone and talks to himself day and night.

One ponders, wondering whether or not to knock, and feels a sense of uneasiness. After finally knocking, a loud and forceful "Come in!" can be heard. Opening the door, one finds a haggard figure standing in the middle of the room, who bows as deeply as possible and will not stop bestowing compliments, and whose mannerisms would be very graceful were there not something convulsive about them. One admires the profile, the high forehead heavy with thought, the friendly, lovable eyes, extinguished but not soulless; one sees the devastating traces of the mental illness in the cheeks, the mouth, the nose, above the eyes where an oppressive and painful wrinkle has been etched. With regret and sadness, one observes the convulsive movement which sometimes spreads throughout the entire face, forcing his shoulders to jerk and his fingers to twitch. He wears a simple jacket and likes to keep his hands in his pockets. One says a few introductory words which are then received with the most courteous obeisance and a deluge of nonsensical words which confuse the visiting stranger. Gracious as he was and, for the sake of appearance, still is, H. now feels obliged to say something friendly to the guest, to ask him a question. One comprehends a few words of his question, but most of these could not possibly be answered. Nor does Hölderlin in the least expect to be answered. On the contrary, he becomes extremely perplexed if the visitor attempts to follow up a train of thought. More about that later, when we discuss our conversations with him. For now, our concern is simply with the fleeting appearance. The visitor finds himself addressed as "Your Majesty", "Your Holiness", and "Merciful Herr Pater". Hölderlin, however, is extremely upset; he receives such visits with the greatest displeasure and is always more disturbed afterwards. For that reason it was always against my own will whenever someone requested me to lead them to Hölderlin. Yet, I would rather do this than let one visit him unaccompanied. The visit would be too upsetting for the lonely man, who is shut off from all associations with people, and the visitor would not know how to treat him. Hölderlin would soon begin to thank the visitor for the visit and would again bow, whereupon it would then be best for one not to tarry any longer.

Nor does anyone stay with him longer than this. Even his earlier acquaintances found such conversation too uncanny, too oppressive, too boring, too senseless, for the Librarian was at his most eccentric in his behavior toward them. Friedrich Haug, the epigrammatist who had known him for a long time, once came to visit. He, too, was addressed as "Your Royal Majesty" and "Herr Baron von Haug". Though the old friend assured H. that he had not been ennobled, H. positively would not cease bestowing him with distinguished titles. Toward complete strangers he speaks absolute nonsense. But first of all, we shall describe the outer appearance he presents of himself, and then we will consider this in greater detail.

He wrote a lot at first and filled every sheet of paper which was handed to him. There were letters in prose or in free Pindaric metrics addressed to his dear Diotima, others more frequently in alcaics. He had adopted a thoroughly peculiar style, the contents of which were: remembrance of the poet, struggle with God and celebration of the Greeks. As for his current train of thought, nothing has appeared yet.

At the beginning of his stay with the carpenter, he still broke out in attacks of madness and rage many times, which forced Zimmer, as a last resort, to strike the frenzied man with his sturdy fists. Hölderlin once chased the man and his whole family out of the house and locked the door.
He instantly became enraged and convulsive whenever he saw anyone from the clinic. Since he often wandered about at liberty, he was naturally exposed to the jeers of the dreadful people who can be found everywhere, and to whose bestial nature such a frightfully spirited unfortunate becomes an object of ignorant viciousness. Now when he realized this, he would become so wild that he would throw stones and dung at them; and one could be certain that he would still be furious the following day. With deepest regret we were forced to acknowledge that even university students were animalistic enough to taunt and enrage him. With regard to this subject, we can only say that of all the wicked traits which laziness engenders in the universities, this is certainly one of the most worthless.

The carpenter's wife or one of his sons or daughters often took the poor man into the garden or vineyard, whereupon Hölderlin would find a rock to sit on, waiting until they would go home. It is notable that persons in his company had to act as if they were with a child, if he were not to be made restless.

If he leaves the house, he must first be reminded to wash and tidy himself, as his hands are usually dirty from having spent half of the day tearing grass from the ground. Then, after he has dressed, he must be led, for he positively will not lead. He wears his hat pulled down to his eyes, and if he is not too deeply withdrawn into himself, he will raise it in greeting to a two-year-old child. It is both praise- and noteworthy that the people in the city who were familiar with him never made fun of him but quietly let him go his own way, while they often said to one another: Ach, how bright and educated this gentleman was, and now he's so crazy. But now he is not allowed to go out alone, except to wander around the bailey in front of the house.

In the beginning, he sometimes came to see the admirable Conz, recently deceased. This industrious and energetic friend of ancient literature had a garden in front of the Hirschauer Gate in Tübingen, whither it had been his daily custom for decades to direct his path one hour before noon. During a quarter of a century, he could be seen at this time propping up his heavy body and stopping right at the gate where the gatekeeper would light his pipe. Then the poet would walk quietly and slowly, stopping after a few hours in the open air or at the garden house. While he was translating Aeschylus, Hölderlin, who had more fire and energy at that time, came to see him. He would amuse himself by picking flowers, and after he had gathered a hearty bouquet, he would tear it apart and stuff it into his pocket. Sometimes Conz would also give him a book. Conz told me that Hölderlin once leaned over him and read aloud a few verses from Aeschylus, whereupon he then shrieked out in convulsive laughter: "I don't understand that. It's kamalatta language," for the coining of new words is one of Hölderlin's eccentricities.

These visits gradually ceased in time as he became weaker and duller-witted. It was sometimes necessary for me to prod him to take a stroll with me in Conz's garden. He had all sorts of excuses. He would say: "I do not have time, Your Holiness" - for I, too, received all kinds of titles - or "I must wait for a visitor," or he would use one of his highly peculiar phrases like "They have dictated they I wait here." Now and then, however, when it was nice and bright outside, I got him to dress and we went out. On one particular spring day, he was greatly overjoyed by the vibrant flowers and the fullness of the blossoms. He praised the garden's beauty in the most pleasing terms. Otherwise, however, he was more unreasonable than when I had him alone with me. Conz took pains to have him recall the past, but without any luck. Conz once said, "Herr Councillor Haug, who you'll still remember well, recently wrote a very beautiful poem." Hölderlin, who as usual was completely inattentive to what was said to him, replied, "Has he written one?" Conz burst out laughing. We then walked toward the house, and as we bid farewell, Hölderlin kissed Conz's hand most elegantly.

His day is extremely simple. In the morning, especially during the summer when he is generally much more disturbed and tormented, he arises either before or at sunrise and leaves the house at once to go for a walk in the bailey. This stroll, usually lasting four or five hours, tires him out. He likes to amuse himself by carrying a handkerchief to either swat against fence-posts or pull up grass with. Whatever he finds, whether it's only a piece of iron or leather, he sticks in the handkerchief and takes it with him. During all this, he continually talks to himself, asks himself questions, and answers himself, soon with yes, then no, frequently with both, for he enjoys saying no.

After that, he returns to the house and paces back and forth. His dinner is brought to his room and he eats with a hearty appetite. He also loves wine and would keep drinking it as long as it were given to him. When he has finished his meal, he cannot tolerate having the dishes and silverware in his room a second longer, and he places them on the floor in front of the door. He positively will have only those things inside his room which belong to him. The remaining part of the day elapses in monologues and pacing back and forth in his little room.
His Hyperion can occupy him all day long. Hundreds of times when I came to visit him, I could already hear him outside declaiming in a loud voice. His pathos is extravagant and Hyperion is almost always lying opened on his table; he often read aloud to me from it. And after he had read a passage, he would begin to exclaim with vigorous gestures, "O beautiful, beautiful Your Majesty!" Then he would read some more, suddenly adding, "You see there, Gracious Sir, a comma!" He also read aloud from other books which I put in his hands, but understood nothing because he's too distracted and can't even follow one of his own thoughts, let alone one foreign to him. Nonetheless, he would consequently praise the book excessively in his usual politeness.
The rest of his books consist of Klopstock's Odes, Gleim, Cronegk, and other older poets of this sort. He reads Klopstock's Odes often and does not hesitate to produce them.

I told him countless times that his Hyperion had been newly reprinted and that Uhland and Schwab had assembled a collection of his poetry, but I never received more of an answer than a deep bow and the words, "They are very gracious, Herr von Waiblinger! I am very indebted to you, Your Holiness!"

Whenever he cut my questions short in this manner, I often tried to forcefully press him for a reasonable answer, and without ceasing turned my words around, rephrasing the question with different expressions and only ceasing when he broke out in violent gesticulation and an incoherent, senseless torrent of words.

The carpenter was soon surprised to see that I could exert so powerful an influence over Hölderin that he would go with me as soon as I so desired, and that he was also so concerned with me in my absense. But it was the pretty little garden house which I lived in on the Österberg which pleased Hölderlin the most. Wieland penned the first fruits of his muse in this same house. Here, one had a view overlooking friendly, fertile valleys, the city spread out on the Schlossberg, the bending of the Neckar, many enchanted little villages, and the chain of the Alps. It is now more than three years since I spent a pleasant summer here in the midst of the green with such a refreshing view, almost entirely in the open air. At that time, unfortunately, there was such an oppressive weight upon my spirit that even the delight of this friendly nature was not enough to strengthen and cheer me up. I was to write a novel here which I would soon consider worthy of being burned, and in which there was precious little which would not now shame me. But later came the "Song of Kalonasora" which at least won acclaim for the author from the most well-known judges and friends of poetry when it was published three years later. But it was to this spot where I led Hölderlin once each week. When he had reached the top and had set foot inside, he would bow each time, commending me for my good will and favor in the most cordial manner possible. He expresses his courtesy in flowery phrases wherever he goes and often it is actually as if he intentionally wished to keep everyone at arm's length from himself. If he has a reason, this is certainly it; but perhaps it is a bit too much to want to attribute to each and every thing a meaning deeper than what is simply eccentric and curious.

Hölderlin would open the window, sit down next to it and begin to praise the view in quite understandable words. I noticed that, in general, it was better for him when he was out in the open air. He spoke to himself less, and in my opinion this is complete proof that he was more lucid, for I have become convinced that that incessant monologue is none other than the restlessness of his thought and his impotence in concentrating on an object. More about that later. I provided him with snuff and smoking tobacco, which he enjoyed quite a bit. I could completely cheer him up with a pinch, and when I filled up the pipe and lit it for him, he praised it and the tobacco most spiritedly and was completely contented. He stopped talking, and since he was then feeling his best, and it would not have been good to disturb him, I left him alone and read something.

Written in large Greek letters on the wall above his desk, the pantheistic One and All (Hen kai pan) had been one of his greatest concerns. He often spoke a long time to himself, always watching this mysterious sign of many meanings, and one time he said, "I have become orthodox now, Your Holiness! No, no! I'm presently studying the third volume of Herr Kant and am greatly involved with the new philosophy." I asked him if he remembered Schelling. He said, "Yes, he studied at the same time I did, Herr Baron!" I told him that Schelling was supposed to be in Erlangen and Hölderlin replied, "He was in Munich earlier." He asked me whether I had ever spoken to him and I said yes. . .

He recalled Matthisson, Schiller, Zollikofer, Lavater, Heinse, and many others, with the exception of Goethe, as I've mentioned earlier. His memory still shows power and endurance. Once, I found it surprising that he had a portrait of Frederick the Great hanging on the wall and therefore asked him about it. He answered, "You have made that remark about it before, Herr Baron." Then I remembered having indeed noticed it many months earlier. He also recognized everything which he had seen before. He has never forgotten that I am a poet and has asked me countless times what I have been working on and whether I have been industrious. But he can immediately add, "I, my dear Sir, no longer bear the same name. Now I'm called Killalusimeno. Oui, Your Majesty, so they say, so they declare! Nothing's wrong with me."

Generally speaking, I heard this last comment from him often. It is as if this were his way of affirming and soothing himself; by keeping in mind, "there's nothing wrong with me."
I also gave him paper for writing. Then he would sit down at the desk and write a few verses, rhymed ones as well, though they were nonsensical, especially the last onces, however metrically correct they were. He would then rise and hand it to me with lavish compliments. He once signed one "Your most humble and obedient Hölderlin".

One day I told him that a concert would be held in the evening. I had been considering whether it would be possible to provide him with such a pleasure. In the end, it could not be risked. Perhaps the music would have been too overpowering for him, and then there was the incivility of the students to consider. Enough, I left the garden house with him. He was completely withdrawn and did not speak a single syllable. When we had reached the city, he suddenly looked at me as if he had just awakened and said, "Concert." No doubt he had been thinking about it the whole way.

For music had not yet abandoned him completely. He still played piano correctly, though in a highly eccentric style. Whenever he plays, he sits at the instrument all day long. He will follow a childishly simple notion, turn it around, and play it back hundreds of times all day until one can endure it no longer. And along with this come quick, spasmodic fits which force him to race like lightning across the keyboard with his long, overgrown fingernails clattering all the way. It is the greatest displeasure for him to have these trimmed, and he has to be tricked like a stubborn and capricious child into having it done. When he has played long enough to stir his soul, he suddenly closes his eyes, lifts his head and begins to sing as if he wanted to pine and waste away. As many times as I heard it, I could never figure out what language it was; but he sang with an excessive pathos, and it sent shivers through every nerve to see and hear him in this way. Melancholy and sorrow were the spirit of his song, and one could tell that he had once been a good tenor.
He loves children very much, but they are afraid of him and run away. He has an uncommon fear of death and is very fearful in general. His terribly weakened nerves make him easily frightened and he is startled by the slightest sound. Whenever he is in motion or in a gloomy mood, his entire face twitches, his gestures are violent, he twists his fingers together in such knots it is as if he had no joints at all, and he shrieks loudly, raving at himself in vehement discourse. Unless he is left alone during such moments, one will be physically escorted to the door. When he becomes completely infuriated, he lies in bed and will not get up for days on end.

One day the idea of going to Frankfurt suddenly entered his mind. His boots were then taken away from him, and this infuriated the Herr Librarian so much that he stayed in bed for five days. In the summer, he is so plagued by restlessness that he paces back and forth in the house all night long.

I wanted to give him other books and thought that he would surely read Homer, who he would certainly remember. I brought him a translation, but he would not accept it. I left it with the carpenter and told him that Hölderlin should keep it, that it now belonged to him. Just the same, he would not accept it. The reason for this is not pride but rather fear of upsetting himself by getting involved with something unfamiliar. Only what was familiar kept him calm: Hyperion and his dusty, old poets. Homer had been a stranger to him for twenty years, and now everything new upset him.

Then I invited him to go with me to a garden where there was a tavern. The view from this place was very lovely and one felt completely unobserved there. Hölderlin drank like a real man. He liked the beer, too, and held his liquor better than one would have expected. I took care, however, that the appropriate limits were never exceeded. He felt completely at ease when he smoked a pipe in such a setting; he stopped talking and kept to himself.

He wrote to his mother, but always had to be reminded. These letters were not senseless; he took pains with thema and they were in fact clear, but only in the same way, including style, that a child writes - one who cannnot yet think or write down a completed thought. One of them was actually pretty good, but then it ended, "I see that I must close." He had become confused at this point, had become conscious of his confusion, and abruptly stopped. One can best compare this state with the disturbance in thought which one experiences in illness, migraine headaches, extreme drowsiness, and hangovers after an evening of intemperate wine consumption.

My garden house became so dear to him that he still asked about it years after I was no longer living there, and whenever he went with the carpenter's wife into the nearby vineyard, he would climb up to the door and positively insist that Herr von Waiblinger lived there.
Nature, a good walk, the open sky always did him good. It is fortunate for him that from his little window he can savor the cheerful view of the Neckar which washes against his house and a lovely patch of meadow and mountain scenery. A multitude of clear, true images flow over from this view into the poems which he writes when the carpenter gives him paper.

It is remarkable that he could not be brought to speak of the things which had concerned him so much in former, better days. He does not say a single word about Frankfurt, Diotima, Greece, his poetry - things which had been so important to him. And if one asks pointblank, "But surely it has been a while since you were last in Frankfurt?", he simply answers with a bow, "Oui, Monsieur, so you maintain," and then comes a flood of half-French.

In the last few years a small sofa was finally put in his room, and this has been an uncommon source of delight to him. He announced it with childlike rapture when I came to visit him by kissing my hand and saying, "Ach, you see, Gracious Herr, now I have a sofa." I, too, was to take a seat right away, and for a long time after that Hölderlin sat on it whenever I came to visit.
During the time when I was his frequent visitor, I made many trips to Italy, Switzerland and the Tyrol. Whenever I would return, he always knew where I had been. He particularly liked reminiscing about Switzerland and praised the beautiful regions of Zürich and St. Gall, and he spoke of Lavater and Zollikofer. I once told him that I was on my way to Rome and soon would no longer be returning, and I jokingly invited him to come along as my traveling companion. He smiled in such a charmingly sensible way, as only a sage can smile, and said, "I must remain at home, I cannot travel anymore, Gracious Herr!"

Sometimes he gave answers which forced one to nearly break out in laughter, especially since he spoke them with a look as if he were really mocking. I once asked him how old he was and he replied smiling, "Seventeen, Herr Baron." But this is not jest, rather complete distraction. He never pays attention to what someone says to him because he is always withdrawn in himself, battling his incomplete and unclear thoughts. If one should suddenly want to roust him from his torpid brooding, one must be contented with the next word which passes his lips.
I was once walking with him across a meadow. I had let him walk next to me withdrawn in himself for a while, when I quickly drew his attention to a newly built house and said, "Herr Librarian, you certainly have not seen this building yet, have you?" Hölderlin suddenly woke up and said, as if the whole world depended on his reply, "Oui, Your Majesty."
In Germany I have amassed a great deal of his written works and the many things which he wrote during his sad life, and would glady impart some of them were it only possible. I remember an ode in an alchaic metre which begins with the following beautiful lines:

An Diotima
Wenn aus der Ferne, da wir geschieden sind,
ich dir noch kennbar bin, dir Vergangenheit,
o du Teilhaber meiner Schmerzen,
einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann . . . [1]

In the last line one can already see that he could no longer hold on to the thought, like a beginner or bad poet who cannot articulate what he wants to say, and who is not enough of a master to express himself as strongly as he feels.

The content throughout his letters is a struggling and grappling against God or Fate, as likes to call it. A passage in one of them reads, "Heavenly Godhead, what was it like beneath us when I won several battles from you and a few not insignificant victories!"

I found a terrible, mysterious passage among his papers. After many laudatory exclamations - the things he says about Greek heroes and the beauty of the ancient gods - he begins: "Now I only understand man when I am far away from him and living in solitude."

His perceptions of nature [Naturanschauungen] are still completely lucid. Even when the very world of thought has deteriorated into a wretched hodgepodge [Wirrwarr] and it is no longer within his means to follow the thread of something abstract, it is a great and elevating thought that holy, all-living, mother nature, who Hölderlin has celebrated in his healthiest, freshest, most stirring poetry, is still understood by him. His behavior in the open air is proof of that, as is the beneficial and calming influence which nature exerts upon him, especially the lovely images which he delights in plucking from her as he watches the arrival and departure of spring from his window. In a vividly homeric verse he has painted the image of sheep wandering over a footbridge. He often watched this from his window. And he has painted a sublime picture in his description of silver raindrops dripping from his roof.

But it would be pointless to look for coherence here. If he makes an effort to say something abstract, he gets confused, becomes enfeebled, and in the end is forced to express himself in unusual figures of speech.

The greatest mistake made by the passing observers of this confused psychological state is that they believe Hölderlin has the idée fixe that he is in the company of kings, popes and the nobility because he gives everyone, including the carpenter, some kind of noble title. This is false. Hölderlin has no dominating idée fixe. He is more in a state of infirmity than madness, and every one of his senseless utterances is the consequence of his spiritual and physical exhaustion. Let me clarify this point.

Hölderlin has become incapable of concentrating on a thought, clarifying it, following it up, drawing an analogy to it, and of connecting it in a regular sequence via intermediary terms to something seemingly remote. As we have seen, his life is an entirely inner one, and this is certainly one of the reasons why he has sunken into this state of apathy, the extrication from which has been rendered impossible by his physical sluggishness and unbelievably weakened nerves. Something strikes him, be it a recollection or perhaps an observation which draws his attention to an object in the world outside, and he begins to think. But then he lacks all the calm, all the continuity and firmity to grasp what inevitably remains hazy to him. He should develop the thought, but in his condition he lacks the power to analyze even a single concept. He wants to affirm, but since the truth is not a matter of great importance to him, for this can only be the product of healthy, ordered thought, he says no at the moment, for the aggregate world of spirits is appearance and fog to him, and his entire being has become a resolute, though awful, idealism. If, for example, he says to himself, "people are happy," he lacks the stability and clarity to ask himself how and why. He experiences a heavy resistance within himself, he retracts his statement and says, "people are unhappy," without worrying how or why they are this way.

This distressing conflict which destroys his thoughts in their course could be seen any number of times because he usually thought aloud. And if he is actually able to concentrate on a concept, his mind betrays him almost at once, he becomes much more bewildered, a convulsive motion travels through his forehead, he shakes his head and shouts, "Nein! nein!" and to save himself from this inner swindel which distresses him so much, he falls into a delirium and says words without sense or meaning, as if his overly strained spirit were trying to restore itself while the mouth were speaking totally unrelated words. This became clear later from his papers. It is still within his means to write a sentence with what will be a kind of theme which he wants to develop. This sentence is clear and correct, though it is no doubt but a memory most of the time. On his own, when he should think it through, work out the details, develop it, so that it is a point in demonstrating how capable he is of reflecting upon that persisting memory and generating the newly apprehended thoughts again, so to speak, it fails him at once. In place of the thread which should knit the strands together, they become entangled in themselves and lost in the middle of a muddled yarn, like a spider's web. He becomes exhausted at once. Touching upon this and that, in the end he has as much difficulty pronouncing his words as an inexperienced child who must struggle to explain himself in written form. But as we have just mentioned, there are still many sublime metaphysical thoughts in his head, and he still retains a certain sense of poetic elegance and original expressions. He expresses himself in a mysterious, adventurous way, however incapable he may be of holding on to the vaporous bubbles of thought or of expressing his memories in a new idiom. On the other hand, he takes pains to conceal his embarassment with the unusual forms and manners of speech which remain within his control.

The compilation of his poetry contains a few poems which exemplify this. Although they display much of what is beautiful, fresh, clear, indeed with passages bright and sparkling, one still finds shallow spots here and there which look like shadowy flecks upon a smooth, sunny sheet of water. Hölderlin's mind had entangled itself at these points, for his sorrows were beginning at the time he wrote these poems, and he was no longer capable of completely mastering the material. It would have been better, therefore, if the editors Uhland and Schwab, who have otherwise been so painstaking and conscientous in their selection, had either omitted them or had provided notes for the benefit of those unaware of Hölderlin's condition. The sensitive editors hinder consideration of the poet who is still living and who otherwise shows absolutely no interest in the appearance of his poetry.

If he is not in a state of complete apathy, Hölderlin is forever preoccupied with himself. But when he encounters another person, the various reasons which make him unapproachable and incomprehensible appear. First of all, he is usually so withdrawn that he does not pay the least bit of attention to anything outside himself. There is an immeasurable gulf between him and the rest of humanity. He no longer has any connection to them other than through sheer memory, the mere habituation of desires and the never fully extinguished instincts. For example, he became extremely alarmed when he saw a child in a dangerous position by a window, quickly ran over to it and pulled it away. This apparently humane participation in humanity is a remnant of his once so sensitive and openly sympathetic nature; but it was nothing more than instinctual impulse. He would be completely indifferent were one to tell him that the Greeks had been wiped out to the last man or that they had completely triumphed and were now an independent nation; no, he would not absorb any of it because it is too far removed from him, too foreign, and it disturbs him too much. If he were told that I had died, he would exclaim with great affect, "Herr Jesus, did he die?" At first, though, he would have felt and thought nothing about it, and those apparently sympathetic words would have been bare form, which he would have enjoyed observing. Only later, if he had finally found a way through them, would he have spoken of my death. This is as far as it would go, for he is positively unable to tolerate anything more. This incessant distraction, this preoccupation with himself, this total lack of participation or interest in anything that occurs outside of himself, his disinclination and incapability of grasping, acknowledging, and admitting another individuality make any kind of accurate communication with him impossible.

Nor is it to be forgotten that he still retains a considerable vanity and a kind of pride and self-esteem. In his twenty years of solitude, he found only bare subsistence because he lived cut off from the world and grew accustomed to not needing it. Since there was no possibility of a cheerful contact with the world, he consoled and appeased himself with proud delusions. As in former days, when his activity had an impact upon the half-acknowledging world outside, now in his isolated life as well, where he alone is I and Not-I, individual and world, first and second person, he deems himself something noble or the noblest of all. His high opinion of himself, however, is veiled by the lovable grace and unmistakable goodness of his nature. Education, a natural civility and sense for propriety, which due to his present absent-mindedness and distraction are indiscernable every now and then, and acquaintance with excellent men of all kinds, and with people of noble standing prevent this high opinion from manifesting itself, and Hölderlin has adopted a modest behavior which has won him many hearts. He is so accustomed to all these forms of courtesy and kindliness that he still observes them with everyone. And just as he must come up with the absurdest things in a life so spiritually disturbed and isolated, he also exaggerates every custom and ceremony, and soon calls people Your Majesty, then Your Holiness, then Baron and Pater. It should not be forgotten that he was at court when his rage broke out violently and decisively, and that something of his pride could have come into play just like his conspicuous preference for holding everyone at an insurmountable distance. That he really believes himself to be in the company of royalty is out of the question, for as I have mentioned above, he is no fool, he has no idée fixe, but instead is suffering from a mental fatigue which his shattered nerves have turned into an incurable illness.

Just as he avoids whatever distresses him or confuses his mental functioning, he is also less inclined to recall those important objects of his earlier life which occasioned his illness. But when he does come upon them, he becomes horribly upset, he raves, he shouts, he paces through the night, becomes more nonsensical than usual, and he does not let up until his exhausted physical nature exerts its right to restore itself. If he becomes enraged and excited, as in the case of his notion of going to Frankfurt, he seeks out his little room in bitterness. He has reduced the whole world to this little space, as if this would make him more secure and unchallenged, and better equipped to endure the pain. Then he lies in bed.

The many nonsensical things which he says to himself are the consequence of his monologue style of conversation. He is alone, he gets bored, he must speak. He says something reasonable, he cannot develop it any further, something else comes into his head, and then that is repressed and erased by a third and fourth thought, one right after the next. A terrible confusion then ensues, he becomes moody, he talks nonsense and chatters words without meaning as his mind subsides again. When he comes into contact with people, he believes that he must be gracious and sociable, so he asks questions, says something, but without any interest in either the stranger or what the stranger says to him. He becomes so tangled up in himself in the meantime that he annuls the second person and speaks to himself. If he finds himself in the embarassing situation of having to answer, it is unlikely that he would think that he had not understood the question because he does not pay any attention at all, and so he cuts off the visitor with nonsense.

His countless foolish eccentricities are for the most part the easily explainable offspring of his reclusion. If from time to time, things which would barely be appropriate to an out-and-out fool occur to even so-called reasonable people, who withdraw for many years on end, especially when they are unable to have any effect, how much more so for an unfortunate man who, after a youth full of hope and joy, beauty and wealth, is forced by an unlucky combination of circumstances and an all-too-excitable spiritual nature to live whole decades far removed from the world, possessing nothing more with which to pass the time than the shattered clockwork of his own thinking process.

Should we answer a question which irresistibly forces itself upon us when we observe the heartbreaking fate of this once so promising spirit, i.e., whether he will ever recover, whether he will regain consciousness and be able to resume complete use of his mental powers, then we must confess with the most painful regret that such a transformation of his psychic life, while certainly desirable, is not probable. Hölderlin's physical constitution is of such a kind that he would need a whole new set of nerves if he were to free his mind from its fetters. But we hope for and, after serveral experiences, believe in a momentary recovery for the unfortunate man shortly before the tie binding body and soul, which has become so terrible for him, is released. But this would certainly be only a moment, and it would be the last one. When I left Germany, Hölderlin had already declined significantly. He was more fatigued than usual and also quieter. Six years ago, his eyes still had fire and sparkle and his face still had life and warmth. But at last, it too grew lustreless and devoid of life. It has been a long time now since I heard any more news of him. He has lived 57 years now, of which only the first three decades were not lost. No other soul deserves to be parted from the body which has hindered its activity, its beautiful energies, its more daring flights like this one, which was woven so delicately and sensitively. We hope, therefore, that our noble friend who has stepped out of our society will be granted that unique and final moment, and that the melancholy riddle of his past is still clear before his pilgrimage into another life, and that the hope of a future one for him lives anew!

Trans. note: To Diotima: If from the distance, now that we're through/ I am still familiar to you, yesteryear, to you/ O you partner in my sorrow,/ something good I can point out to you...

Schelling to Hegel [Letter]

Schelling to Hegel


Cannstadt
July 11, 1803

. . . The saddest sight I've seen during my stay here was that of Hölderlin. Since his journey to France, where he traveled on Professor Ströhlin's recommendation with a completely false conception of what the duties of his position were to be, and whence he immediately returned again, since it appears that demands were made of him which he was incapable of fulfilling, and which were not compatible with his sensitivity --- since this unfortunate journey, his spirit has become completely disturbed, and although he has proved capable of a few works, such as the translations from the Greek, he is otherwise thoroughly absent of spirit. The sight of him was unsettling to me: he neglects his appearance to the point of repugnance, and though his speech is less suggestive of madness, he has taken on the outward mannerism of those in such a condition. There is no hope of being able to restore him to health here. I thought of asking you whether you would take care of him, were he to come to Jena, which he would like to do. He needs peaceful surroundings, and with attendant care would probably be set right. Whoever is willing to take care of him must thoroughly take charge, and must build him up again from the foundation. Were one victorious over his outward appearance, he would no longer be a burden, for he is quiet and withdrawn in himself.

Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum, Iocus Tibi Factus Es

In the most wearisome condition
That one could vividly picture
As though moving from one form of unknowing
To the other
A sempiternal age
Of replacement
Repetition
Without change
In the recollection of events

Humourless cynicism
In the image of life
Just about melting
Into a text
Weaving the umbilical cord
Of a groundless existence
That falls through the abyss
Of its own pivoting point
In anxiety
No longer knowing itself

Revealing knowledge
That one couldn't withstand
Like the Prophet
Staring into the flame
Uphill
And turning over
The water
From one moment of dignity
Into a paradox of history
Creating mankind anew
Without railways
That lead no place else
That do not sing echoes to anything

Sempiternal silence
Of civilization
Of urbanization
And only death
Brotherly
Makes a screeching noise
And laughs
Altogether
With the rest of the world
As the moment to grasp the idea
Flees as an owl
And returns
After dusk
In the motionless
Of unknowing prophecy

Breathless enchant
Tired au-voir
Of pleasant faces
And neurotic sights
In a refugee
Of wordly chasm
With so little ground
So little space
So much choking
Under a parabole
Under a metaphor
That contains only filth
That for a moment
It's turned into jade
To green the mellowing brooks
The yellowing brooks
Into piles of hay
And disappear
With everything else

No Hyperion can be heard from here
At the bottom of the earth
Whereby good meets evil
And turns his face away
In the blindness of azure lights
In the freedom of the Israeli
Bows to Gods and idols
Forgetting
Escaping
Imagining a different fate
One with so much less meaning
One without images of glory
Two sides
And a Roman owl
Protecting its lies
As though a shrine
To hide
To scream
To silence up
Before the major laughter
Before the blue Octavo

You've made a joke of your own suffering
A rather silly comedy
That sells in the stands
Without initials
Without characters
With a plot nowhere around
You've been like Eve again
Answering the question
No one had asked
In the nudity
Of your rootlessness
In the nudity
Of your father
Before a great narrator
Iterum
In such unearthliness
With the chains of heaven
Riding on your chariot
Begetting atonement
For the fatal mistake
Of those questions

Letter

Dear S.

It's a pity really I have to type this letter because I can't dictate you to anybody nor am I able to write it myself, usually with paper one's rather patient and can contain almost the whole of a person's life, like a "Buchlein". As you know by now I have to type because this is one of those ailing days in which one can hardly find comfort with himself and is watching the whole world as though he were in the tower of H., but the wintery tunes can just barely release the sights of the world and the mere stiffness of concepts starts flying across the horizons. As you suddenly ill in the lyrical age then perhaps you're alloted to see a little more but yet within your own boundaries. I didn't find it too satisfying you know... and had been pretty desconsolate myself until the little book of Rosenzweig appeared, that one which spoke about death. After I read it I think I understood better than ever how much we live in psychological times, the "self" age, as though Schelling had been one of our prophets.

Rosenzweig says in the little book that nothing can help dying, not even health! For as soon you enter the circle of natality (and you know from whom I've derived this expression) you're already dying, unless you choose death! (Although this might be already my actual own understanding of it)... "There's no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, had the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time. Health is on good terms with Death. It knows that when the Grim Reaper comes he will remove his stone mask and catch the flickering torch from the anxious and weary and disappointed hands of Brother Life; it knows that he will dash it on the ground and extiguish it, but it also knows that only then the full brilliance of the nocturnal sky will brightly glow. It knows that it will be accepted into the open arms of Death. Life's eloquent lups are put to silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: "Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother"; I think it's a wise book in every respect but I don't want to give you the creeps with all this talk about death, nonetheless I think each one of us should read that little book.

Somehow I can hardly think of it as a Jewish book because in a way it speaks with a certain security that is tantamount to anxiety, E. insists nonetheless that there's no anxiety in Jewish Thought which might be certainly true for the Rabbis but never for Rosenzweig or Arendt, both of whom thereby there's a certain kind of longing, a certain Messianic anxiety and this is a kind of sorrow "sector" that I can't exactly equate with either Christians or Jews, but rather with the painful Christianity of certain Jews; don't misunderstand me since I'm not speaking about "converted" Jews, it's something I can't quite explain to myself, yet I'm not longing for it... It'd destroy a very treasurable mystery. Most people wouldn't understand it, perhaps Ivan is the only one and even then I doubt it, perhaps he needs to read Hegel a little, no less than I need it though.... This security doesn't come willy-nilly, because it certainly doesn't come from the theology of the "last things", firstly because this in my opinion had very little to do with Jesus and second because the theology of hope (like in Moltmann and Bloch) is a reflected anxiety, therefore it could only come after modernity. That security is rather the metaphysical "identity" (or let's call it ontological) that one finds in the theologians, like Duns Scotus and the poems of Santa Theresa or St. John, St. Anselm, St. Augustine, etc. It is different since Schleiermacher and beyond, but he remains very important too.

In the other hand the region of sorrow isn't entirely Christian, because it resembles too much the poems of Zelda, who as you know was a very humble Ultra-Orthodox woman who had very little to do with the "West" Jewish narrative, like Dan Diner likes to call it. It's a very confusing matter, specially because it's not possible to know these things in advance and the questions don't even come up while you read, they often appear on everyday life or in those crucial moments when you reflect upon certain works of art and are trying to make up your mind on the aesthetical aspects; at times there's so little you can say and then you can only weave a thread of Midrash and connect everything so neatly.

This happened to me today as I went to the exposition (not intentionally, but as I searched for that fish restaurant) and was faced with the painting of Habib Sasson (an Israeli artist, don't know much about him myself) called "return, return back, oh Shulamit". It had been one of the most impressive pieces I had seen, you know? There was a woman with black hair and a long dress kneeling down and two men asfixiating her with a rope around the neck and pulling to different directions; yet there was something very strange about the scene... she didn't seem to resist too much nor they seemed to attack her, it all seems to go quite smoothly and in the spirit of mockery, bureaucracy and without any sense of humour. If there'd been only one man then I could've understood we spoke perhaps about Moses and Miriam or even one of the tales of Elie Wiesel. The two men looks quite estrangely different and differently similar at the same time (to speak here making good use of Hegel) but the relationship isn't one that Foucault or Freud could describe; then I remembered the name of the painting "return, return back" which in Hebrew is the same word for "repentance" and for "finding a ground". I think in the end the idea came to my mind, it was a Kafkean macabre picture: The two men were Celan and Heidegger, already during the former's visit to Todtnauberg Shulamit was long dead, but she had not died, taking away the "region of sorrow" that was replaced by the cosmis emptiness after Celan's own suicide.

You should see that painting, I didn't quite make too much sense of it really. I thought about this some other person you know? But it's different, because both Celan and Heidegger loved Shulamit, but in this case the ark couldn't be more indifferent to the bow and one needs to be a little Hegelian to be engaged in such deadly games. I've been reading some of the letters from Hoelderlin to Hegel, they're quite interesting and far from boring actually, what I like the most is H's telling of his own frail health and his frustration, his lack of interest in things and his desire to return to that tower... just right before he lost his mind. I could read all that in his poetry, even though when E. said that my take on Endymion was very paternal and therefore Catholic. I think I want to redefine it as Greek, but I don't quite succeed, I shall not dare. I also have my own frailty at the moment, but before we shall discuss it I'll await your next letter.

F.

02:59

My right leg hurts
From a lethargy of sleep
And a perverse memory
That can always remember
No matter how much
It would pay to forget
In a pathway of concrete
The ego of freedom
Of art

Hadn't I seen myself dying
I could easily withhold myself
From disagreeing with her
On that philosophy has a lot to do with poetry
Because it reminds me of God
Hanging from the gallows
Everyone else too
Except the young Dutchman
Who lingered for much longer

Yet it is seemly better than death
Tantamount to despair
Together with the calm perils
The tired eyes
Of the red-haired man
Hiring help for the world
Bribing silences
Building bridges
Between Meah Shearim and Rehavia

Calling you on the phone
With onerous tasks
That you perform only at night
Swallowing lights
As to uncover the leg that hurts
Raveling death at once
Seeking solace
In the distant past
From Mt. Zion

Perhaps you shall find shelter
Under the spell of Aquinas
Once the Shekhina has been uprooted
You find it existentially true
And meaningless therefore
You shall seek Orion
Two years later
From a Canaanite tower
And dream of Abendland

א ביסאלע

וי נעמט מען א ביסאלע מאזל?

וי נעמט מען א ביסאלע גליק?
דאס דרעדל זול זיך שון דריען
און ברינג מאין מאזל זיריק?
די וועלט איש באשאפן געבארן
פאר אלע מענטש גלייך
וי נעמט מען א ביסאלע?
יוכאס א ביסאלע
וי נעמט א ביסאלע גליק?
וי נעמט א ביסאלע?
יוכאס א ביסאלע
וי נעמט מען
א
ביסאלע
גליק?

How can one strike a little tad of good luck?
How to strike a tiny bit of happiness?
That the roulette shall run forth anew
And that my good luck will come back.
The world has been created
For all the same
Where can one find that little,
Even that tiny little,
Where can one find a tiny bit of happiness?
How can one strike a little,
Even is only a little bit
How to find
A
Little bit
Of happiness?

(Popular Jewish song)

"With a stone in my shoe", an unpublished novel by Diana Wang, translation from Spanish by Ari Akkermans-Amaya. Chapter I

Argentine, 1989

There were no margarine bits or caviar on table.
Nor waiters pouring fancy drinks in crystal glasses.
It was not Saturday, and by night one couldn't hear the usual music.
There were people, those we had known for a life time yet at the same time we couldn't find at all familiar. It wasn't one of those celebrations, at which we had always seen them. They stared at with a different intention, under another spell.
It was rather odd to see them at that hour, that day of the week, under such circumstance.
A Monday.
In the morning.
Mourning dad.

There was no bouquet over the coffin.
The coffin was solid, strong, of dark wood, relying on the window through which revealed itself a pale sunlight, almost European.
And the clouded, turbulent river in the distance.
There were no religious objects or the like. Dad wouldn't have taken pleasure in that.
Only the coffin. Closed. Of course.
There was nothing I could know about the folder then. There would have yet to pass three days. But, in a somehow mysterious fashion, it was present, there, in between the murmurs and the eye-glimpses.
Dad would have liked his funeral. Almost all his immigration mates had been there, his friend from the poker table, the wives, the widows.

That Monday morning death came around once again, and gathered them together as it was before, in Poland, hidden in forests, little hiding places and barns, fleeing frightened in between mud, snow, hunger and hopelessness, persecuted by the sorrow of those who had been left along the way. Parents, sons, boyfriends, friends, uncles, neighbors, work colleagues, cousins, foes, ex boyfriends, grandparents, teachers, counselors, had vanished together with photo albums, dried flowers, certificates. They fled bereft of almost all their pivoting points, empty of so much not understanding.
Without families or belongings, without perspective or strength, damaged and scared, but dangerously alive, they slowly slowly arrived to our port. And this country, contradictory no less than human nature, provided them with shelter through the same gate by which many of their victimizers were left in, the Nazis, accountable for so much. I see in the pictures from my earliest birthdays that bunch of resurrected men, so thin, with big eyes, breathless, a forced smile before the imminence of the flash and that –even today incomprehensible- terrifying will to live. They gathered once a week and spoke about the past. They remembered, but they were also dying to forget. Halina played the piano in a duet with Nusio on the violin. After the adagios and pizzicato, it was truly animated and then we started to sing. They started in Polish, with those European tangos at which I burst into laughter and finished with old songs in Yiddish. Moischale main fraint, Reisale, Papirosn, A Idishe mame, Vi nemten a bisale mazl, Warshe main, Oif'n pripetchek, Tumbalalaika, S'brent, Kinder iurn[1].... It was Roman who always started with "Hatikva" that we all sang along while standing. I had no idea it was the anthem of Israel. Nor did I know, it spoke about hope.
But those gatherings had been left in the past. In forty years, life led them through very different paths and they saw each other every time less often. They only stumbled upon each other, like that morning, in the funerals. Death brought them together. That old bride that they believed forlorn returned to collect her share; they had learnt to take her very seriously, without fear or solemnity.
I left the living room. The friendly voices went back to my childhood, to old odors that would come back and calm me down. I didn't accept their refugee. I went to dad's bedroom. I stared into his placard door, as usual well-locked. I sat down on his bed. Sank my face onto his pillow that still bore his smell. The room wasn't at all empty, his tobacco, his pipes, his lighter… I didn't cry. His absence wasn't yet obvious.
Thereafter, the journey to the cemetery.
Long awaiting at the entrance hall while the body was purified.
Then later the bewailing in Hebrew, atavistic, heartrending. A little walk to the place whereby he would find a burial place, close to the monument to the survivors. The rabbi, the davening and the penknife that opened a new ditch in a hidden spot of the clothing. The sound of the earth that falls down, dark and perfumed. Kissing good-bye.


Three days later, mom rang up:
- I've found something. I can't open it all by myself. Come.
We went. We refused to sit and eat the barley soup she had insisted in preparing and that were so fond of. There was something urgent in the air, we heeded and went to the bedroom.
Mom took the keys out of her handbag. She opened the left door of the placard. Pulled out a box that was also key-locked. She opened it. Took out of it a handful of keys. With one of them she opened the right door of the placard. (Dad's suits, the trousers, and his smell irrupting again...) There was a wooden box on the bottom, with a little key-lock. She took it in her hands, sat on the bed and proceeded to open the last key-lock.
My brother and me, hypnotized, just looked into the endless sequence of keys and locks that were opening as though mouths lined up, to finally, speak out.
Mom was leaning with a hand over the cover of the box.
- Dad told me "when I will die, I'm going be in this box". I don't know what he kept there, he never let me see, he said it belonged only to him.
With trembling hands she lifted up the cover.
I don't know what we expected to find. Her anticipatory words had created an almost unbearable expectation.
There was one folder, merely a folder. It was seemly of little significance. Which kind of things kept in such a flat little folder, could contain a whole life?
It was a cardboard folder, one of those with flaps. It had been grey, perhaps green; it no longer had almost any colour. The crumpled sides indicated it had been opened manifold times. It read "The Flint" and down, three empty lines. Nothing else.
We sat on the floor, by mom's feet, as though coming closer to the fire in a cold night. We could hear our own breathing. We were the whole world concentrated in what those hands would midwife from within the folder.
The first thing she pulled out was a poker or casino chip, a red one.
- He always said that life was a roulette-, remarks mom with kindness.
A bill from his carpentry workshop, with the logo that he had himself drawn, in red as well; my brother wasn't born yet, we had just arrived in Argentine; I remember him sitting by the kitchen table, covered with green oilcloth with red and orange flowers, trying out which drawing fit better…. Whether a table, a tiny writing desk, a bedroom set…, I remember when the first receipt books arrived with the final logo, I remember his pride at seeing written the pompous-sounding "Carpentry Factory"…
Later she took out a lock of blond hair tied with a little colourless ribbon, mine? My brother's?;
- I can't remember-, Mom said. Most probable my brother's. I don't believe they would have brought a lock of hair of mine from Poland. My brother's, he was born here after all. Certainly it should have been his.
At once appeared a white envelope. Within, my brother's diploma and my first professional card; we were meant to be more than carpenters or sewers.
Mom then took out a newspaper cut-out with the police note of "the accident" with our Mercedes and our names as survivors from the tragedy.
Then a mandolin cut out from a magazine.
-Like the one he had in Poland- Mom explained, after the saw mutilated his left index, he could never again play it.
-Look at this picture- said Mom- he had it taken when he dreamt of being an actor, with pressed cloth, suit and cigarette holder, on the stage, to sing and dance, that's something he loved… Look how attractive he looks in this picture…. He looked like a gentleman… he was boasting.
That was everything, it seemed. She took out the folder.
-There's something else here, she said when she found a wooden envelope lying at the bottom.
She opened it very slowly and then appeared some yellowing, cracked documents, written in Russian.
-The motorbike, she explained, the Skoda he had bought for himself after years of savings, the Russians relinquished it in 1941, when the Germans invaded, they came home and took it away, but they left these documents, "so that you shall claim it back when it all will be over": the technical inspection certificate, the official taxes and the relinquishing receipt; everything properly signed and stamped, poor thing, he could never forget about it.
A little Yiddish book with a man's sad face picture on the cover.
-The lyrics of Gebirtig songs-, Mom smiled while she caressed the pages as though she heard his voice, -if he would have had it at the hiding place, so much he wanted to learn them by heart, but he never had a good memory, he only remembered the beginning and ended with a tararara... when everything was over, he found the little book in an old bookstore in Krakow and bought it as treasure, I don't know, like a symbol of whatever it was he was recovering. Gebirtig's songs....
She turned back to us and now pulled out a little notebook with an orange cover meticulously written in Polish.
-The songs, what I had told you before, our guide whispered, -the songs he wrote when we were in hiding, he was afraid to forget them…. We had to do something, to keep ourselves busy, he insisted; songs from school, the fashionable tangos of the time, the theater plays in Yiddish… he said that he must have them for when we will be free, that he would sing again…- And then she stopped. Turning the page, the stage shifted, another drawing, another climate, another hand-writing, a nervous calligraphy.
-It's my writing-, and she was left in still reading those words… We wanted to know. She then explained: -we were desperate, hearing the planes full of bombs fly over us, we couldn't escape and had to remain stale, in silence, no one should know where we were, it seemed as though the whole world had disappeared..., there was no future, only fear. The Russians were battling, that Stalin could save us, we depended on him... I wrote him a letter-.
- To Stalin?- we asked.
-Yes, to Stalin. I explained him, told him we hadn't done anything, that we didn't know why all this was happening to us, that we had never attacked anybody, that we didn't know how to defend ourselves, that someone had to come and do something, that we were lonesome and frightened, that he would please help us, he shall send the Red Army, to finish off those murderers!... Look from whom I was asking, he himself a murderer… But what did we know back then? He was our only salvation.
We didn't dare ask whether the letter had been ever sent. We couldn't, because right then, she took out the last three objects that the envelope kept.
We had seen them in the movies so often that they had already become familiar.
-Yes, these were ours-, she answered to a question no one had asked as she handed over to us the white sailcloth bracelets with the star and the numbers in blue. She couldn't go on talking either. Then pulled out, from the bottom at the very bottom of the envelope and out of that memory that death brought to light, a little sock or perhaps a sewn woolen slipper, we couldn't see it well, she pressed it against her nose and inhaled deeply; embraced to it, closed her eyes and just breathed. There was no need to say anything. We knew what it was about, we knew it was the only thing left from that son they had to give away so that he would survive and that they lost forever. We embraced with her around our lost little brother, and around dad, who had kept these treasures so that we could begin to know.

"When I will die, I'm going to be in this box" dad had told you.
Dad had dreamt. He was always so careful. Always a step ahead of what could happen.
Not only that he was in the box. There's much more inside. There was a wish, a permission. To open it was for me like plundering into that certain somewhere that hadn't been possible, to see things that I had never seen before, to know and to listen about events that craved to be questioned about and wouldn't dare ask, mom, I could never have, you know?... My desire to know wasn't clear at all. Clouded, blurry as that sight one's got as he awakens, as when one's just wept, as when one's sleepless. I wanted and I didn't want to know. I was afraid to open scars that seemed healed. I was afraid to penetrate beyond and violate, disturb a holy precinct. I was afraid of being afraid. I preferred to be unaware, to be an accomplice of that mockery we placed that everything was alright, that everything will be alright, that it's always been that way.
The box granted me permission. Dad's box wherein he believed he was therein alone. To see pulling out all those witnesses of the past that had been suspended as though an invisible roof over our everyday life, it made me see that the scars were not such, that the wounds subsisted, that else how in a mysterious way everything had been like it was then, that the past had never gone anywhere, but had been rather betrayed, bribed as to bother the least possible but however present, imperturbable, haunting, awaiting for me, challenging me.
Like Eve of the 20th century, I let myself be tempted by the serpent, disturbed about the past and I decided to plow, right therein, at the core of an uncertain but necessary apple of knowledge.
Yes mom, that's how I started to ask you.

1] Popular Yiddish songs.

Epiphany

To Fifi and Elfi, my teachers

I

Epiphany comes
In a veil of vain lust
Procrastinating between Jerusalem and Auschwitz
And I found her, in the morning
Wearing the heavy glasses of time
Reminding me of unearthly procedures
Of human faces
Of mechanical production
In the body of a young man
Like Celan
With the ashes of Shulamit
And the gray hair of Margaret's curls
The bridge between Grittli and us
In a world spirit
That could for one explain
So much burdensome homelessness
In the midst of our own tents
Thy name Jacob,
Then thy name Israel
Slightly comic
In Auschwitz
In Budapest
In Jerusalem
The three names
Like a Holy Trinity
For the perverted memory
Vienna
Budapest
Auschwitz
They all fall into the grammar
Of Jerusalem
In her mourning
That has become evicted
That has become lawful
And Jerusalem,
You contain all the names in the world
The name that I wore
With pride
As I was being led toward dying
In the aftermath of my birth
A twilight of life
Instead of death
In the faceless unchosenness
Of Shulamit and Margaret
Somewhere drowning in the Seine
Or elsehow in the frontier with Spain
Nearing Todtnauberg

II
She knew about that strangesome feel
E. as well
She knew it in Jerusalem
Like we all did
Turning the waters from all the Noahs in the world
Into their mightiness again
And for good
In a moment of nothingness
As we entered the emptied out chapel
Without rejoicing
Stale like the stones
As though before the waters choked
And the primeval time stopped
In sempiternal momenta
That created the gaps
Between our names
Replacing them with crosses
And with silences
Right therein
At the top of the hill
From where they all walked
Toward their deaths
Namelessly
Without dying
Bereft of speech
Creating unpresences
From old essences
That no longer walk
But rather lead themselves
In a macabre spell
To Plato's cave
Paradise turned upside down
On the firm earth
Wet from the outrage
Of silent screams
Crosses
And their speeches

III

Oh Endymion
How troubled I had been in those years
Half-standing by the gates
Near the railways
When I found out
You were not my father
That I had not seen you even once
At the tower
In Tuebingen
Or Heidelberg
And only here
In Jerusalem
That contains all the names in the world
I could make sure
That I remember all the hymns
And the supplications
That you sang for me
As I played with your father
In the eternal world
From where you vomitted me
In front of the gates
That would seal
The stamp
Of my noble birth

IV

Auschwitz was the only name
That I could pronounce then
Because it contained Jerusalem as well
And I remembered the learning halls
And the philosophies
Which watered down as his fingers were cut
And only a faintly truth remained
After the course of the trains had changed
In Breslau
No longer from Athens to Jerusalem
Since that day
The only journey
Alloted to us
In the roulette of life
Was indeed
From Auschwitz to Jerusalem
Whereby all roads meet
And one truth chops the head of the other
As though Lessing had been one of our prophets
And him
Our older brother
Had told us
One should not fear
Because the bridges had been broken
Ever since Jena
And we could no longer speak
Without mourning
That is exactly why
Auschwitz and Jerusalem
Today
Mean just about the same
In a comic way
Too much this-worldly
To sound funny at all
When you have been an exilee
Ever since those days
When you have already forgotten
The mother tongue
And then
All musings and mournings
Are bad translations
Bad mornings
Nighting away
With the same name

The Death of the "Other" in Paul Celan (First After-Thought on the Ark)

"Todesfuge", 1944

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus und spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr anderen singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen

Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

I

It is not simple to write musings on Celan under the present circumstances, for one would like after all, to subscribe to that philosophical consolation of old; yet the bridges have been broken, and with them Hegel and all possible "polis envy" have disappeared from sight as though they clouded in the snow and became faintly dim. Elsehow there's that primal need for an interlocutor, to summon Socratic conversations in which it is still possible to love the world unconditionally, it is a dialogue without partners and I cannot even rely on myself too much risking a certain touch of banality that has become a cluster in the everyday speech of our generation. Yet this everyday speech doesn't mean the language of everyday life, a distinction we owe to Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy in that language is distinct from world, even though by speaking we engage in a sort of world-building process, that altogether seems to be greatly hindered firstly since our expulsion from Paradise in the beginning of mankind, and followed by a deathly blow at a time when the world had been destroyed just as we knew it; despite everything things returned to normality, but this is only the surface... Hegel and Heidegger are very enlightening at this point when one says that as soon as you remove the "Grund" (foundation) of our freedom in community, which is communicability, we are immediately facing the "Abgrund" (abyss); because the freedom itself couldn't be the whole foundation for the world. The Jewish sages often said that the world was based on three pillars; in one account it is told they meant the Law, the Sacrifices (in the Temple) and Love (they actually meant "Charity", but this hardly holds the same meaning in the tradition of Christian thought that furnished us with the word "Charity", from the Augustinian "caritas" that in its alleged worldlessness comes rather far from the Biblical "Love Thy neighbour like yourself", beautifully expounded by Hillel, who was seemly uninterested in the ontology of beings and was perhaps in quoting this text, relating the life of the mind to the life of the community[1] - in a way similar to that of Hannah Arendt and Eveline Goodman-Thau).

Of course our tradition of continental philosophy (which I openly hold onto as my own, in the spirit of Karl Jaspers) since Plato (not Socrates or Jesus) emphasized the two-in-one (an innermost duality) causing a dichotomy in man's way of thinking (I shall not say mankind, for this is in itself a term as abstract as "everyday life" has been for Marxism) that set forth an incurable entimity between politics and philosophy, or between action and thought to establish a paradigm of generalization necessary for the sake of discourse. From the story of Plato's Cave and Diotima through Augustine and in our days with Gillian Rose's "Love's Work" and the Aesthetics of Lukacs, love has been mind-informed by philosophy whenever an adequate concept must be arrived at, whereas politics, namely the practical politics, has remained preposterously adrift from the philosophical conversations of our times; odd fact whose consequences can be seen clearly in the outcome of Western history for the last hundred years at least, the philosophical "error" that Hermann Cohen set to mend and that many others after him have followed, with a crucial junction in Hannah Arendt and her beautifully phrased "Politics is love applied to life". Such concepts which sprang from the "philosophical revolution of the 1920's" (to use Cassirer's wording) would have been entirely alien to the long centuries of Christian thought on the background of Aristotle, all the way down to Leibniz, Hegel and Fichte.

This is a particular mode of thought which still puzzles most of us today, specially in the light of our present circumstances under which nothing could pose more of a threat to the actual live of denizens in democratic states than the making of actual politics; altogether Arendt also wrote to Scholem in the 1960's (as well as in different articles addressing issues of the Blacks in the USA) that love is something that must be kept for the private, because the love of people is usually an oppresive affection on the basis of qualities which are akin only to oppressed peoples indeed, and that do not survive the momentum of their liberation even for five minutes. But this is not a simple riddle, as Kafka in "The Castle" is keen in letting us see how in his expulsion from Paradise, man has lost his name (his characters go mainly by initials), his language (there's no real communication) and his love (only sex remains); only to be reinforced by Foucault, who speaking the language of modernity says that in our times the clusters of judgement have become rather blurry, therefore good-bad-evil has been replaced by normal-abnormal-pathologic. It doesn't come willy-nilly of course, but as Arendt and Heller have expounded, it is the result of "science" becoming the winner "world-view" of our times, and religion (altogether with the traditions bound with it) the defeated one. In the light of this loss, which is experienced in its raw form by modern men and women, it is no longer possible to seek alternative refugee in a metaphysical sort of existence, neither to destroy the space for reflexion altogether; for in doing so one would do away with both reality and essence, which is actually what has happened in the last phase of "modernity", which I would dare to call "modern postmodernity". Yet in this very age, the concern with both "exile" ontologies and the realities of reality, has never been greater. Paradoxically enough, it is all within the discourse of a quest for meaning, which for Gavriel Motzkin is in fact, a denial of human freedom. It seems that the death of the "subject" preached by some of our "postmodern" philosophers sounds indeed like a hoax, for concern with "Selves" and "Beings" couldn't be any greater, both of which fail to address the actual needs of modern men and women, that can only be addressed through a "modification" of the conditions under which the yoke of everyday life is lived, so that eventually a social change could be effectuated under non-totalitarian means, namely without the secularization of old myths and their messianic elements that have promised heaven on earth, of course on condition of the elimitation of certain "others" that are not Selves or Beings but people of flesh and bones. Stalinism, Nazism and Islamism are only the modern ambassadors of such threats that have visited Western mankind since the earliest beginning, not to mention Anti-Semitism, which demands a much more intrincate discussion of religious, political, social and cultural concepts. "Interesting times are always a curse", so goes the Chinese adage, favourite to Arendt.

Beings and Selves have not actually sprung out of these interesting times (despite Heidegger and his followers magicians), but have remained at the backbone of our historical memory. Beings are actually a Platonic cul-de-sac and the philosophical beginning; one can see for example no such a concept existed in Judaism until the Hellenistic age and the Rabbis seemed to have been more interested in practical politics than in metaphysical divagations, in fact the Romantic idea of this unphilosophical religious canon was the strongest motif behind Harvey Cox's "The Secular City". Some scholars have argued that the "Self" is a cultural invention as old as the Biblical and Classical canons, and "Being" a more contemporary philosophical heritage; in my humble opinion they're utterly wrong, for philosophically speaking I cannot locate the "Self" (not in the context of "Beings" but of "Individuals") earlier than Kierkegaard, who in fact was responding to Hegel's totalized view of man that continues the monistic tradition that to holds so little interest for philosophers concerned with the issues of the day, those I shall refer to as "existential phenomenologists of politics". By this I mean thinkers concerned with concrete worldly artifacts whose description entails such a complex interweaving of concepts (genealogy) that eventually leads them to develop fragments of philosophy, there're actually, let me say, existential epistemologists of politics as well. As much as they differ in opinions I would place Arendt, Goodman-Thau and Jonas with the former, and Heller, MacIntyre and Bloch with the latter. Juncture at which I am again able (despite myself) to turn to Goodman-Thau and Heller, in my musing about Paul Celan's poem. Not without saying that the foundations of hermeneutic philosophy as it stands today with its major thinkers has an underlying motif at the core, in exercising a radical critique of Hegel in particular and of Historicism in general; namely the divorce of philology and the cultural sciences from philosophy, which has in fact turned philosophy into a rather sterile discipline and at the same time has left the cultural sciences bereft of any philosophical heritage that could prove itself fruitful in the quest for enabling political action through thinking, once again relating the life of the mind to the life of the community.

II

On Decent Philosophy and the Pride of Thinking

A lot of pivoting questions have arised as of late, questions that evidently bear the stamp of an after thought - namely of something that hasn't been thought of ex nihilo but rather bears the weightful chain not of the tradition but of the experience in everyday situations; to use the better refined language of Jaspers: "borderline situations". I'm certainly interested in philosophical questions, but not those that belong in the realm of philosophy but rather those that border on "philosophizing" - as an activity, a process; namely a mode of action for philosophy, that of exercising a critique of culture in the sense of Lessing: a world-building activity that prescribes modes of political action, especially the judgement in everyday situations, either borderline or not, and the existential choice of oneself for a decent person.

Roseznweig wrote to Mennecke, expressing his growing interest in "questions asked by human beings", instead of mere intellectual discourse... that as in Jaspers, is unable to pose questions in the language of necessity (and here we have to return to Marx a little bit only to leave him altogether for good) and doesn't enable the "communicability" necessary to establish the language of judgement and responsibility that can safeguard the course of Modernity; in general philosophy even lacks the "attitude" to be this-worldly and in a sense the old dogmas of myths and fantasies have only become secularized by the Godess-of-Reason, which as someone pointed out, had been already buried by Kant before the French actually heard of her at all.

This convinced me even more than before that the next school of Existential Philosophy will be that of "Hermeneutics of Everyday Life", a subject that has been in public discourse perhaps since Weber but that actually no one had formalized or coined before my teacher and my own person. A philosophical revolution that started with the Exodus philosophers (this term belongs to Gillian Rose), Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (specially the latter, even though I'm particularly closer to the former) and was "completed" (only in the sense that its ideas became de-radicalized) with Cassirer and then officially with Jaspers, despite Heidegger's contribution to the discussion which is secondary to none, for it was him who shifted the attention of thought from Existentialist philosophy (which to this idea remains a French school of literature and philosophy without much influence in history of ideas - other than the recognition of a break in the tradition that happened sidedly with the Enlightenment and saw its peak in a negation of itself in the most Hegelian fashion: The Holocaust) to Existential philosophy.

What is at stake here is not a mere philosophical system, but the whole existence of modernity at large and per se the political consequences of thinking, which has hardly been considered a too respectable object of inquiry for modern philosophy, even despite the progress achieved in the fields of political and moral philosophy. There are no longer issues of Thought separated from Action, the old Cartesian model has been long dead altogether with the totalized view of Idealism and its imaginary flights that caused the "philosophical error" on which the Enlightenment had been built creating the most lonesome of all possible existence for men under the yoke of everyday life. This philosophy can only that of the decent type, boasting more than philosophical discourse the mere pride of thinking, unburdened and without a bannister. No other people I've heard of who embodied this decency than Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Karl Jaspers; while at the same time no other people whom I've known have embodied this decency more than Eveline and Agnes, my teachers.

"Was ich bei Ihnen gelernt habe und was mir in den folgenden Jahren half, mich in der Wirklichkeit zurechtzufinden, ohne mich ihr zu verschreiben, wie man sich frueher dem Teufel verschrieb, ist, dass es nur auf die Wahrheit ankommt und nicht auf Weltanschauungen, dass man im Freien leben und denken muss und nicht in einem noch so schoen eingerichteten "Gehaeuse", und dass die Notwendigkeit in jeder Gestalt nur der Spuk ist, der uns locken moechte, eine Rolle zu spielen, anstatt zu versuchen, irgenwie ein Mensch zu sein."

Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers
"Sechs Essays", 1948

Ich weiss

ICH WEISS

Ich weiß, daß ich bald sterben muß
Es leuchten doch alle Bäume
Nach langersehntem Julikuß –
Fahl werden meine Träume –
Nie dichtete ich eine trüberen Schluß
In den Büchern meiner Reime,
Eine Blume brichst du mir zum Gruß –
Ich liebte sie schon im Keime.
Doch ich weiß, daß ich bald sterben muß.
Mein Odem schwebt über Gottes Fluß –
Ich setze leise meinen Fuß
Auf den Pfad zum ewigen Heime

-Else Lasker-Schueler

I don't know when this poem was written and I'm tempted to try and find out, with the only hope it wasn't in Jerusalem a few months before the end of the war, the poem is actually a rather beautiful musing and an embracement of something I cannot describe, that most often is related to childish imagination and cold memories; like escaping into a forest next to that enormous cold lake and breathe in the venomous clean air on a certain day when my cousin ran after me. The poem has a little modernist vagueness which I like, especially because it's charged with humour. I shall not write too much in the forthcoming months, fearing to lose sight of myself.

I just know with some vague certainty that the obssessive imagination of death, perhaps not of your own, but of death in general is the founding principle of any possible philosophical reflection; just like the painter imagines his death on the canvas, the philosopher cannot but return to this idea as though he knew the exact moment of his departure. It is pointless to escape the Platonic reflection that teaches one that the only possible aim of philosophy is to teach man the wisdom of death, namely to learn how to die. This is only under the assumption one would believe there's anything to be learnt at all and whether this has a connection at all to our worldly experiences.

Not sure if this discussion is entirely relevant in the secular philosophies, that have for long lost sight of their own objects of description, and the subjects themselves are everything but dead. We take a slight distance from the pivoting point of our thoughts in order to create worldly spaces and as Bloch said, to establish the unparadoxicality of philosophizing namely in intimately tying our critical philosophy to the political action of the everyman. It is my opinion that it is only possible in critical philosophy and deconstruction, as to build the bridges destroyed by the decline of the Greek world and the deadly blow set on the forehead of dialectic philosophy.

Here I return to my communist painter in that "you've become the eternal motif of all my paintings", shifting my attention towards the poor sad Morgenland. It's a life of eternal moral conflict, in which everything you can ever teach or learn in the Socratic way can only tear you to pieces. But that's what you've chosen for yourself, the paradox of being a modern man... The ethical murderer, and the ethical dyer.

Philosophy needs an addressant, like you have in letters, it needs a thorough humanization and personification that can distance us a little bit from Kant's sad world. It doesn't occur to me at all how this can become possible other than re-poetization. Ofer insists that my thoughts on freedom remain extremely Protestant and Puritan, because a certain portion of everyday life can in fact be chosen - which is true, nevertheless there is no rationale for it in the traditions of philosophical discourse except in that you can actually choose to end your life, both knowingly and unknowingly and this could actually prove not rationally but hermeneutically that Agnes Heller got it right when she spoke about the spiritual center of modern life, specially when addressing the question on how something so fragile and with so little spirituality can survive; that more than often becomes a theoretical question because this is in fact the only strength that modern life really has, even though this has to be refined and de-Hegelianised in order to become a value, in that it can only be relativized.

Diary of Shame

O reckless traveler, have you exchanged your shame afresh?

Perhaps also your creatureliness and otherness for a chemical mirror?

You shall no longer fall under this spell

Or believe their lies

It is necessarily sad

You cannot choose yourself for world-survival

For it then dawns upon you one day

When no one glimpses into you

And the fear of immortality

Seems rather unbearable

Untenable, unmiserable and unchoosen

You wish to paint a black spot on your eye

That encounters more than it searches

Right in the middle

Desirably estranged by pangs of birth

That bring no thing into the world

But transform you

Into the nightly navigator

No longer able to locate Orion

Or Aurora

The Church II (Mario)

Before I had reached my first pivoting point I had never felt sorry for myself, in fact the first time I did I should have been old enough as not to be able to feel sorry for myself anymore, it was just a way to feel things that had been already forsaken, it wasn't for the sake of rememberance, but more for the sake of time. On my way to the pivoting point I came back to the church, in a place so entirely different than my own; there I couldn't experience much of a religious feeling, not the hypocrisy or the common misery of all, the songs were a little empty and even the choir director resembled more a summer camp swimming instructor than an actual choir director. As you entered the church you immediately felt betrayed, the squared building (which looked more like a government building) had several tiny classrooms in the ground floor and a chapel upstairs adorned in a very Protestant style, wearing no other jewelry than a large wooden cross and refusing to host in any mysteries.

Right outside the church there was a large fence and a small concrete yard used often to play basketball, in short there was nothing there that could inspire one to think about anything other than submission and punishment, not even salvation would occur to you in a sudden sinking bliss. Yet at the social time this church did mean a significant social improvement and sooner than I had expected worldlessness and hypocrisy returned as though they had been disguised into something else just not to spare me the surprise to find them anew. The community had rather puritan leanings and it befit me just so well right in a period in which I had left all my puritan longings behind, so in order to confirm myself as a Catholic properly I used to escape the services to hide in the toilet and smoke and self-please myself soon thereafter returning immaculate to the service, almost proud of my mortal sins. Because of my boredom at school and time wasted in libraries reading serious books I enjoyed the church also because of Sunday School for Youth Ministry; there we had first Mr. Lunnen, one of the many American diplomats that would be part of our church and a rather wealthy man, very well built but already in his fourties. The class wasn't very interesting and there was but little one could learn, time in which I might say I could have missed the brothers at the French School but such a thought didn't occur to me at the time.

The Lunnens invited me over very often and I ate the most delicious food I can remember from the whole of my childhood, with the only exception of my aunt's mother-in-law's Christmas cooking. I enjoyed their company very much because it felt a little homely and not exceedingly artificial like when I sat with my father to watch TV, they weren't the most intelligent people but at least I could practice my English and well somehow play the pariah again, with all my "respectable" acquaintances. Their sons stroke me as rather stupid and tasteless except the middle one but I can't remember his name, I think he was the closest to a friend I had from the Lunnen's yet I put up with my act so that I could visit often enough without raising suspicions of being almost homeless in the spiritual and familiar sense. That as long as they didn't watch movies, then I had to run away and spend some time at the park or watching young people passing by and imagining someone would come to talk to me and "enact" a thoroughly revolutionary friendship or I could as well find my way down the hill to the German Institute and watch a movie or spend sometime in the library; there were two people I have some memories of: Sabine Ringler was first the secretary at Goethe's and then became an official at the Swiss Embassy where one of my first and most loyal penpals worked, Frau Christine Fischer, the cultural attache; of course she wouldn't be as helpful and patient as Herr Oliver Urban, who had the same position at the German Embassy.

The other person was Maik Mueller, who happened to be a friend of Till from Germany and someone I actually happened to admire at the time. This turns a little comic because years later my friend Daniel had an internship for his law studies in Haifa and he happened to be a friend of this Maik who comes from a god-forsaken place called Rostock in the East of Germany. Had I met this Maik only a couple of years later I could have said he belonged to one of those categories of people I would even refuse the privilege of sociability; it shows how funny young people can be sometimes. Not only this Maik became an outspoken faggot but quite a simple and pointless character, one of those that are often deleted from plays in later editions of the original script. But then again I might have got this wrong too because it seems to me I was acquainted with him while I was still at St. John's and way before my second partnership with Rome, nonetheless these details fit in perfectly in speaking about Lunnen. His wife was a pretty neurotic character and tireless chatterbox, possibly never becoming intimate with anybody and rather a saver of the humanrace herself, certainly not in the fashion field I can attest. I think their home was one of my first attempts at renewing my vows with the consumption of pork which I had broken since severing ties with my father, it wasn't long lived though.

Robert Lunnen was the first person I spoke to about my sexual orientation but of course, like most young people do, I did it using this "a friend of mine asked me that...." which might have been revealing of everything at the time, but I couldn't know this too well. This was also the time when I became knowingly aware of my Jewishness but that's a story I still can't write because there're many details missing and I shall speak to my parents before I can reconstruct this story and in any case, I didn't think there was any connection between one's religion and aggresive church attendance, because the church after all was about sociability and not about religion. It was about double morality, not about vocations. Yet at this point it becomes important only in order to show that contingency and the unpredictability of one's telos can down upon you very early in life.

At the church I met Mario (not my good friend of later years, that was when I entered the International School) and I can't exactly remember how; he was presumably a very snobbish kid and perhaps a year younger than me, a Mexican too. I believe we became acquainted at some youth group and the first memory I have from spending time together was a certain day climbing up the walls of a church to go and smoke pot right after Sunday school, a third guy might have been there with us but I can't remember that too well. I don't recall many details from those days but I know they were terribly intense and confusing, perhaps I was in fact in love but I don't know. He used to be a rather wild character and not very good at school but very popular everywhere and one of those kernels of sophistication I would form in my mind for long years. He used to have a girlfriend but I can't remember her name at all, and I do remember well his apartment in downtown and his parents; it was a very small apartment and his room was very warm and typical of a guy his age, so totally unlike mine, so large and cold and bookish yet totally lacking personality and overlooking nothing more than a very old grocery store and a very pauper street.

He had two friends who became my friends too, two sisters from another city and one of them extremely beautiful and not very devoted or intelligent. Mario and me had the most spectacular conversations you can think of, perhaps it wasn't like my days with Till but there was something really whimsical about it other than him being an extremely beautiful man. Only two scenes remain that can't be washed by the weight of the years of adulthood; once we had been late at night in the house of the two girls playing games and throwing pillows at one another, for some reason (perhaps part of a game) they closed themselves in the room and both of us stayed outside in the dark. I can't recall anything about the conversation but it might have been something rather embarrassing and at least for me frightening but I do remember myself standing up in the dark and having a long kiss with him even though I was self-assured about him having a girlfriend and not sure at all about myself; that was my first French kiss. I had been very hopeful there would be a continuation but soon thereafter I think his mother called and we ought to return to his flat and there I slept but nothing happened other than a very bitter conversation which slept away in disappointment.

From that point on I think I saw him more often than I would have expected but less than I wished, and even one day I simply went away with him and his family to their countryhouse and had one of the happiest times in several years (we didn't go for holidays too often and when at all, it was rather lame and pained), I remember his mother wasn't around at the time and only his father looked after us, which was like having a statue look after us. We didn't go to the city I believe but we ate together everyday and even play in the pool until very late at night. One day (which is the source of my second story) his father thought it would be really nice to take a mud bath; he was an homeopatic pharmacist and a rather exquisite and large person, in the social meaning of the word. That day we slept in a different wing of the house and I remember coming downstairs to shower and wash off the mud; perhaps I had a terrible argument with Mario and as I walked into the shower he did as well and tried to calm me down and kiss me again; not sure what came out of it but that's all I can remember. That night we listened to music until very late (I still have some favourite songs from him) and fell asleep, can't recall if perhaps I shed some tears that night, it's very possible. Nor I remember the letters that I wrote him or he to me, but I knew there are more than a few; I had always been a prolific writer, and he had also presented me with a copy of Shakespeare's "Midsummer's Night Dream", but this also might be false, perhaps it was another play. The day after the mud episode we returned back to the city.

I think it should have been fun with him in the city too but don't have memories of what we did that day, perhaps sooner or later I found myself in his home giving him another present, maybe a bottle of maple syrup I got from Canada and then I had this delicious meal which reminded me of the Lunnen's but in a totally different context because at the time I think I was definitely in love with Mario, and he was to blame. Next I betrayed my household and escaped back to his countryhouse expecting to spend both Christmas and Silvester with him but he treated me quite badly at the time and I felt obligued to return only two days later with his brother, I remember not liking him too much but he had been very generous in inviting me to share some pot. Before the trip back we also had pizza together, the three of us in some large restaurant in the town and I can very well remember having said something about the way Germans eat their pizza, perhaps something I learnt from Till or I just had invented it. I might have seen Mario perhaps very scarcely after that and one day he just disappeared; I went to this home and rang the bell many many times, but I never received an answer. One day I met his father (I might have taken a ride in his car, he really liked me, this old man) and he told me he had returned to Mexico with his mother. I wasn't heart broken though, and for some time we emailed; I remember well this e-mail about the movies he had seen which had been exactly my same favourite movies of the time, "La Vie Revee des Angels", a Spanish movie about a love story between Spain, Finland and Germany in a town called "Rovaniemi", whereby the Polar Arctic Circle starts, and also "Magnolia", whose music I listen listen to today.

One day I received a phone call from his friend, that beautiful girl, telling me that he was in town and had wanted to see me very much but he never contacted me. A couple of years later when I was already through my pivoting point and on my way to Israel I happened to meet a certain guy from the church who was perhaps who introduced us formally in the beginning; he told me at the time he heard Mario had "become" Jewish in Mexico. This wasn't a very weightful thing to hear at the time but now in retrospective it holds all possible meaning in the world, because contingency in human beings keen to make their own life choices, can be something so daunting that it might be perhaps shared from far away in the distance by friends and loves of younger years.

Sometime before or after (it might be years even) I went out to rollerskate with the Lunnens and found myself resting in front of the synagogue; I couldn't bother to look into very much but it had some power to attract me with the madness of drunkenning tiles. I had seen a boy standing there with a skullcap that very much reminded me of Mario, but it wasn't him. Digging into my memories I remember him showing me a framed picture of his father's grandfather who had been an immigrant from England - a very rare thing at the time; I also remember his curls, his eyes and some kind of dark irresponsible sensuality about him all. This is not precisely what I've found in myself but I look into him now by remembering my friends of later years and it no longer strikes me with oddity him being a Jew, like me. As I said, contigency can be sometimes so burdensome that it can be even shared by friends; the most powerful memory I have of him isn't the stories I just accounted for, but his smell... which years later I found in F., and then in Ofer and lastly on myself, as though it had been accursed on me by our common telos. I can only help myself by remembering all this precisely when the chips are down and we're summoned for judgement, for the care of the world, for responsibility, for accountability even. While I was in yeshiva in Jerusalem I might have prayed a certain night while he uttered the same prayers somewhere else, the idea that such could be possible, saved me from endlessness and recklessness and unknowingly sealed my pivoting point once again.