Ragged Claws

“Life is a kind of madness that death makes.”

Is it harder to write when you have nothing to say or when there is so much that can’t be put into words because the feelings themselves are slippery and abstracted and finding the words is just trapping them in cages that will never fit? 

I write less the more deeply I feel, as if I am afraid to look those things in the face because they will tell me to go places I do not yet know if I am brave enough to see.

I’ve had this feeling for a long time, and I forget about it, and then something happens, a dream, a moment, and I remember that I know things about myself, that I’ve felt them in the deep places between my organs and my bones, that the whole world and spectrum of existence is available to me. That I am alive but dying, that to live as I want to is to burst into flames and never extinguish. 

That this knowledge is the closest thing I have felt to joy and to loneliness, and that I have not yet learned to reconcile the two. 

I can feel that things are changing and are changed. Sometimes you feel the most imperceptible differences, the warming and cooling of a single degree that propels the entire ecosystem of your being into a different reality. I sense that things shelved beyond reach, things frozen to a kind of nonexistence are thawing and coming to life, and I welcome them even though I know they bring war. 

I can sense these things, and I can say they are like this and like that and to some degree this might represent what it is I feel, and perhaps the tone and style might show how I feel and why and for whom and without what. And yet there are other things, places where thinking dissolves and what is left is not quite feeling either, but a knowing that resides far away from knowledge, a feeling of some cosmic pattern, some truth, some joke that I can only tell with the suggestion of a smile when no one is looking.

Sometimes, if you’ve had this feeling, the confused words above might be enough to remind you of your own knowing, and though yours will be a different memory than mine, perhaps the two will stand side by side in agreement, and we will know, yes, we exist to each other in this way too, as two souls side by side in agreement.

And so what is it that is different? Is it that I recognize something that I didn’t before? Or that a pattern changed and I felt its change as my own? Or that my thoughts of the pattern changing led it to, as such prophecies do? Or is it simply that, as Renata Adler said, altogether too much of life is mood?

That line I told you, about the world of introspection and impulse, it is my life. I think about how each thing I do seems to fall neatly into one or the other, how each is the extreme and ever more to balance the other, about how they are my attempts at the truth reached only through the back door. About how the back door is the only one that really exists, this knowing things without knowing, feeling them without words.

We are all perfectionists in such irregular, uncompromising ways. I heard a man say yesterday how tired he was of being alone, how everyone wants someone, and I felt so reassured and so devastated and the two feelings came crashing over me like two great waves, simultaneous and insistent. And I couldn’t shake this feeling all night, that I don’t know what love is, that no one does, that I am alone and always will be, that I choose and cherish this, that it is my biggest fear and greatest consolation.

I used to want to be simple. I used to fantasize about what it would be like to a be a person for whom things were enough, who could find a nice job with a nice view and settle there, who could find a man that loved her and love him back and not think about leaving always and freedom and love.

I want freedom without cost, I want peace without revolt. I want to arise on the other side of the revolution and feel myself victorious. I want natural beauty. I want to remain a child forever.

These are the things I have been thinking about. Things have changed and I feel balanced precariously on the edge of some other existence I am afraid and in awe of, and so I feel that of myself, that I am afraid and in awe.

BF Problems

“You don’t respect my sheets. You respect nothing.”

LIFE. 

Pale Blue Dot

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Carl Sagan was an astronomer, astrophysicist, astro-etc. But if you ask me, he was a poet, because like whoa. That shit is good. 

Thomas Houseago - Sitting Figure Thomas Houseago - “Sitting Figure”

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down in front of words and wanted to plunge into them. Often this only happens right before sleep, when they begin finally to blur and deconstruct in ways I wish they would when I was awake and I remember that I love language for itself and not for what I wish to do with it. It is a matter of courage to allow oneself to be used. And only at the borders of one’s own sanity does the truth begins to show, or true existence, or perhaps just existence itself, like the waking from a slumber one didn’t know one was living. 

There were times when, through work, I sat across a person so infested with schizophrenia, they could scarcely leave their house. And yet their world, their reality, seemed to me less absurd than my own. Didion says this best, as she does, in ‘The White Album’ when she includes a psychiatric diagnosis of her mental breakdown, depicting “a personality in process of deterioration” and follows it only with: ”By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

My own insanity seems to me so contained, so well-adjusted these days that I can’t resolve whether I am the happiest or most repressed I’ve ever been. The massive discrepancy between my own self-image and that which the world seems to conceive of me is fascinating. I fear it will all break soon enough, but then again, maybe not. 

Deptford Goth

—People Get Still

Deptford Goth will take over the world. 

This is everything. 

Felt apocalyptic sad today, but then drank a bottle of vodka and danced to Salt’n’Pepa and felt nothing and that’s how you get rid of sadness, I guess. 

The Capsule by Athina Rachel Tsangari.

It was created as both fashion film and art installation, commissioned by art collector Dakis Joannou, designed for this year’s DesteFashionCollection. It has premiered already somewhere in New York, MoMa maybe, Toronto too, but still seems like a dream someone fell into reading Sophocles on acid. 

It calls itself a Greek Gothic mystery, inspired by the Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska whose drawings follow the movie’s stills. This is the only synopsis the website provides: 

Seven young women. A mansion perched on a Cycladic rock. A series of lessons on discipline, desire, discovery, and disappearance. A melancholy, inescapable cycle on the brink of womanhood — infinitely.

Also on its website is a link entitled “Confessions”. There are seven, each in a different language, not translations of each other but similar. Evil, from hint to promise, I think. 

Stories*

I typed the words “I hope you found love, because you lost all of mine.” They seemed true, vindictive enough, ill-tempered and hard of sharing. This seemed a fitting end, the honest way to leave. I skipped the congratulations, the niceties people say in situations such as these. I’m happy for you. I wish you well. I tried to imagine the unraveling end but could not imagine one more sorrowful than ours, so I altered my fantasy. He doesn’t really love her, not in the way I knew. He loves her the way you love a loyal dog, the way you love your mother. I took comfort in the knowledge that my destruction was also my appeal, that playing it safe never reaps the same rewards.

*Swear it’s at least partially fictionalized. 

Tour Guide Extraordinaire

The moment your plane skids the earth of this continent, we are renting you a bike. It is the only way I deem fit to travel, trained tigers notwithstanding: fast, road-rage building/endorphin-releasing, economical, compact. Plus, happiness is biking home in silence with the rising sun.

It is also and ascertainably the best way to see a city. When I first started working in the north, I would bike home to the very tip of the south and, before realizing weeks late that my compass-bell was solely decorative, I got lost in what seemed like every stray neighborhood this city hid in its belly. I’ll never find my way back to those beautiful mangy places because they are, like, at the deep-throat end of Alice’s Wonderland, but I hope you find some of your own to hollow out your dreams.  

He’s also right about street food. But I’m going to tell you this, and I hope you listen, never trust a man that recommends you currywurst.

Berlin food is Turkish food, I don’t know if anyone’s told you this yet. We will eat haloumi by the plates, and thin-crust Italian pizzas by the sunset canal. If I love you, I will feed you, and you know how I love you, so bring loose pants. If you are feeling spirited, I will take you to the traditional schnitzel-und-bier joints, and if I’m feeling spirited, I will let you braid my hair. 

Unrelatedly, living here made me realize that what I for twenty-frive years thought were Bosnian delicacies were actually Turkish remnants left over from the Ottoman empire. :(  At least we have our peace-loving natures to absorb this loss. 

But your friend, he is right about something, and it is Berghain. Pack dungeon-appropriate fashions for this: everything black, disintegrating, cum-stained. I’ve yet to participate in the infamous sex dungeons or the pee cells I keep hearing about but that’s why you’re coming right? Should we feel like dropping acid after brunch, Berghain comes highly recommended. 

The Epistolary Novel, pt. 12

I have not written a letter by hand in more years than I can count, not since I was a child in Croatia and writing to some distant one in a country as unheard of as mine. And now I am back and nearly a decade has passed, and I write to you in a city more remote to me than ever, because I like what you make of my words, how they come and where they go. 

Last night, over pear liqueurs and many joints — they follow us like hounds! — a man said to me, only half in jest, that I hadn’t missed much these last ten years. But, I wanted to say, but I missed it all! I feel as though I stored a piece of myself here and have been waiting for the day I could collect it again ever since. 

Currently I am searching for it in the turquoise colors of the sea. We are in Brac, on the beaches of Bol. It means pain in Croatian; is anything but. The sky and sea battle for brightness, for lucidity, each reflecting the irreproachable blue of the other. Between, not a wisp of a cloud. Sailboats teetering in the distance provide the only relief to this great blue expanse. 

The salt of the sea rises to meet the sticky fragrance of grape leaves, of the fruits that ripen behind the stone gates of every house, and everything beneath charred orange roofs, before chipping bricks and white facades burnt with centuries in the Balkan sun.

Every so often, two tanned shoulders can be seen rising from the water, the thrashing head of the swimmer, the great splash with which the feet follow. Heat steams from the slated stones of the beach and our bodies flicker in it like vapors. The rocks are large and jagged ones hide amongst the pebbles, but, like a flaw on a flawless face, it adds to   its beauty, grounds it in a reality more perfect than the ideal. 

Maria woke us with Turkish coffee today and we sat in the garden, under the tangled vines and the timid sun and watched her husband, in possession of four teeth in all, collect fruit from the tree beside, small, coral-colored fruits like apricots, but sweeter. 

My mood is changing with the weather, as it does, and storms are beginning to brew beneath the placid azure of the sky. 

Sexting

“you should really come over so I can [—-EXPLICIT—-] and then [—-EXPLICIT—-].”

20m later

“nm, got too high.”

Italo Calvino is a genius, and lesser is the man that made this video but still. 

I dreamt last night we were on a kaleidoscopic galaxy adventure and it spanned all of time and space but then we were home before the sun rose.