Begegnungen - Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Wo ist das Entzücken des Ruderers auf dem dunklen See? In ihm oder in dem Beschauer - dem Wanderer der die Gewitterwolke sieht und den Gischt aufbrausen hört oder in dem Falken der nichtachtend dahinstürmt? In dem Fischer der seine Netze hereinnimmt und sein Herdfeuer sieht zwischen den Netzstangen? In dem Knaben der eins ins Schilf gelegte Tonne zunagelt und durch Gitter hineinspäht?

Where is the delight of the rower in the dark lake? Is it in him or in the observer - in the wanderer who sees the cloud of the thunder storm and hears the spray flaring up, on in the falcon that in dishonor squalls? In the fisherman pulling back his net and seeing the fire in his hearth between the rods of the net? In the boy hidden in the reeds, nailing a barrel shut and peering in through the grating?

Es könnte viel bedeuten - Ingeborg Bachmann

Es könnte viel bedeuten - wir vergehen

wir kommen ungefragt und müssen weichen.

Doch dass wir sprechen und uns nicht verstehen

und keinen Augenblick des andren Hand erreichen.

zerschlägt so viel: Wir werden nicht bestehen.

Schon den Versuch vedrohen fremde Zeichen,

und das Verlangen, tief uns anzusehen,

durchtrennt den Kreuz, und einsam auszustreichen-

It could mean much - that we should not last

we are coming uninvited and then must be passed.

Though we are speaking, but understanding, we can´t

and never a moment, in another hand, we can hold steadfast

So much as battered - upright we shalln´t stand.

Already effort and might, twisted with oh´s and and´s,

and the craving, tearing through the Cross with a hand

To look deep into our hearts, in solitarily withstand.

Farewell to Tundama Ortiz

"Illusie"

Niet om afscheid te nemen,

Of om mij op reis te begeven,

ben ik het station ingegaan,

maar om tussen de mensen te staan

die voor een bestemming leven,

om ergens heen te gaan.

[To the train station I went,

Not to begin a journey myself,

Or even to bid you farewell,

But to stand between all people

Who are living for some goal

For a somewhere to go.]

- Ed Hornik, 1960

"Does he learn like a god or like a stone? I can't be befouled, it's a tale about seduction", led astray from my own metaphors of preoccupation, I couldn't be sure at the time of what he meant, as Tundama greeted me in the jolts of the day when I could no longer turn my attention to the choices between trees, but it was him perhaps the only loyal comrade in my Prussian battlefield where the language of the powers that be laid slain and beheaded under the sign of a volcano. The sights had been very pleasurable in spite of my cold feet and the numbing greys that hovered over the hole in my shoe as a healing malaise, replacing every wound with a different color of sore - Ten years back I had assembled myself just as comfortably as Raphaël in the certainty of the instruction of the wisest minds, weighing heavily toward the obligation of truth and rowing against a tide of possible questions that kneeled down before the curiosity of men with arrogant defiance; the fissures in the skin of the poet had grown thinner and thinner, watered down by the raving impulse of laughter, he could not longer afford the mad frenzy of the notebooks and found little pleasure in this wisdom, that of its own accord now resembled more the map of a shipwreck than a travel plan. Yet so many thousands of kilometers, I thought, the places remain unchanged by the will of man more than by the time, this merciless and godly enemy of the body.

It was an illusion in its own right to re-live the past merrily and without tiredness, awake in the nightmare of the mirror without falling in the water, chancing alike into the eyes of friend and foe rather than a self-inspection and in avoidance of guilt - guilt not about death, you're guilty of nothing but unhappiness. But how beautiful these illusions are when they do not come at the expense of contemplation but in the exercise of the most cruel maturity of language already blinded to the flamboyance of the demands of history and ever returning, even ten years later, after a battle fought with the war, to lay peacefully on the grass that grows toward the present and is prescient with gifts of adoration offered not to the men of this earth but to the Janus-faced skin of god and stone as they interchangeably surface on the edged nails and fingertips of the miracle, they're objects of pleasure and praise that dance in tiptoeing motions around the corpses of older words that seemed once ideal, that befouled the unrest and mishappened as sciences of an undercover life, the secret would lift its veil once and offer the mysteries of reality as it were - bereft of interpretations and clean from intermediaries, be them heroes or saviors, unfolding and branching out as a tree of love ripe in fruits and overgrowing the fallacies of Paradise. This all seems stale now, beauty has proven a perverse companion of youth when it appears not as a gift of the gods but as a remedy and elixir against the displeasure of walking over the sharp edges of the stones.

Tundama was just like that, fleeting as a bird but without the presumptuousness of flight, no longer concerned with the therapeutic rhythm of knowledge for life - it seemed as if the world was no longer in the obligation of letting himself be used for survival. In this language of paucity and slow depth, the words didn't descend from above as a gift from heaven but rose from below as in the transformation of the stone into a glyph forgotten somewhere inside the thick forest of womb-shaped trees in an ancestral mountain, its whole grammar had been once already destroyed and its beauty ransacked for the sake of hearsay. The luxury of his abode was all too perplexing for me coming out of my own little inferno, my wooden prison cell from which I was able to move out freely into a house of strangers, yet it reminded me a bit of myself when I was running against the time of the universe before I had learnt the walking ways of the simple and wet earth; more than anything the shelves and the books and the scars from the wounds in the pages and to the side of the lungs, I was no longer in the posession of any books being a traveler as I now am, but there was no feeling of animosity or jealousy, only the rather felicitious contentment of looking outside a window that doesn't stare into the accumulated fat of the kitchen ceiling and the thread of hangers for laundry that seems to extend infinitely into the pierced heart of heavenly bodies that somewhere up there in their own abode, hold the lives down below in the kind of contempt typical of very talented writers.

There was so little time and so little distance yet in the restful space of the shelved room, if told about it, one would be inclined to believe it was an airport affair, but so tied to this earth those brief moments were, so appropriating of this land, no walls separated the room from the rest of the universe, so that even the airplanes would resemble little birds flying from mountain to mountain over and over and tirelessly with the only effort in mind to lay a nest along the paw-looking branches of a tree without science and on the banks of an ancestral lake. The universe, however, seems to last for a long time, impossible to conceive of in the limited scope of cab rides and lunching times, crushed under the weight of something as simple as a wristwatch, crushed under the heavy weight of all the lightest wristwatches in the world! The jerky and expressionless talk of nervous travelers sketching a plan to conquest the world in a distant time, to conquer the wristwatches and the crush down the effect of a thousand pages in an hour and within the course of a simple conversation in which no philosopher would take the pleasure of distinguishing truth from untruth and rainfall from storm; I kept wondering where the blue would end on that day, pretending to sleep through the restful city lines, imagining another time, once again, thousands of kilometers behind and ahead, in times of unrest.

The street that I thought narrow, had become impossibly wide and the options manifold, it's just that I didn't know of a somewhere to go, only in order to escape from the silence that the conversation with Tundama had turned prohibitive and sinful, nihilistic even; images of other kinds were conjured up in the short ride home, I could have perfectly made myself at home in his little palace never to return again to my little inferno, but in the abscence of a battlefield, of a favorite reader, there's no mischance or mischief, the pages that were once destroyed with the intention to wage a war against the wristwatch were now blank and filled by footnotes written by a man several years my junior, those pages were not bloodied thus I couldn't destroy them or water them down as mistakes, they rather marked another age in the world, one that it takes much effort to live happily with: how to survive in a world where there's no longer war, how to survive when survival is no longer required and when the power of enticing of the man who was once a soldier is now a marblestone of pleasures for art rather than an evil god. The problem is not the abyssmal void left by a God gone in retirement but the weakness of current evils, the fact that even without the friend of an hour and a half, one still has to write something, oh god! This is what we learnt though, that writing is not bleeding, it has to be sustainance and livelihood without swallowing up the whole world, this is why we still look for the goddamn tree, in ancestral lakes, in places older by ten years or in friends younger by as much, because there's absolutely no point in returning to Paradise, there's no point in writing for the end of the world; it is after all an issue, that we still want to be read.

Looking for Tundama

Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.

"Does that mean", I said in some bewilderment, "that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"

"Of course", he said, "but that's the final chapter in the history of the world."

Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater”

“With the passage of time and the intervention of newer, more difficult works, the artist's transgression becomes ingratiating, eventually legitimate. Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an "invisible theatre." But in time the invisible theatre becomes "visible" The ugly and discordant and senseless become "beautiful." The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.”

Susan Sontag, “Aesthetics of Silence”

Dearest Katherina,

For a long time I had wanted to write you and to warn you as well about a certain young writer whose company I haunted while he was still alive and before his untimely departure for Siberia, where I’ve been looking for his sights already for a long time; now it would be presumptuous to believe that he’s dead and the idea itself is most repulsive – a writer that is posthumously born in anonymity by a human pen, on a free ride through the universe hopping from one tree of knowledge to the other as the possessor and professor of a truth so infinite that it cannot be grasped literarily, stretching beyond the limits of one’s own literality, an unsettling language of lips and lives. That there are places in the world that forbid the kind of language that is usually taken advantage of by literature, it is something I could never deny; there’s no longer an appeal in going into painful technicalities to describe an erotic scene that takes place in a public bathroom – this kind of fantasies are as devaluated as the currency of promises because the image is no longer unsettling or chaotic, it could speak for a lack of moral ambition but no longer has the paucity of a stare of fantasy. The favorite language of the artist is today a very simple perversion – silence, and it is nowadays perverted not because it has lost its age-old religious metaphors but because it is silence what constitutes the deliberate attack on the part of the artist against the society that has nurtured with bureaucratic care and loving excesses the pretensions of his own aesthetic debauchery, the aesthete is modeled not after the curious contemplation of an ever belligerent world but against its orderliness – inside out. This artist does not want to be read against the overwhelming innocence and fertile wordiness of an advertisement – in his natural apprehension to surrender to the world as will and representation (and what is the modern advertisement, if not the enshrining of the image as will and representation of the world but cleaned free from the serendipity of a Christian struggle?) he turns his mind to the only place safe from the certainty of the Cartesian window-shopper and the managerial inquisitions of publishers and galleries, it is a priestly geography of imperial capitals and flat worlds; while trying to distract the shopper from the raving madness of consuming his art (art is after all his only life, there’s no biography outside a work of art even when the work of art functions as a biography of unwillingness) he’s also actively engaged in making the reader or the spectator disappear together with his art in a transaction that transforms the artist into his own enemy – he wants to be no longer an artist and his silence is a fundamentally elitist and paternalist attitude that enables him to sit in the public, as unrecognized as a true Messiah but with the Pharisee demeanor of a false Messiah that refuses to produce art that is not for art’s sake (give to the Caesar what belongs to the Caesar) while lecturing the ignorant mobs about a correct reading of art – there’s no meaning in the chamber but only a paradox in which the empty room and the solid air of the vacuous space is supposed to stand in lieu of the most extreme aesthetic experience; the death of the Romantic writer turns out to be a most vivid confirmation of life whereas the silence of the modern artist, bereft entirely of religious pathos, cannot aim higher than the line between life and death, it is only extreme insofar as it is a desire to be noisily overheard amidst the thrift of raving noise.

Tundama Ortiz was one of these writers that being dead as he was (although he was born on the same year that I was) – and perforce of necessity silent, he was still able to sign copies of his books to the very select following that he had, believing what would have been unthinkable to the genius of Frans Hals – that the good works would reach their desirable public by means of a magic devise, perhaps it had to do with a more refined sexual morality than that of a Calvinist painter who sold the opprobrious looks of moral superiority to an aristocracy of refined taste that would pay for it the same way one would pay today in order to spend the night with a beautiful maiden – Tundama Ortiz was certainly no prostitute. I became aware of this that night when I became acquainted with him in that small room that served the purpose of his posthumous revelation to the world amidst the noise of glasses and flatteries, that are necessarily present as well in the funerals of writers, both good and bad ones. As a ghost of sorts he paved around flamboyantly greeting the hordes of guests in this untimely scenario and while he didn’t have any of the priestly traits of the ever so silent artists that scream out loud from a place of both fame and contempt, it’s the same transgression that pretends to elevate a form of art in the moment of its most critical destruction and it is a fine irony that one could say that destruction could be ever critical, as if it were not in a protest but through a laboratory procedure that the destruction is effected – trying to dismantle the work of art with such care so that it is still whole and possible. Moreover the problem with aesthetic destruction is that it can only last for a single moment, that’s why it is perhaps easier to embody in the pen of somebody else other than yourself, the terrorist writer becomes a subtext in a larger and more grandiose story that the living writer is telling and because he is at best only telling a story there’s still a chance for survival of the person – none of the promised boundaries of life have been eroded and therefore one shouldn’t be held accountable for the consequences of the unspeakable, the place of the sublime is still unmovable.

That night it appeared to me as a surprise that he could be a dead writer and this I didn’t learn from the book but from the natural talent of the writer to tell stories; one wonders time and again, why people who are able to tell stories, are ought to write anything at all! Maybe the answer is not that we are not understood but that we don’t necessarily want to be understood as we are but rather through a sequence of mirrors that make it impossible to resort to the silence we claim to practice but are in no position to demand from the world. The most suffocating ideal of aesthetic silence arises when a writer makes a deliberate choice for silence, looking at his craft as an intermediate step between the ultra mundane existence in unfreedom or constriction and the disappointment over the failure of art to meet his demands; the freedom in the choice of aesthetic silence could be a great deal of help if the renunciation would not come with the added value of guilt, not the typical case scenario of guilt about living and dying but rather the fact that even after Rimbaud went to Abyssinia and Duchamp turned to chess, they still considered themselves as artists in the most primordial sense. The silence is not abandonment but a continuation of the cycle of linguistic misunderstandings in which the use of language heretofore has become judicial evidence for the case against oneself in which, Kafkaesque speaking, the person stands as a puppet judge in his own trial. The transgression, even the transgression of Tundama Ortiz as a rather sympathetic critic of his own genre – and in this sense his renunciation is not different than mine, in my adamant refusal to write at all, has to turn at some point into an aggression not against the literary but against the literality of a life that is lived without writing and without telling but as embedded in the same language of scripture and writing as the advertisements and flatteries of sociability are. In theory we all should be able to write novels but we choose a management career over the writing of novels, this theory is most fallacious though because it seems that most men of letters who wrote novels did it almost against their own will as if the fact that one has to write a novel or a work of art at all only attests to something very lacking in the world of literality which is the favorite trope of the writer – unlike the philosopher who has outright condemned literality as untruth.

“It’s indeed a problem”, we used to say in the past as if speaking of the symptom of a well known malaise, when speaking of the fact that this unliterary literality seems to have the ability to walk at a pace much faster than that of beauty, while the irruption of beauty as a part of literality which begins as a transgression is at some point bound to become an ideal, the poets have been all too keen on explaining how it’s been them who taught men about colors and landscapes even before the painters did since in general poets are blind and painters are staring straight into the sun – both positions are very uncomfortable in life. The denial of art and its conventions for the sake of art itself seems like a confirmation of the powerlessness of the artist and the independence of his works from his own life, lest he turns to the world as a laboratory not of life but of work and when this happens, then his own life becomes ownerless. I only realized the extent of this powerlessness while talking to the young Raphaël, who surprisingly is still able to read Kleist for example, without being particularly harmed by life, and while I have so little respect for this attitude my jealousy is so overpowering that it’s turned into a silent admiration – I’m of the faith, as you are, that there’s no possible appropriation of Kleist unless it’s for the sake of armed and violent guerrilla warfare against the world, there’s no place for aesthetics there unless one has realized beforehand that the limits between the work and the artist are no longer stable and whenever the balance is shifted toward the work, the artist is forced to leave the world as we know it, its relationships of happiness and property and the ownership of ideals becomes illusory unless they’re embodied in an intensity of language for which the work of art is nothing but a bland footnote. It’s impossible to write without being unmediated harmed by life during the process and the exemplary renunciation of writing or of writing in one’s own name seems to overcome the difficulty not by avoiding harm but by placing it elsewhere, elsewhere outside and at a distance: it’s an Oriental prince who paints, it’s not me! It’s a philosopher who composes, it’s not me! It’s a writer exiled in Russia who sketches short stories, it’s not me! But you see, Raphaël, he reads Kleist, and he’s still himself! So completely assembled in reality in a way that has never been possible for me, reading without cruelty and without despair, translating within science and without bleeding, without exile and without war; do you think that it is maybe the reason why Tundama Ortiz chose Siberia?

I traveled all the way to Siberia to look for him without any other directions than some story he had told us that night about a friend and I tried telling the story to all the people that I had met along the way in order to find out whether they had heard it themselves; to my own demise every time I told the story I was sent in a different direction toward a person who was exactly like Raphaël and who reacted to me with the same calm, contentment of the eyes and certainty of fingertips, people who were able to read literature without having to respond to the challenge of being changed. That night when I met Tundama Ortiz I didn’t know Raphaël at all but overtime here in Siberia I’ve learnt pretty much everything about him, things that I can’t even tell you because they’re not exactly literal, it’s a story I’ve told you many times, how difficult it is to turn a person into a Cain when they no longer recognize the difference between life and science, between tree and tree, between word and word, world and word. I want to respond to friendship always with silence but in turn I respond with fruits from the tree of science that are mute enough to deafen any possibility of life, any offerings from the tree of life that demand nothing different from what God demands – to be infinitely unconscious and unfulfilled, precisely what all the Abels and the Raphaëls offer without demands. In Siberia you can make no difference between the trees because they’re all covered by thick layers of snow and then I thought that maybe this is what happened in Paradise, a confusion of tongues, an inability to translate affections, and this is why ever since we’re directed toward the unharmed as if queuing at the train, in between the stations, without destinies and destinations, only heavenly innuendoes and illiterate deliverance. My problem is not that the world was freed from God with whom I didn’t have particularly strong networking precisely because we demand from people just about the same, my real problem is that we no longer believe in the devil either, thus it can make no different which tree we choose and the result of this is almost always unequivocally the most terroristic devise of Christian theology: Life is eternal. This is the issue at the root of the silence of every modern form of art; death is no longer a charade to play on the Lord, it’s another commodity, the renunciation of life as much as the appropriation of science can no longer be a topic of conversation and as such, truth, unless be it topic of conversation, it can’t become a trope for art. That’s where the charm of an invisible theater is at home, the invisibility is the insurance against topics of conversation and once it becomes visible the transgression is over and with it the attention of the audience; there’s no audience for art without a modern-day transgression – this is why Tundama wrote the criticism of his own literary genre before he wrote anything in that literary genre.

Tundama I have met only once whereas Raphaëls I have met on the thousands while looking for Tundama in Siberia, but it’s strange, you know, I no longer remember Tundama – there’s something explicitly expressionless in him and that’s why I’ve come to adopt so much of what those questions marks demand from beauty and world as if nothing had been ever eroded; whereas Raphaël I remember distinctly as if I were speaking a life-long enemy while at the same time it’s difficult to loath people that haven’t themselves written anything at all; there’s nothing you can accuse them of with the exception of a charge for protecting themselves from the world behind nothing but laughter and there’s no acquittal for such a serious charge which is not as deserving of contempt as it is of love. What angers me is not the friendliness in the appropriation of murderous devises for the sake of entertainment as much as the endless innocence with which everything is carried through, the paucity of mind and the care, the ability to work unmolested by the facts of the world. I can take no pleasure in Kleist’s warfare unless it’s for the sake of its destruction. Has he eaten of the tree of knowledge in order to return to this state of innocence that enables one to read Kleist without harm? No, I don’t think so, this is not his mortal sin, his sin is that he hasn’t realized that there was a tree of love as well and that God with rapacious voracity ate all the fruits and the branches of the tree in heroic viciousness while Adam was still busy trying to figure out what to do with his body in the moment of self-awareness and has ever since mistaken the fruits of life for fruits of love and the fruits of science for fruits of life. This is precisely the reason why Tundama is nowhere to be found, he’s still there, with his little book, in the beginning of everything, trying to find the right tree, while in the greater consciousness of things, the Raphaëls of the world, down below, are either gods or stones, never trees.

Alice I

The mornings are always prosperous, it can feel a little sinful even, arrogantly happy, so fresh like the summer ebbing tide; there's this constant guilt about being alive, the guilt of being so trivial, harvesting the produce of the tree, moonlight breakfasts and the loud singing too. Outdoors, even past the walled patio and the garden, the guilt is constantly augmented up to the point where it already swallows the whole world into an orderly mass of stars, visible in daylight. There's this urgent complacency in it, voracious desire to be so simply understood, to transform the time in a living space; unlike the nights, the morning steals away from the fear of one's own death, it might be even necessary and silent, unpoetical, accidental and sudden. The time seems mortal and absolutely eternal, a necessary transition between cycles of slumber, bearably interminable at the juncture of the hours, less passionate than fragile, with a body of its own, unavailable for testimony and clean from the glitter and the animal gaze of inner sunshines.

I enjoy looking at my own image, through the glasswindows of the cars as they move along faster than the smoke escaping the breathing moisture of my mouth; never in a mirror or in the water, but in the movement of the glass. The skin is less deteriorated than the eyes, they look so passively small, unready for love while the rest of the body in unison stands on the asphalt craving for that transformation, rising to the miracle rather than the hopeful expectation of prayer. There's this inner faithful desire to just never stop the night, to continue deprived from sleep in a timeless flight toward a destination, looking at death from closer, without fear or expectation, just letting himself be carried away slowly and in full awakefulness, yet the little pleasures of daytime, the scorching sun or the hide outs from the rain, the pressure of the roof tiles over the gravity of the shoes and the plants, all of this, keeps us from the waters of this flight at the unsafe distance of oblivion.

Through the glasswindows the prosperity becomes a happy possession, an undeniable gift, language of berries and figs, vanquishing the despair of facing up to the stars and imagining stairways that lead up to more heavenly places where there's still daylight, even outside of the earth, carpeted with trees and thrushes, shrubs and elbows, just like down here, an island burning down, flames rising up and the bodies in the thrust of the leaves reaching past horizons of winds and temptations of the cool breeze. But there's always this dispassionate end with the jams and the lines, the carpets of skylights extending along the pitch of the greenery and rising abovewards with sounds and delights, the journeys are wonderful and the trains become livelier than waters puncturing the sand, it is a final act, like a grand finale, the eye folds up and the hand reaches for a telephone in a pocket near the heart. I wish there were these mornings also overthere, when I can find them at last, when the screens will become flights and even if for a sole moment I could trespass the commandment of sitting behind glass, to place a fingertip near their mouths and swim inside their necks with the erratic motions of drowning helplessly into and against the tide, being lashed by the rocks in the silt, the scales of the fish and the sharp nails of the moss in the walls of the riverbanks. Losing the visions from inside and in their stead, floating above the planes from underneath the water, gazing into the smoke, from above, loving the cuts in the flesh, that kind of unlove that begins in the throat and becomes friendly at the level of the cheek, unable to sleep over the chest, it turns to the embrace of hollow grass.

Changeling in 4 Instances

Only at the expense of the clumsiest exhaustion the gifts of daylight, transparent and sterile, seem to rain from above but without any particular source; he might well stand outside for the hours in between half inebriated by the chaotic demeanour of the floortiles that resemble more a palette of colors protruding in greys mixed with reds, there is this sterile sense of clairvoyance obtained from the sequence of the days shoveled by patience into one continuum of light, afterlight and the indoor purple muteness of the night. The skylight showers the first rays of sun seen in a fortnight and he is surprised to feel warmth on his decolored shoulder other than the alternating changes of temperature in the most varied forms of recoiling, kneeling and suffocating from cold itself.

There's no other feeling through the hours but the absence of worded imprecations on the part of an intimate distant acquaintance, but he is somewhat comforted, the yearning itself is far more pleasurable than the complicity in this reckless plot to unearth beauty from some place, from some space in which they stand, barefooted, sensual and yet childishly loving; it seems to be inappropriate to think of love without the impeding dragging of risky casualty, perhaps it is a good thing to be exiled from this friendly imprisonment and instead, to enjoy the silence and the rather dull company of this icy chunk of memory. There's this total unrest, coupled with a certain aesthetic satisfaction but the abscence becomes an empty space filled with his own flesh, and as if in olden times, the other body, and not even a body, but mere expressions and wrinkles, satisfaction of lips and language of hands, covers the whole geography of yet another motif; an impossible messianicity that tiptoes on knees and knuckles, on the palms of the hands and the forehead, it is allowed no further.

But then again, it is this beautiful skylight, broad like a river at night, trying to pierce through the earth below and reach him by the ankle, beautiful, the light, but just as helpess, tardily enunciated, unletting go of the big vault of heavens, a feeling so intense, never a sentiment, running deeper than a grasshopper's jumps into the void mouth of the rattlesnake, more like a sense of discomfort at the height of the bellybutton than the purer and sterile infatuation of poets and others that looks for lips where only brushes and papers are set aside for viewing. The tiny room seems to contain everything vaulted within, the cheap reproductions of lifeless paintings, the table maps, unused drawers, pencils and papers, the distant litanies of a family, written after the style of prayers but anchored far away, where he can't reach them, where they are to no avail. There are other days, higher up the scale of the historical forces, but they are quietly inferior, less distinct, less formless and just as vague, but never bordering on palatal pleasure.

We learn the world from images! He muses for himself, trying a hand at less singular thought, something less personal, that shall require the imagination more than this difficult skill of human trust. It's difficult to feel unhappy in such moments, the sheet replaces the skin of the tree, the mud and the fly, meandering in a woodland of false touches of the hand, unmolested by the geographical lie. There're still some sounds that manage to pervert the harmony of the ebbing tide, no serendipitous waters reaching from below, there's nothing mad in the flight, just the soft and sweet surrender of the fingerprint to a different order of joys, less honest and also less interesting but not as crude, not as indifferent, not as solid. Somehow he is fascinated by the daylight, wondering, pondering on the whereabouts of legs and limbs, of the other; not entirely uncomfortable with the newfound solitude, with the transient pedantry of the silence in the chamber, there's still so much a person alone can do with a piano and the yearning seems prettier than the overweight of extant telegrams. It is so strange, all of a sudden, for a character in a novel to go missing, just like that, he can't remember any particular details, deliberately almost. Oh, he's at last relieved from the curious ignorance: It was not a sanderling, it was the changeling! There's no anxiety in his waiting for the right lines to come up, it's more like the sort of sympathies one has for the fatherland he left, they're not quite dead but neither real they are.

Iceland (old journey)

Sint Maarten (old journey)

Out of Time

Slow, throatsore, painless the spine

A cold in the hand, low blood-pressure

It is just a night, fragilemost

Opulent handshake with the hour

Hoping for a ceasefire

Between the wind and the time

Rain pouring elsewhere

An umbrella within the chest

Sheltering turbulent words

They run through the wrinkle lines

A coffin for two, in the mornings of life

No more coffee, he is asking for love

Not for another crutch in the sand

Faithful summers of the past

He might fly to San Francisco next time

With no other luggage than your eyes

In an amber box full of padnotes

Of paradox, an assortment of postcards too

You haven´t missed a train alone

The abandonment runs deeper

Deeper than papercuts over skin

Oceans of dead lullaby

Winters and falls

A yesteryear!

A bloodtorrent of letters

Plaster without walls

Misunderstandings, conversations, pain in your chest

Embedded solidly, soundless, presences

Another traveler yet

Will find your letters, the knowledge of the hair

He might be a better storyteller

His pockets of grain, the skin less decent

Suitable for loss, gain of porcelain

Rustier than your shoulders of grass

Without headaches from jetlags

It is not your fault, wanderer

You have never been precise

You never sleep at night

But you can write!

The travel log of the city sleeper

That will live out of your luggage

And bleed out his heart

Helpless you are

That chest is not thine

You are out of time

Skin

So often I am overcome by the older thoughts about illness and my peace is then broken piecemeal again, stolen; the quietness another type of well known madness, more powerful than illness, than body and word, than soul and world, in the constant flow of the innermost tides that inundate the joys of earlier days and the imagined faces of beloved men, with poisonous unrest, in a swift and constant flight, they all begin to vanish, recede with the waters in tenfold pulsations of fingertips and for a moment the lips become dreamy, the flesh less bruised, the limbs covered with sawdust, twilights as words, cityscapes overflowing with darker shades of colour folding up into the most primary greys of morning moonshine. They begin to loosen their bodies, losing shapes and turning into lines, jotted down at haphazard into the risky night, vertical endeavours reaching up to the most distant slies of heaven and the power of contentment limited to possible dreams alone.

Just as often I miss the mornings, time after time, inebriated from the fogs in the night outside, raining upwards into the streetlights, bathing the fickle warmth of the yellow hearbeats in the glass; it becomes impossible to face the days as they break into hours of noises, demands and constraints, into unfamiliar old bearings in this language so distant, so unloving and often so silent to the inner desire of yearning eyes, searching for blue and grey, also for weaker greens, cerulean and emerald, a merit land of oceans passed unter water, falling from a canvas, breaking ranks at last, like a sanderling, traveling through strands of the most foreign skins, so utterly changed by this slow movement of the arms. Precarious minutes, like odes, navigation plans for a boat anchored inland. The simplest pleasure denied at the expense of a stanza, looking into the void, performing for a last time the lines that could keep these ghosts afloat for yet a day more, even if only for the peak of the hour when a word is needed to unwind.

Eyes wide open into the pitchdark, fueled by the anaesthetic spitefulness of silence, drowning in the leaves as they fall from the books and the windows, unimagining the trees and other elements of the universe outside, refusing to engage with the smells and the fruits of their hands; the day sleeps away into endless vacuous time, hours of shipwreck into the exile of calm, death yet so far, the world so alive, rustling and joyful, nothing is changed, no decree is revoked, no indictment passed. There are chairs, floortiles, long threads of hanging clothes, invisible rooves, mosquitos as rowers and the taste of snow in leftovers from food, maps of foreign lands, the smooth sounds of hair, nothing is bloodied, everything at rest, it is so wonderful, this beauty, destructive, stale, untouched by motion, by decay, by the most fickle and superficial moment of love, it contains everything, like the morning, except the writer, the instructions, the beloved man and the light.

You can´t be sure anymore whether this is illness or absence, what overpowers you, it is a metaphor of images, a puzzle without riddles that you might not want to complete, least you discover callousness in the other end of the line. Failing to reckon, to acknowledge, it is a lot easier, makes you less guilty, your thoughts unhampered, you´re free to choose, friend or foe, for yourself. Anything can be written, anyone destroyed, wiped from the vessel of fragile impossible future thoughts, cleaned as dust, replaced, painted over again, without colours other than grain. Reading becomes impossible, asfixiating, you only want to hold tightly, to give in, to reach abovewards, oh set the time aright! Prayer is to no avail, the only refuge is without, in the open, beneath the flux of earth and rain, of bodies with olden flesh, new memories, reckless nails, bruised chins, cuts in the lips, a bitter flavor in the arm. You feel grace in the illness, it keeps you from the dream.

Life Writing

One would think that it really makes no sense this whole "life writing" at this point in time, the topic seems rather overrated for most modern men and women; we have all grown into that of kind of utterances and they seem to hold little power to entice us, year after year, in inexorable engagements and entanglements, the word "life" seems to gain just about enough deeps to stretch little beyond its biological and ultimately bodily channel of meaning. Since there are times less than optimistic, most of us surrender to the pressure exerted on us by the endless chains of demands made by modern life. Whoever were to strike a conversation about what it is that we mean by life, or by writing about life, of course we would think immediately of the personal journal, no longer a literary gender but a productive activity of language and self-understand instead. There are all different styles of journals, perhaps most closely associated with a copious industry of films and other entertainment for teenagers; as we know from the long history of literature there have existed since immemorial times travel logs, personal letters, accounting documents and the like, which fall under this rubric, but seldom have we found in them true literary expression. The high-brow end of the academic line of argument would also tell us about the German Romantic movement, in particular of Friedrich Schlegel and of "life as writing" which shaped those long by-gone, yet pregnant and exasperating times. Life was reduced to a solipsism of sort whose only purpose to be lived, was to be at last written down. This process, far from the solitary cries of medieval love poetry, first condemned and now praised, because of the frequent homosexual themes, might have its foremost modern root in the writing of Rousseau, under whose spell, many of the early Romantic writers fell. It was more than anything an attempt to tell the story of the "I", in a way such as no one had done it before.

Ever since then there's a great deal we've learnt from personal writing, as an expression of selfness and selfhood, we have made sure to scrutinize with care all the personal correspondence of as many writers, politicians and intellectuals, as it has been possible. Not only we have learnt the movitations behind their actions and their thoughts, their written thoughts as they have come down to us, but viciously enough, we have taken their personal motivations to trial and have judged their love affairs, their passions, their melancholy, their glee, everything, and to no avail. There's nothing more useless than a dead writer, so many would say today, and then there's also the anthropological turn in the humanities (referred as to the science of anthropology and not anthropological as concerned with man and man alone) that under the commercial name of "Structuralism" has been up and around in the market for nearly a hundred years (but gaining great power after the social revolutions that shook Europe in the 1960's and that it seems today were everything but social or revolutionary, at least according to some very opinionated elements of the bourgueoisie) preaching on the basis of examining documents of countless indigenous cultures of the world and in languages none of us know, that there's really no such a thing as literature but rather a dynamic of power, of knowledge as power nurtured by the theo-political history of the Western canon in which certain works have been elevated to the stature of this so-called metaphysical institution of "literature", whereas the reality (a term that our great social scientists have so oddly failed to define that we are not sure anymore whether the serfs of the good dead god did too bad a job) of things is that all human expressions are equally valuable as long as they are expressing the manifold possibilities of human language. So let us assume that there's no such a thing as literature and that it is all in all possible that there're no different aesthetic standards to judge the difference between the Diary of Anne Frank and all of modernist literature altogether. This would be pretty nice indeed, so many people would be saved from the precarious usefulness of learning the likes of literary criticism in college.

So literature is a political devise after all, in which case, this fallacy of the canon has existed since Classical Greece, and it is but the poor self, the victim of this colonial, imperialist and subtle magic spell, because of all the failed writers that this has produced after all; not that too many people could read and write in the golden age of either Greece or the Netherlands, but then there is the blogosphere today crowded with endless numbers of petit anglaises, truthseekers, hairsplitters and worldskeptics. If anyone had the time or the material resources to explore with care the writing of so many modern people, he would be likely to find a few good authors in an ocean of what we would not call failed writers, because they were not trying their hand at literature anyway. What there is, is a mass number of everyday men and women trying to speak their minds out in this new international, cross-cultural and somewhat lawless mediatic platform. The overbearing number of pages written everyday attest perhaps not to the fact that people are more willing to write than in previous generation or even to the fact that life is more interesting today; if anything we could play the devil's advocate in saying that most people actually have little time for "writing" in the proper sense of the word, even within their limited professional circles. What is becoming manifest here is that people communicate less and less, and that the big open wide world is in fact a place much, much smaller than the planet earth but more like a global village which is in fact very much a village like those portrayed either with yearning by Hamsun or with irony, by Kafka. A village of nameless unrelated dwellers, a very small place in a no man's land. People feel just too ought to write about their own lives, and the psychological aftereffect of this is not only that classical case of drawing attention, but of the rather poor quality of everyday language. The effect of this language is much less powerful than the language of the old faiths, for it seems unable to stand on its own but rather acts as a bridge in between the satisfaction of bodily pleasures, which boldly speaking, is the only satisfaction that modern men, with their disparaged experience of time (time as not being dead yet), can understand.

There's this undeniable craving for experience which men are seeking in the most varied activities that would hardly count as experience in the sense of unmediated interaction with the world in which knowledge doesn't interfere; entertainment in all of its forms and the debauchery of sexuality seem to stand rather as way to learn the world in all the emotional connonation this has, rather than as pure experience. The activity of writing and the attention it receives from other human viewpoints is one of the rawmost forms of experience available to people nowadays by means of which they construct themselves and they disclose their sense of being in the world. We might be as well fed up with the endless tide of self-help books that are immediately best sellers and that if they were to constitute real spiritual enterprises in building the world, should be offered freely and the speakers not paid huge amounts of money to speak to the leading partners of multinational companies but rather broadcasted on nationwide television. We should sheer away from this thinking of both life and writing as commodities and begin to consider them as facts of our worldly existence, of the intensity with which the world can be loved and experienced for what it is, in its sheer whatness of character. The technical possibilities afforded by the internet make us look less than dull primitives, for we speak often in smoke signs and scribbles of Altamira rather than in the highly organized language of fully developed human societies; we seem to take just as much pride in our unhappiness as we take offense on those who actively seek it outside the realm of purely material satisfaction. It is them, our capitalist friends, running the world from the international corporations, who might stand for the most religious people of this world down and below, for their trust in a material and reckless version of human existance has gone so far as to prove its own dogma, that even medieval metaphysicians would have been embarrassed about themselves in purview of the great might of this modern revolution of restaurants, shopping malls and sex parties. Less is more. No, you're wrong. All is not enough.

We are not getting any smarter from this point onwards, and the complacency afforded by this postmodern sleaze of liberty might only by overlap coincide with the liberal definition of freedom as "non-domination" upon which has haunted the fate of a great deal of political thought. The village grows smaller and smaller and the non-domination far more performative, so that soon there might be enough empty space around it to begin a new world, without the chains of the old one, but without the global or the village. That world might as well begin in Wall Street or at the Zuidas in Amsterdam, if they want to give it a little royal charm - for it seems there are some cozy restaurants around there, with English menus and dirt cheap prices. Before they accomplish that of course the internet will be a great venue to do away with our languages and our cultures and replace them with icons so that people can matchmake their own sex dates without typing so much, because the age of the greatest technological possibilities is also the age of the greatest ignorance that has ever prevailed in all possible fields of knowledge so that Einstein might have been writing in asserting that the next war after the next will be fought not with weapons of mass destruction but with sticks and rods. It is not ignorance what makes people unhappy indeed, but the complete lack of serendipity. Our manager friends might be so sure by now that they rule the world and that Europe is dead, that it is no more and that happily the world is run now by China and the USA. Of course it never occurred to them to think even for a moment that no Western civilization can exist without Europe as the theo-political sphere of unity that it has been for over a thousand years and of course it didn't occur to them that it was the struggle within Europe's own tradition what enabled this modern world to unfold as it has, for the good and for the bad. We can rest assured that they will be happy to invent another set of myths, much more radical than Christianity's, certainly a godless China would have no problem in a new political mythology, but then that would be hardly necessary, for the world will be nicely interconnected in bigger and larger global villages with the same restaurants, modern museums and flat complexes, so that it will be no longer necessary to move elsewhere to pursue happiness or intellect, for anyone. This is the only reason why people should write about their lives, and continue doing is... In this activity we hold perhaps the only possible expectation that people might really want this world and no other, that they love it with the truths and untruths implied in its order of reality. The multinational corporations are still too lazy and their godlessness is still too fresh in the history of mankind to overpower millions of men and women in their attempt to find a home in the world within the specificity of their own rootedness and in the love of some particular persons and no others; their religion of endless and reckless acquisiton of wealth at the expense of all the rest seems to be entirely resolute to outdo this world, it might be even the most radical version of Christianity seen until now, the most otherworldly enterprise ever begun, more than Augustine's Ecclesiology and Constantine's conversion of the Empire; not to mention the help provided by our very friendly buddies in the sand dunes to fuel it all. The great problem with it all is that they have no authority from anywhere other than their pockets and that people in the world, unfortunately, are still looking for love, in the most classical and political sense of the word, so that they might come and go, but people's faith in the love of the world might still exist, and there might be then, a much fruitful and varied assortment of testimony to this today than there was ever. It might be that we are are being called to a truer unreligion, which is not atheism or just sensuality, something much more radical than all this, something like a faith of neighbourly love. There's little doubt that capitalism, sensuality, atheism, Christianity, globalization, self-help books and a whole deal of modern sciences, are nothing but different brand names for the same old religion that has existed for as long as man has used not the power of violence, but the power of love, to subject another man, and this goes back, well, a long time.

David V

"Then one morning about eleven o’clock, as she stood by the open window and looked out over the sea with sad, yearning eyes, she heard the notes of a piano sound softly through the house, as if it were in gentle accord with wind and waves. The music was so quick, so smooth, so wonderfully fluent and masterly, so sure and firm, like an army of splendid beings bringing her tidings of peace and love".

"To Hedwig, who was so anxious to get well that, like all melancholy people, she was always thinking about her own condition, this meeting seemed to be a blessing sent to do her good. For this man possessed the power of raising her mind out of the drifting sands of melancholy and sinful imaginings. If he would only play to her".

-Frederik van Eeden, "Van de koele mere des doods"

"How could I leave?"

He asked himself

Though, he had never been there

But he jotted down the maps

Of the parks and of the jolts

Remembered pathways back home

Down the alleys, rained upon

Charcoal passages

That divided the other writer

From the true object of his affections

He wondered where could home be

What it would be like

Had he been not so late in life

Drawing sketches of the space

In his mind, awake all night

Trying not to think of illness

Of the irreparable damage

In the eye, the ear and the hand

In the walls, at the prison

He drew fountain springs

Thus, while bleeding

Navigating in this last breath

Of his own bodily life

He dreamt, for a last time

Swimming in the tiny rivers

Extending from the bed to the lightbulb

He had never seen something this beautiful

There was this tiny mountain, a hill

And an island, uninhabited, heavenly

Frozen waters surrounded it

Bathing the northern earth

In foams of grayest fogs

There were other moments

More perverse

He would not dare jot them down

They were like flights

At the expense of the canvas

Untouched by the world, by the blood

The eyes of a wolf, of erratic legs

Constant and transparent blue

Neutral to the language of the limbs

Only the glass could reach the lip

Tombstones afar

Travelling southwards

The first movements of the mouth

A big haul of fish for the fall

Receding toward the sorrow of the pencil

As if the flood of a tide

Swallowing big islands, then the immensity too

The physical pain again, steamrolls

First from the left eye, through the throat, into the back

Contaminated from the hairchest of former lovers

Now forgotten, condemned, unmentioned

Yet the skin still this soft, like paper, like the sun

Unused by the time, free and so unkind

So absolutely mortal, faithless, self-contained

When will I arrive there?

He asked himself

Though, he had never left

The heart knew well the maps

He could no longer feel

The motions, the jerks, the options

The city was still there

An empty bed, bloodied and transparent

Crawling through fields of wheat and figs

Thousands of miles from afar

His body making love with the mud

And the stones, unconscious as he was

Drowning at last

With only one eye open

Through the viscous waters of silt

Watching abovewards

The airplanes flying abroad

So helpless this moment of love

He imagined the hours

And the minutes, the years after the hours

Even the first time, after the last

Until the stream engulfed by the bridge

Would cut off his last glimpse, of this world

Beautiful as it was, unpromising, unsettling

He sent his love in a boat

That by mistake

Was bound for Rotterdam

Then he awoke

He wasn't dead

But yet, he wasn't there

3.23

Nearly ten years ago

That morning, the hereafter

There was me, collecting sand

Hoping for earth to stand

On its own, without feet or hands

Stanzas you wrote

So far away from home

Losing the mouth in galore

Another love had failed

Postcards were sent

As the oak burnt and bent

"But what does it mean to regret, when you have no choice?"

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children might live"-Deuteronomy 30-19

Standing always, 3:08

In the patio

Never a chair

A bank not even

Next to intoxicated

Chilled to the bones

A shivering leg

Always the red tiles

The endless yellowing light

Trust of the night

A truce, with the time

Praying for daytime

Never to arise

Frozen slumber

Cigarette butts

Waters turning around

One by one

In bricks

Emptying out the ocean

Until heavens

Will fall to the sand

"It would be wonderful, to say you regret it

It would be easy, to regret

But what does it mean to regret, when you have no choice?

It's what you can bear

It was death

I chose life"

Vlieland

"Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es? Ich weiss das Land nicht

zu finden,

wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf"-Friedrich von Schiller

Seven hours later

The land I can never find

Slumber of the density

The street I can't recognize

Elsewhere I went

It ain't but a grave

The asphalt of sunlight

It ain't a creek, or a volcano

The morning whites wash away

In the earliest hours of heyday

The lucid dreams of hesper

They are cast off as the stranger

I read from a postcard

Over snow of an older winter

"There is only one village in the island.

A second village, was lost to the sea in 1736."

At the Zuiderduintjes

Passing through the fingers

In throbs, watered down

Miraculous dangers

Feed from mouth

Of a sanderling

The banks of daytime

With waterfalls

Of strange urges

To land home

Island stranded

Moonshine opaque

Of humid lights

That keep the traffic

From the windows

Of my ears

Vaguely so

And at the expense

Of newspapers

And motets

Simpler words

Emerging out

Of solid bodies

Flesh and water

Both in him

In a crater of bonds

Extending from south to north

In the search

For happier news

Than those of knowledge

Of the world

Creaturely bonds

Depart from his body

Cut across the land

Pierce the phones

The ropes

The new beds

The unloves

Unwoven the thread

There are no footsteps

We walk up again

All the way!

But I was there

Waiting for him

At the Zuiderduintjes