The Psychology Of No One And Nothing In Particular

I wish I could write something about distance and how it makes me feel.

Transcending the here and now somehow doesn’t work my way today.

So, forget the hypothesis. Long live experience.

Wintersehnsüchtelei

Manchmal wünsche ich mir, ich könnte mich in eine Katze verwandeln. Nach Hause kommen und mich schnurrend auf das Sofa legen, den Körper einrollen und den Kopf auf die gefalteten Pfoten legen. Das dicke Fell schützt gegen Welt und Winter, die Nonchalance der getigerten Seele düpiert die Sehnsucht. Die Sehnsucht nach Schneeballschlachten zum Beispiel und der dumpfen Stille im Neuschnee, nach glasklaren Nächten übersäht von Sternen und schneeflockigen Ingrid Bergmann Küssen und einem warmen Körper und Gegenstück zu diesem Loch im Herzen. Die Sehnsucht danach, nach Hause zu kommen, sich auf’s Sofa zu legen, den Körper einzurollen und nicht an Dinge zu denken, die es so garnicht gibt im Zeitalter des Klimawandels und der Desillusion. Der Klimawandel macht meine Winterwelt letztlich nass und grau und die Desillusion lacht sich ins Fäustchen und verdeutlicht, dass dies strenggenommen garnicht meine Welt ist: Denn irgendetwas, was vielleicht auch irgendwann einmal aus Liebe geschehen ist kommt vermutlich genausogut aus anderen Gründen zustande.
In dieser Situation hilft eigentlich nur etwas Warmes im Bauch, ein gutes Buch, ein Anruf, Bier, Kaffee oder Spaziergang mit Freunden, mit Kindern spielen; Programmkino, Pfefferminztee oder einfach nur ein aufregender Wichs im gemütlichen Prädormitium --- Witze sind wärmstens zu empfehlen und Wärmeflaschen auch nicht schlecht. Gibt es Theater, Kunst, Disko oder ein Konzert zieht’s mit mp3s im Ohr wippenden Schrittes dorthin, wohin die nasskalte Dunkelheit die Menschen treibt. Dort verleiht man seinen Kopf, Geld und Witz und hofft - auf die Nonchalance der getigerten Seele, Schneeballschlachten und flockige Ingrid Bergmann Küsse, die Wangen apfelrot dank innerer Wärme und vielleicht duften fremde Haare nach Winterluft. Währenddessen verkriechen sich Klimawandel und Desillusion vor lauter Sehnsucht zwischen den heimischen Sofafalten.

Thank you Bev for the cat...
Thank you Beautiful South for those Ingrid Bergmann kisses and thank you F.C. Delius for "Ich leihe Dir meinen Kopf".

Samson

Here is a balad that was recently played to us by a good friend in a session with other good friends. Each of us brought a few songs that meant something to us. My friend brought "Samson" by Regina Spektor and think it is really special. It basically tells the biblical story of Samson and Delila from Delila's perspective - Samson wasn't tricked into cutting his hair, but chose so himself, out of love. I think her story is so credible and such a good alternative to the biblical story - after all Samson's uncontrolled anger was also the source of his invincibility, but how could he truely love with an anger like that? So she cut his hair out of love and she did rightly so. Yet their ensuing true love was only meant for a night: After all Samson, as a major political leader, could not afford to be in love, with enemies waiting for him to pounce upon the sign of weakness - and then they wrote history, blaming it all on Delila.
There is a lot in this song and if you read up on the biblical narrative, it makes you think - about feminism, politics, the politics of religion, the lies that may well be hidden within the biblical narrative if you think that Delila might just as well have been a political scapegoat --- and primarily a great lover.

Thank you Julianna for the picture of Delila and Samson from St. Trophime in Arles and thank you K. and P. for the song...

Old/Nutcase vs. Young/Knowledgeable

It's three weeks until the US elections. According to my sources, there were 204 people reading this blog from the US in the last three weeks - the largest number of readers I have in any country. Now, if another 204 people become little rickety rockets over the next three weeks, enlightening discussions with merry laughter and awkward smiles, the future should look bright!
This is therefore just for you US Americans - straight from my heart to yours, understandable for any hockey-mum, everyday-joe, countryclub-hipster, wrestling-couchster or fastfood-conservative:

Please, don't vote for McCain/Palin and do vote for Obama/Biden next month. You will have to make up your mind between old/nutcase and young/knowledgeable. I know that can be hard, but do try and do vote. It will feel very liberating and hence truely American, I promise. It would make a difference to us, i.e. the world, if you did that --- for us, God and America. It would be as grand of you as what you did in Vietnam or Iraq, only much, much nicer.

You're maybe still unsure, but let me tell you this: If you're scared of someone because somebody else is talking about him or her in a kind of scary way, you are actually scared of the one doing the scary talk. Most of the time.

Just watch this video...

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Berlin and Back in a Day

Sitting on a high speed train
I stretch my brain
Each ripple I watch unfold
Memories untold and flimsy hope
Crumbled dreams and dust of gold
Falling like postcards across my mind –
Germany rushing by

My Friend Autumn and I

I told you about Autumn being my friend this year. Another friend of mine - from the tropics - asked me to post some pictures of Autumn, as she has never seen what he looks like. OK, so here are some pictures of us inside our local park…

This is my friend Autumn. He really likes leaves, but thinks that green is boring. That’s why he changes their colours into various shades of yellow, red and brown. I often challenge him to do blue or pink, but that’s just a no-no: He usually says he’s an artist and that there are certain colours that just don’t go down well with his general appearance, political mission and interior personal landscape. It’s a long standing discussion between us…

This one he really liked – the technique is apparently called juxtaposition: “Wait until I bring in the wind and all the leaves mix --- everyone’s equal in a leaf-pile…”, he nods significantly while I quietly mumble a ‘smartass’ in his general direction, wishing that I could do something like that...

This guy lives in the park and just overheard my friend’s artistic comment. He said he had thought about this and other fundamental questions of life and death for a long time now and has eventually come to think that if Autumn really thinks so, he must really and actually exist; probably as an entirely separate substance from any body and therefore wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical, i.e. as an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing, which is entirely distinct from any object and would therefore not fail to be what it is even if every object in the world would cease to exist…
“Who’s existing now?” Autumn laughed, blasting two dozen leaves off some random, innocent tree - just because he can…

This is Schneeeule (pronounced "Shnoile") and she knows Autumn for quite some time now. She thinks he is generally ok, but she actually prefers the real thing --- Winter. “Not good,” I thought, because for sure this Winter is now out to kill my good friend sooner or later...

“I never really wanted to be a migratory bird. I just didn’t read the small print when I applied for a job as an entertainer in Europe and even though I don’t even care about Autumn or any of that seasonal nonsense, I could imitate it if you gave me a 10er. I’m saving up and working 24/7, hoping to someday wriggle out of my contract in order to fly back to my tropical home...” Those are the working conditions for professionally trained parrots inside our local city park. Truly shocking, but Autumn couldn’t have cared less…

This is me in front of the arboretum. Autumn just made some bad and politically incorrect joke about all those trees waiting to get their leaves stripped - just to take a stupid picture of me…

But usually he is good to be around with, especially now, while he’s still joyful and full of colours…

André Heller

I went out to buy a jumper for winter yesterday and came back with five forgotten LP records instead. It was a good tradeoff. I do have a soft spot for 60s-70s poetic songs (as in "chanson" or "Lied") with good lyrics. I consider this the crucial part of the first generation of pop song writing. Sung poetry can be such a drug, amplifying a thousand times what may be lost between bookends.

In the anglophone world there were Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, etc. In the francophone world there were Francoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, Renaud, Jane Birkin, etc. For a long time, however, and for very good reasons I kept a safe distance to German-singing songwriters, because German folk music generally sucks. A lot.

But yesterday I discovered a few gems which I think deserve to be mentioned alongside a Paul Simon, Janis Joplin or Jacques Brel and over the next couple of weeks I shall explore and share more of it. So today enters André Heller, a true poet and versatile artist involved in music, poetry, theatre, football, performance, and and and...

Die Hundertjährige ("The 100 year old woman")
...a song about a 100 year old woman and beauty in dignity.

Jetzt wo alles besprochen ist ("Now that everything has been talked about")
...actually the truest song I know in the category "what to say to a former lover".

Denn ich will ("Since I want")
...a beautiful song about freedom in love.

Sei Poet ("Be a Poet")
...my absolute favorite. You may want to learn German for this.

Song to Whoever

For us to be in love, each day I must –

Nourish every passion in this German soul
Feed Love with other hearts and minds
Rekindle Anger with pins in my voodoo doll
Steal moments and play them to Wit on my shoulder
Carefully wrap it all in language and balance
Life dancing across the gorge of everytime
Chase my shadows and ghosts until they love life
Intrude and rage inside the sanctuary of relativism, then
Unplug my heart and shed its blood in thick drops of tears, to
Work for what will be beyond you and me
My mother-tongue I must break to make room for the kaleidoscope of exile

I must only live –
Fly with the owls, hunt with the cats, eat with the eagles and sleep amongst crocodiles
Jump from the stage of my life into the abyss
Knowing that the full embrace of your love will catch me

You must not change anything
For if you really are what glimpse I caught -
Just make me a part of your whole life

Thanks James for the "love or die" graffiti...

War in Mindanao

I recently discovered a very good documentary by Al Jazeera about the current crisis in Mindanao on Youtube. I think it gives a very good picture of some of the current threats to peace: It includes a situationer, as well as interviews with civilians, NGOs, Al Haj Murad Ebrahim of the MILF and Gen. Esperon of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process. It is 22 Minutes long and you can find it

Here (Part 1)

and here (Part 2)


Nothanks, Philippine Daily Inquirer, for the strange cartoon above you published in early August...

Critical Moments

Bush warning over bail-out delay
US President George W Bush has warned the global climate is at a “critical moment” and vowed to get his climate change rescue plan through Congress. He said the consequences would be “painful and lasting” if the $700bn (£380bn) deal was not passed.

Bush warning over bail-out delay
US President George W Bush has warned the level of global inequality is at a “critical moment” and vowed to get his wealth distribution rescue plan through Congress. He said the consequences would be “painful and lasting” if the $700bn (£380bn) deal was not passed.

Bush warning over bail-out delay
US President George W Bush has warned the level of AIDS/HIV, tuberculosis and malaria prevalence is at a “critical moment” and vowed to get his human security rescue plan through Congress. He said the consequences would be “painful and lasting” if the $700bn (£380bn) deal was not passed.

Bush warning over bail-out delay
US President George W Bush has warned the level of human rights protection is at a “critical moment” and vowed to get his rescue plan for human rights defenders and victims through Congress. He said the consequences would be “painful and lasting” if the $700bn (£380bn) deal was not passed.

"Bush warning over bail-out delay
US President George W Bush has warned the US economy is at a "critical moment", and vowed to get his Wall Street rescue plan through Congress. He said the consequences would be "painful and lasting" if the $700bn (£380bn) deal rejected by the US House of Representatives was not passed."
www.bbc.co.uk, Sept 30, 2008

Danke, Gymnasium Bensheim, für die gute Grafik.

Wetland Sunset

Myra startled as a stumbling Leonard crashed sleepingly through the dark living room, fumbling for the ringing phone and breaking glass in the process. She jumped at the corresponding noise but was soon calmed by his brief and calm conversation – “how exactly does it feel, human life,” she wondered. Myra yawned while stretching her back, preparing herself to ponder this thought on the comfortable sofa: How was it that life for Leonard seemed to be fleeting, like rain on a sunny day or sudden gusts of wind slowly stripping the trees in autumn? And yet, it was commandeering, imposing its twists and turns on everyday life in all their briefness or extraordinary drama. But why, she thought while straightening a spot of messy fur on her back, does he antagonise it and still embrace its wonders once they had become apparent to him anyway? She had suspected all along that he got some kind of satisfaction out of this struggle and premeditated that she would observe him, tomorrow, to resolve this mystery. Her dream turned into an eagle-winged tigress, hunting like an owl through the dark and starry night.

***

His favourite radio station brought him back into the world in the morning. He knew the commentators by their voices, enjoyed the interviews and discussions on current events and was never annoyed by the musical intersections. The radio, just like the bakery around the corner, was what he loved about home: This he had known before, but cherished ever since he had come back from his recent trip to the opposite end of the planet. At the moment home was still new to him and he considered himself lucky for what he had and that was that. Moreover, he had started to get this deep sense of satisfaction from his work: Someone had said it, and it had stuck – “there are struggles much bigger than us”. He really wanted to be a part in some of them.

***

Myra had long woken up, cleaned her fur and sharpened her claws. Now she was hungry. Leonard had not come back home all day and outside the moon already rose from behind the next row of houses. Houses - Myra took them for granted, just like the trees, grass or garbage cans in the backyard. At the moment, she was concerned with other things, though. She hadn’t had a chance to check on Leonard today and was hungry, very hungry.
In the morning he had seemed strangely at ease, even playing the paper-mouse-on-string game she was crazy about. And when he had ruffled her, he had done it just right, there had not even been the slightest sense of ---
she heard the key in the door. All her suspicions about human life were confirmed even before she saw the woman enter the flat. Myra watched her come in from the opposite end of the living-room. She didn’t look hostile, rather at odds with herself, the world - just about everything. Her eyes were wet: This she had seen with Leonard before and it fitted perfectly what she had wanted to find out about yesterday! Yet, it did not matter much now, for now she was just a very, very hungry cat.
The woman sat down next to her, staring a hole into something on the opposite wall, the keys weakly dangling in her left hand. “Let’s see if this will make a difference,” Myra thought and brushed around the legs, purring and mewling. Oh, she really was hungry now…

***

A few hours earlier a glorious day full of jokes, flirts and laughter had come to an end for Leonard. He and his friend Fran were then enjoying the sunset, overlooking the meadows, flowers, birds and trees alongside the little lake inside their local city park.
“I’m really glad I caught your call last night – broke something while picking it up, though,” Leonard said. “Oh, where I come from that is a lucky charm,” Fran replied. “Ha! Where I come from it is actually a sign for clumsiness,” laughed Leonard. “I don’t think so,” Fran said, now looking straight at him “I haven’t seen you this happy in a long, long time. Now, you spill the beans what’s going on with you, will you!”
Leonard smiled. The sun was still warm and setting and everything looked strangely beautiful and surreal. In fact, the sun was a giant orange and the meadow a mysterious carpet painted by Monet. At first he did not notice the fist clenching his heart, but when he did, the pain was already too strong to speak. The world around him turned into something else, like an artist’s impression or an incredibly witty remark. He wanted to laugh, but his mind broke into confetti.

On a gorgeous late-summer evening Leonard's good friend Fran called the ambulance.


Thank you, Jan Schmuckal, for Wetland Sunset.

Autumn's Velvet Underground

This is officially subjectively the first day of autumn at my place, and I decided today that autumn will be my friend. I shall play with it, make fun of it, fool around with it and remember it dearly once it's dead and gone.
Only then shall I tune in to Winter Song.
This year, autumn will be my Fairest of the seasons and I shall be Beginning to see the light, ha!
After all, Who loves the sun? - definitely, not just anyone...
Yes, Somewhere there's a Feather and I shall be there to catch it!

Thank you Diana for that picture.

Mindanao Revisited

Once again I spend a few days in central Mindanao. While a day in Pikit area, two days in Cotabato city and a brief stint to Midsayap gave me impressions, it was certainly not enough to immerse in a community and really deeply understand the impact of the current conflict. So I shall stick to a few impressions. In Cotabato I felt detached in a complex way, much the more since I spend a good chunk of time in the guesthouse in order not to be a liability on my companion’s short-notice trips to a hotspot area in Datu Piang.
Cotabato once again struck me as a sad town. While Davao, Kidapawan or even Midsayap are buzzing and booming with traffic and commerce and forever changing their faces, Cotabato still seems poor and neglected with a looming shadow. There are frequent bombings, assassinations of local politicians and the crime level is high. At one crossing in the town center there are about six or so pawnshops. Each time I come to Cotabato, friends and collegues tell me horror stories – “this is the café where a local councillor was shot the other day, I was just driving past”, “just 30 meters from my home a bomb went off last year, body-parts splashed up to the wall of my house”, “this hole is the remnant of yet another bombing of the bus station just a few months ago”, etc.
Of course, these superficial impressions are influenced by me being Caucasian, all the inner city travel advisory from my Filipino companions and the overall mystery of crime and punishment that overcasts conversations when you say you intent to travel to Cotabato. Also, the city hardly has any taxis – there are too many hold-ups and too few people are willing to pay the extra Peso for a cab, I was told. My mobility, in turn, was limited and I could not help feeling like a spoiled child waiting for people to pick me up.
I was touched by this lush and abundantly overgrowing garden around a small fishpond at my guesthouse – long ago somebody had created this little idyllic Eden there and had even placed clay figures into the scenery: In the middle of the pond stood a child wearing a T-shirt with “City Boy” written on and he was happily waiving its clay arms. To his left sat a large white swan, which in his glorious past must have even been able to spout water. I particularly liked four musicians joyfully playing from within an overgrowing bush and I could not help thinking of the Beatles. Above it all and in the back stood a large virgin Mary. I was really puzzled by this garden and I wondered what it said about its maker – other than that he/she was probably Christian – was this intended as an antidote to the city, like a treatment to the trauma of harsh everyday realities or was it merely an expression of somebody’s love to a city? The latter, somehow, seemed to me too naïve to be true. Maybe it shouldn't.
But what am I writing here… To be honest, I do not want to write about the conflict today, although I had some interesting conversations and I did get a fair grasp of the current situation. But I do not want to jam this place with half-baked political analyses. It’s meant for impressions...
Just a few snippets from my beloved Pikit – there are still about 400 families evacuating within the municipality, waiting in makeshift huts for the calamities in their villages to settle or too scared to go back just yet. There are many more in other places in Maguindadao and Lanao, all in all currently around 34,000 families. Rumours of war are frequently cropping up and there is a lot of uncertainty. From Pikit, we drove some way into Liguasan marsh and I was torn between the beauty of the area and the hardship of its people. An Al Jazeera TV crew was interviewing an old man in his preliminary shelter along the side of the dirt road: How many times in his life he had had to evacuate, they asked him. He could not remember. Another man told me they had not received any food supplies since the beginning of Ramadan and he was starting to get worried. Yet another one burst out in a frustrated rant against conflict, poverty and the government when I greeted him. Later on we drove past a large crowd of pupils on their way home from school and our companion said “here comes the next generation of MILF mujahideens.” I was wondering what else I would have become if I had grown up in this beautiful, fought over place.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

Yesterday it rained like I'd never seen before. A thick curtain of wet strings fell from the sky and within minutes drains turned into creeks and streets into rivers. The two seconds it took me to jump out of the taxi under the porch were enough to make me wet. Just how much water can fit into a cloud, I was wondering, and this one might have just been overambitious and was now coming down with a crash. I cannot imagine what Manila itself might have looked like - or the slums alongside the river Pasig.
For us up in Quezon City, however, it was mostly fun - the kids in the neighbourhood used the opportunity to swim on the street and I became a laughing stock when I tried to cross the street with my flip-flops on and they got carried away, me hurriedly hobbling after them. Also, I was happy that somebody had warned me to watch out for open manholes: Apparently they are one of the great dangers during rains like that.

Who is Kathy?

There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
I love it when songs become real. It happened to me before with the lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen – he describes the same story in his book The Favorite Game, so when I heard the song it really struck me – “yes”, I thought, “this must have really happened.”
I just accidentally found out that also Kathy’s Song is originally by Paul Simon. I had heard some cover version before, but now it makes so much more sense. Kathy just became real for me and the bus journey must have actually happened. Apparently Kathy is also referred to in Homeward Bound. Hence three of the best S&G songs are about the same girl! So what’s the real story here?
This is what the internet comes up with:
Kathleen Mary (Kathy) Chitty and Paul Simon met at the very first coffeehouse Paul played at when he arrived in England in 1964. She was three years younger than him. Kathy apparently rarely spoke and Paul referred to her as his “friendly haiku”.
They broke up in 1965, when The Sound of Silence became a big hit. Some say that Kathy wanted no part of the success and fame that awaited Paul. How painful the breakup was? I don't know, but in May 1991, when Paul was touring England, he received a letter from Kathy, much to his delight. Kathy was married with three children and living in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, working part-time at a technical college. Despite the great interest of the British tabloids, she did not talk to the press…

Hotel Paradis

Manila is large, loud, smelly and hot. There’s just so much life packed and crammed into this place, you feel like its fermenting, constantly brewing futures, fortunes and fate. Its population is young, hence active and constantly communicating, be it in terms of career, pastime or survival. There is so much life here, that it does not let itself be digitally managed as, say, in London, Frankfurt or Paris. Urban management here seems mostly manual – I watched a traffic police officer yesterday who was physically struggling with the waves and waves of cars, jeepneys, tricycles and people breaking into a crossing – despite working traffic lights. I recently spend a lot of time on public transport and I cannot stop looking at people. I try to imagine their lives, or at least something about them. What a snag that I don’t speak tagalog! On the other hand this allows me to listen to conversations and contextualise, like I’m dubbing brief sketches I make up of people.
If you take the MRT from Cubao to Manila, you can change train lines between Recto and D. Jose stations. These two stations are connected by a totally fenced in skyway through an urban slum area. It feels like a zoo, like a catwalk, like a prison and I had a strange feeling of segregation, like one gets by looking through fortified glass barriers at international airports – you can see the flights to Atlanta, Tokio or Sydney, but you cannot take them.
This was when I saw that sign – “Hotel Paradis – Sound proof wall!!”. Obviously one urban slum dweller had picked it up from somewhere and was now making a point to all those hurriedly passing upon business or pleasure through the skyway. Or at least so I'd like to think. Maybe he is just getting paid by the said hotel...

Six Feet Under

Everybody dies and everybody lives
With their struggles and their pleas
Our crystal sorrow summer afternoon
Teaches a child swim attune
The powerful calm of life sways
From in between
And not a rock and a hard place

Musical Life Cookery

When life did not feel right Martha started playing a game she called “musical life cookery”. It was an amazing, imaginative game where she could just about detach from her own life and let lyrics, sounds and all those fictional and non-fictional characters of popular music mingle and meet. That usually made her happy.
Martha liked weird, funny, poignant and occasionally touching connections switching and mixing issues, people, ideas and personalities between songs. Making up a musical movie in her mind allowed her to live other lives for a while until their experiences brought her back home.

One rainy Saturday night, Martha made Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons accidentally bump into each other in an old funky jazz bar in Louisiana. Frank was just in the middle of a whacky Nixon impression, when Beth nearly ran him over.
"Blimey!", Beth said, not instantly noticing that very strange and weird change that happend as she spilled her drink amidst Frank's attentive audience - Frank and her had mixed personalities: Frank suddenly was Beth, or rather a Beth-like Frank, still retaining some aspects of his but with some of Beth’s personality traits - and vice versa. Frank felt curious. Not only had he never been to Portishead before, but he had also never felt that particular kind of serenity. Strangely inspired he grabbed a guitar and sang

“And the right and the wrong and insane
And the answers they cannot explain
Pulsate from my soul through my brain
in a spanish guitar“ (For a Spanish Guitar by the Byrds)

Beth, in the meantime, had gotten herself a glass of white port with lemon juice and was chatting up the band disrupted by Frank’s singing. When Frank had finished, Beth smiled and cracked a joke about the American guitar she had grabbed. Together with the band she played Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman and even Frank joined in the dancing...

Martha was happy with the world where Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons would become friends and people were happy with each other’s similarities and differences. Jacques Brel was sitting next to her on the sofa, gently stroking her hair and kissing her forehead. Martha took a sip of her tea. Outside, the rain was pouring down and her good friend Tanita Tikaram waived at her from under a large black umbrella. Distant music trickeled into her room -

“On a midnight voyage,
One that has no ending;
And it's sending me
The things that I need.
Far away from shore—
Further than I've been before;
But I feel the strength of the new sea.
(Of a midnight voyage for just what you need...)
Dreams come and go,
And I sift through them.
Love starts to grow
From the thoughts that I find within them.” (Midnight Voyage by the Mamas and Papas)

Crossroads

It’s not that love is not around
In her nightgown she stands as Jeanne of Arc
Over the rubble of the city she had build deep inside
Life had torn through metal, glass and wood
Tearing it up like an angry storm chasing lost hair
And at the end
I collect scattered hopes, wishes and dreams
In company of her and the wildlife

Love in the Days of the Blunt Pencil

Wilbur had just finished going through the weekly classified and since the kettle was boiling, he got up to make tea. There were still gaps in his tour for tomorrow and he was hoping to make amends by choosing a route through the middle class suburb of Rosemount to possibly pick up leftovers from the odd removal. He had rented the scrap metal truck about a year ago and although things could have been better he was his own boss and getting by modestly.
When he sat down at the kitchen table he noticed the slim figure quietly standing in the doorway. Wilbur was puzzled, for the person must have stood there for some time without him noticing. Looking at her he remembered seeing her passing by in the park a couple of days ago. Or could she possibly have stood next to him in the second hand bookstore downtown? Yes, he remembered briefly remembering her, like an echo of something significant that had happened long before. And then he had found this book that he might as well send his nice Emily for her birthday.
She smiled and as if she was walking right through him, a soft blanket or veil slowly flowed neck-down around his shoulders, just inside his skin.

~

The party had been going on for several hours and the speakers were spilling a mid-90s trip-hop classic over the midsummer night of North Donside Beach. Wilbur was comfortably tucked into his blanket, his face gleaming in the heat of the fire. The mood significantly lifted by various passing bottles of red wine, old friends and new acquaintances were chatting and laughing.
“What is this about mustard-vinegar dressing that makes me cringe?” Sitting next to him and pulling a face Beth Gibbons would have killed for, Alice was playfully tossing around her spinach salad in a plastic vessel. “It’s the vinegar – there’s just too much of it,” Wilbur answered, while Alice shrugged off sour times – “brrrrrh, you can feed that to the seagulls!” - “Crooooaak, croak, crrroooooak,” Wilbur replied flapping his arms up and down and prompting Alice to wittingly shove a spoonful of spinach right into his mouth – “yikes, very sweet of you, but too sour even for a gull on a beach party,” he laughed. “Just like real life,” said Alice and kissed him, “this food is something special.”

That had been the beginning of an extraordinary summer. With the last exam finished, they went on a long trip hitching and hiking across central Europe. In Switzerland, they had found shelter in a farmhouse after a long hike and torrential rains. The old lady of the house was a brilliant story teller and when the rain finally stopped early morning, they had gotten to know the full extend and drama of love, death and horror in the villages’ local history.
In Leipzig, they had made love on the rooftop of an old disused factory building – their ‘castle’, and they would look down on the tiny match-sized subjects below and invent royal decisions to be taken: “That’s Margaret. Her husband had been a former employee of the postal service, but after the reunification he had lost his job. Margaret is frustrated with him, because his mood is nauseating ever since he has been working with the employment agency – what should we do, my Queen?” “We chop his head off, my King.”
And they had found Alfred – a hungry little stray kitten crying for help in a public park in Amsterdam and after organising water, cat-food and a cardboard-box with breathing holes, they were now smuggling him back into Britain.
“I want a baby, Wilbur…” The National Express was hurrying across the pastoral scene of late summer rural England and inside sat Wilbur, painfully trying to imagine what his baby might actually look like and despite his luck at loss at the overall meaning of it all.

They had been madly in love in summer, but by winter their lives were moving at individual paces. What Alice could not stand was his stubborn self-deception. He was like this or like that, he would say, implying a hurtful “you still don’t know me, maybe I’m not good enough for you”. She knew that wasn’t true. She could see beyond individual character traits and had struggled through both the death of her baby brother Marco and her parents’ subsequent break-up: If there was one thing she knew for certain it was real love when she looked at it. It was not something she could ignore and with Wilbur it had been with her all the time – mustard-vinegar dressing and all.
“When freedom was practised in a closed circle, it faded into a dream,” Wilbur then wrote in fridge poetry. At first she took it as decorative whimsy, but the sentence had struck and stuck: Of course, he was the person he was and she loved him for it, but the hidden cruelty with which he would maim her efforts to devise a common future for the two of them hurt her. It was also rather childish, in her opinion.

Wilbur was at odds with himself. Not only was his job with a local accountancy firm meaningless and boring, but he was also struggling not to loose it. Yet, the more stress his boss would unload onto him, the less he would get done. With each apology the strings on the inside of his soul would tie into a tighter knot, impossible to untie. What was needed was a sword, to break the spell just like Alexander had done with the Gordian Knot. Wilbur wanted to quit and look for something else, but when he got home, his mind was oblivious. On top of it all, his father kept calling – “we’re going to Venice on invitation of your sister Francine and her husband Barry. You know he is a solicitor in Hampstead, don’t you? He is such a man of means and connections. Anyway, when will you get a proper job, Wilbur?” What a prison cell his life was! How could Alice honestly expect him to simply break out of this mess without any collateral damage?

One night he had a dream. Alice and he were walking up Gallowgate through stormy weather. Gusts of wind tore through their conversation, distorting phrases out of context and into absurdity. Both of them felt misunderstood and hurt by the other, yet they were trying to drive their respective point home: “You are ---- invincible ---- shit” – “When you --- falter --- each time your father calls.” They were bitterly angry with each other when Wilbur spotted what looked like a Rubik’s Cube just next to the sidewalk. It looked muddy and had obviously been thrown away by some bored kid. Yet, it looked precious, as if it could provide answers to all his questions. “Wait, I need to pick up that thing,” he shouted, but Alice startled at the monstrosity the wind had turned this phrase into and with tears in her eyes darted off into the wind. Wilbur picked up the Cube and tried to follow, but the wind got stronger and stronger, until he could hardly move forward. Having lost sight of Alice, his only hope was the cube: He instantly realised that each of its sides provided the answer to one of his personal struggles. “My life is such a mess,” he thought, “I won’t make sense of any of the other sides, but at least one of them is an image of Alice.” He knew that if he would solve at least that one side, she would come back and maybe they would be able to sort out the rest together. Frantically, he started to turn the bricks, but with each turn less and less bricks actually reminded him of Alice. Then he realised that he didn’t even know what she looked like – and woke up.

A month later, Alice moved down south. She called him from Westmoreland Service Station: “You know, Wilbur, I cannot forget you stopped loving me. Love is a precious living thing and a terrible thing to loose. It is like a plant that needs watering and sunlight, so it can grow. I have taken Alfred with me. Take care of yourself, please do. I really hope that you take care of yourself…” Soon after, Wilbur quit his job.

~

The figure was now sitting across from him. She looked neither young nor old. Her face had friendly and rather androgynous features. She wore a pastel-coloured dress gently flowing around her body and although she looked at him in a kind - yet nonchalant – way, her body generally seemed fragile enough to get bruised by everyday items such as wooden chairs, kitchen sinks or even a blunt pencil.
Wilbur searched around for dangerous objects. Indeed, this was not a place to receive a guest – he fetched a pillow and blanket and put out Turkish delight. His guest, in the meantime, smiled. Who was she? Just when he was about to ask, she spoke:
“I am Love and I’m moving in.”
Wilbur blushed. “There might not be enough room for you and I’m not sure if you can bear with me...”
“Don’t you worry about that – I’m here to stay. As long as you can remember…”
The veil gently settled over a vast expanse of land deep inside Wilbur - where he had expected crevasses and cliffs - and he smiled for the first time that day.

Treasure is everywhere

Record shops are full of treasure. Here is a great pasttime for a rainy afternoon: Find a friend with a sense of humor, go to a second hand record shop and spend ten minutes looking for the worst album cover you can find. You and your friend will most likely end up laughing your heads off. There was a time in the 60s, 70s and 80s when quirky layouters would come up with a vast range of breathtaking adsurdities...
Take a look at Slim Goodbody - can you imagine what his music may sound like? What may the "FREE full-color activity poster" look like and what on earth would it make you do? Discoveries like this can make your day, you can bottle them up for another rainy day, a shitty everyday moment of murkiness lightened up by their vivid memory.

The music video of "I Wanna Love You Tender" by Armi & Danny is another one of those peaches. Not only is the dancing choreography ridiculously awkward and the lyrics totally naft, but I think it is the grammar that adds a pinch of grandeur ("How can I be sure you're not pretender?") to a great artwork. I want Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny to team up! I want a music industry that cherishes quirky detail and serendipidous crappiness! I want a museum for artists like Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny!

Courtship Rituals

One of my current toilet readings is Henry Gleitman's introductory psychology reader. Admittedly, it is a steep challenge for a toilet reading, but it features various chapters with more and less interesting well-organised short sections and - there are various amusing and educational images and graphs on every page.
Today I read about peculiar courtship rituals in the animal kingdom and since it is spring I would like to share some of them with you. Maybe we can all learn something from it, refine our human interaction, arrange unions, liberate from hormonal controls and physiological cycles and enjoy the splendors of polygyny, polyandry and monogamy!

First of all, the bower bird, living in Australia and New Guinea. The male bower bird tries to entice the female into a straw hut decorated with all sorts of items, preferrably matching the blue of his feathering.
Appart from traditional decoratory items, such as shells or berries, the modern bower bird likes clothespins, plastic caps and all sorts of strips and shreds of consumer culture. If an object is moved while Mr Bird is out at a collector's fair, he puts it back in its place. Miss Bower walks around, carefully assessing each bower, considering everything from the color coordination to the rarity of the items, including the overall artistic significance and what that might say about Bob Bower. Finally, many females mate with the same male, leaving everybody else in artistic squalor and tornment.

Secondly, the grebe. The average grebe surely knows how to make the good times roll. These water animals engage in a complex water ballet during courtship, stylishly dancing with hydrofoil feet accross the water while exchanging gifts of seaweed. How utterly beautiful, nice and sexy! I think I wanna be a grebe for a sunny springtime afternoon!

Much unlike the dancing fly. During mating time, the male dancing fly secretes a little ball of silk which he gives to the female while he copulates ("Dear, I think the ceeling needs painting"). It may sound nice to bring a gift to a date, but why exactly does he do that? Apparently, in other related species occupied with less precopulatory fuss, the female may decide to eat the male, rather than making precious love. Some male flies have therefore cunningly taken up bringing a small prey animal to their date, to have something up their sleeve if Ms Fly is looking for a fry. She eats, he copulates, everybody wins.
Now that isn't the summit of fly cunning: Other guys decided to wrap the prey in a little bit of silk, in order to make sure Lady McFly is occupied with unwrapping and eating, while he's got a little more time to copulate.
The dancing fly, in turn, is the abomination of that idea - he simply sticks to the wrapping and when poor Florina Flyson is finished unwrapping the ever smaller present ("What could it be?! A grub? A fly? A small fly? A tiny fly? A very, very tiny diamond? Nothing?!!! What the ---") - he is already gone, bragging about his conquest with the other guys at the liquor store. I surely do not want to be a lady dancing fly, not even on a sunny springtime afternoon on Broadway.

Now, not all guys are like that. For that matter, let's turn to one of my favorite animals - the sea horse. When Seamour Stallion and Melanie Mare discover their mutual interest, they court for several days, disregarding any interference of others. They change color (do they blush?) and swim side by side, gently holding tails or gripping the same strand of sea grass. Before dawn they wheel around dancing. Their final courtship dance lasts about eight hours whereas Seamor pumps water through his egg pouch, which opens up to display its emptiness. Then both he and Melanie let go of any anchors and drift snout-to-snout in spirals upwards out of the seagras.
Melanie deposits her eggs in Seamour's pouch, together with a handmade wooly hat and other practical items one needs for a long journey. He then sighs, assures her that everything will be fine, fertilizes the eggs and carries them with him until birth - a pregnant father, as well as a beautiful and indubitably humorous animal: They can look with each eye at different locations at the same time. I wonder if they use that skill during courtship.

Climate Change "Expert" John Coleman

Have you heard of global warming? Are you concerned about it, maybe scared about what kind of world your children will be growing up in, the issues your grandchildren will have to lobby and campaign for?
As with every serious political problem, there are people who can just make it vanish. John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel and a former TV weather presenter is one of those, and apparently he finds an audience, happily listening to his talking magic. Click on the link above and you find an intriguing interview with him. Climate change is "a total myth" in his world and "20 years from now, I will be the one laughing," he says. That may well be an evil, sardonic laugh and I don't want to be anywhere close when he launches it. I wonder why people like him get any airtime at all - I might as well say the earth is revolving around planet Jupiter or Mel Gibson is an unperturbed person with great respect for religious differences...

Ronald McDonald's New Child Care Strategy

Everywhere, 30 April 2008. Ronald McDonald has launched a global campaign against children unsatisfied with their Kid's Meal Package. "Children need to learn who's boss. They cannot grow up thinking that costumer satisfaction is key to success. Studies have repeatedly shown that underachievement is often linked to unconformity and children cannot grow up just wanting more and more. We have decided to take action - children who don't like our food, or who think our toys are not fun or save, well, they need a good and hard hiding, like in the old days," a clown-faced spokesperson was quoted saying. According to Ronald McDonald, big business have to put their foot down in the current global financial crisis and show who's really running the show. Counter-strategies also include educational activities, such as the one shown in the picture above. "We would like to expand our educational strategy to areas such as making children work for their food, like they do in Africa, and then we would like to include women into our activities for gender sensitivity training. People need to know that each penny donated to the McDonalds charity reaches the target group hard and fast. Though there are still some legal issues we have to take a look at we expect our character building capacity to expand by about 18% this year, so we're really chuffed."

Wildlife in Essen

National Geographic would have had a field day. Just came back from a long walk with my father and baby brother in a nature reserve along our beautiful springtime river Ruhr. And guess what - we even saw three large water turtles, lazily lying in the evening sun - right on the log in the middle of the picture, a duck with nine fluffy ducklings floating by. They got really scared when I went closer and they frantically swam towards their calm level-headed mother. Spring now has a firm grip on people's lifes around here, and all those hibernating joggers, cyclers, fishermen, canoeists etc have crept out of their homes and holes. The city meets nature and canadian geese are the supreme rulers of our local river paradise.

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

I shall submit three entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest of San Jose State University in California. It challenges entrants to submit the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels. So, this post shall test-drive my entries for the categories "general", "romance" and "science fiction". What can I do to make it worse?

General:

Martha was nibbling on her grand opulence sundae as a lorry-sized megapnosaurus smashed through the exuberant front panel of the Grand Palais, crashing Lord Edmund’s playful birthday costume party with odorous guts splashing right up to the miniature Buddha on the 18th century mahogany cabinet in the adjacent piano room, but Martha still couldn’t make up her mind if she had a good time.

Romance:

On a warm and breezy midsummer evening in the picturesque harbour town of Isla Cristina, traditional fishing-boats gently dandling in the evening sun, Lucy considered a sensation of moribund confection at the “I love you” Hank had just spat with germinal intention over lobster and caviar mousse, and excused herself, the evening song of a lone orphean warbler disturbed by noises of unorthodox disgorgement.

Science Fiction:

“I will not tolerate this insolence any longer”, Captain Zone Serrati barked while fingering for the “kick me” note posted on his back, but nobody really cared and after a brief, yet utterly futile, moment of suspense, Zone decided to sulkingly ignore the rest of the crew, intent on settling the score once they reached their final destination in the distant galaxy M87 half a century later.

Goodbye, and Good Luck

This is goodbye to magnify, the thread and needle, sweet and lime,
A hunch, a weak and futile lie - the urge to sing a lullaby,

To share, what won’t be shared again,
To purge, to heal, to chance, sustain,
To chase what’s brazen into light,
To gain and conquer, reunite,
The story of a gentle friend,
That signified with wonderment.

My friend, I’ve seen you snoop and pray,
For Paragon, the God of May,
Protecting love and luck and play,
Treads softly over heath and hay,
His antlers care to touch the frail.

My dear, I heard you cry tonight,
For Grampian rain is quite contrite,
We carry our precious freight,
The ribbon of a scattered kite.

Nightswimming in Zanzibar

Inspired by Katy's nightswimming meditation I remembered something beautiful. In august 2001 I stayed at a small hostel on the southern east coast of Zanzibar Island, trying to relax after two exciting, mind-altering and frustrating months in Tanzania.
Zanzibar had been a myth and wonder of my childhood years. There was a German popular song about it and I had starred at its shape and name on a map of my father's comprehensive atlas of the world.
Now I was in Zanzibar, but it wasn't what I had wanted. I couldn't stay on the beach, as I couldn't bear the begging children asking me for a pen for school (their parents probably send them to generate income). I couldn't stand the tourists (of which I was one), for their lack of courtesy towards the locals. And I couldn't get to know any Zanzibaris, due to the insurmountable cultural wall between us (human interaction stripped to its bone of survival and dissipation). So I decided to bugger off back to Dar and my beloved YWCA, where I had spend two weeks talking, chatting and mingling with all sorts of people - students, development workers, tanzanian politicians and two tanzanians who became my close acquaintances.
On one of my last nights on Zanzibar something beautiful happened. We, i.e. me plus three fellow aberdonian Students whom I had been on a workcamp with and again met in Zanzibar, listened to "Nightswimming" by REM. The song had never really been that important to me before, but that night it was suddenly clear - let's go nightswimming! While the others found the idea rather awkward and went to bed, I jumped out of bed to dress bathing gear.
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: The sea on Zanzibar's east coast is so shallow, that you can see kelp and white sand shimmering through from below the waterline for half a mile into the sea. The sea was calm and the moon nearly full. When I stepped onto the beach I was an only soul with a vast and surreal watery patchwork carpet of white and black right before me. The moon was bright enough to see fish swimming, as if the carpet was alive. It was low tide and I waded through lukewarm water for some time, standing in the watery carpet which was all around me. I wanted to swim and kept walking into the sea, but the carpet was endless.
When I got tired I turned around. I knew something special had happened and the image stayed with me, keeping a shred of the Zanzibar wonder of my childhood years alive. I happily went back and crawled into my bed, my companions already sleeping save and sound.

Smultronstället

This morning, right after getting up and scratching my bum while looking for mail I made a discovery. There are wild strawberries growing on the little patch of garden in front of my house! Four tiny plants right under my nose, merrily sitting under a rhododendron, taking roots and making oxygen. I wonder how they got there.
Incidentally, "Wild Strawberries" by Ingmar Bergman is also one of my favorite movies. Its orginal title is "Smultronstället". It is the story of an old, pedantic, emotionally cold and detached man, looking back on a life of work and studies. He is recalling his past while travelling from Stockholm to Lund to receive a honorary degree from Lund University. During the trip, he has nightmares and daydreams about his youth, family and impending death, forcing him to reevaluate his life in order to find peace of mind. It is a beautiful and bitter-sweet, but positive movie.
The swedish word "Smultronstället" describes a place, somewhere amidst the wilderness of the swedish forest, under birch or pine, where the sun quietly touches upon a soft mossy spot to ripen wild strawberries. It also refers to a place children treasure, where they share their secrets with their friends. Bergman uses it figuratively to describe a most private place in one's own mind, where some memories and secrets, bitter and sweet, are kept. Though the movie is black and white, it has brilliant mood and color, and some images are so beautiful, I wanted to cry.
So, I'll keep watch over these four little buggers. How could I not see them in three years?

Are you an onion or a mango?

Is human personality more like an onion or more like a fruit, say, a mango? Are we made up of spicy layers that can be stripped away until all eternity or do we hold protected a seed with all our basic makeup right in the middle of us? I'd like to think I am a fruit bearing a seed, doing all the stuff fruits do, with a core protected by juicy flesh. Who wants to be an onion? But did you know there are egyptian walking onions? Possibly you even know one personally? And what does it mean that the mango seed gets harder, the riper the fruit?
Anyway, depending on the sharpness of the knife both onion and mango can be easily cut right through the middle.

Pantoufles

"Il y a moins les buttes qui on fait craindre
aujourd’hui que le bruit des pantoufles."

Tansania, Juli 2001

Draußen scheint ein halber Mond so hell, daß er Schatten wirft. Ich habe ein Sternzeichen gesehen, das könnte Herkules sein. Ein Kind rief und ein Hund bellte. Was ich in mir trage, soll gesagt werden. Was geboren wird, soll leben. Ich war ein Kiesel, und wenn ich wiederkomme, trage ich fremden Sand in meinen Schuhen. Wenn ich wiederkomme, gebe ich Dir nicht die Hand. Auch werde ich mich nicht wie eine Decke um Dich legen. Wenn ich von ferne komme, wirst Du mich lächeln sehen.

Dezember 1997

Am Samstag habe ich Ingo kennengelernt. Ingo ist etwa 60 Jahre alt, Alkoholiker und furchtbar unglücklich. Im Suff jedenfalls. Er schwankte an einer Mauer entlang als ich gerade nach Hause ging und weinte und schrie herzzerreißend. „Ich kann nicht mehr! Ich will sterben!“, weinte er. Ich fragte ihn, ob ich ihm helfen könne. Er sagte „die Erfahrung macht das“; er betete weinend zu Gott und wiederholte ständig: „Ich habe eine verantwortliche Stellung, ich bin ein geachteter Mann im Betrieb!“. Dann war da noch ganz viel Familie und Heimat in ihm. Er sprach mit starkem schlesischen Akzent und fragte mich mehrfach, ob ich Deutscher sei. Ein gebrochener, hilfsbedürftiger, aber nicht empfangsbereiter Mensch, der von seinen guten alten Werten mit voller Wucht eingeholt wird. Ich bin mit ihm ein Stück mitgegangen und schließlich hat er mich zu sich nach Hause auf eine Tasse Kaffee eingeladen. Daheim wartete seine Frau, die sogleich sagte: „Iiiingo, wò wahrst dù? Haast dù ahlles eingekauft?“ Ingo hatte nur Eier und Brot eingekauft, für den Rest hatte er gesoffen. Von den Eiern waren acht kaputt. Da wurde mir klar, das es das Romantische im verzweifelten Säufer nicht gibt. Ich sagte: „Du brauchst Hilfe.“ Er wehrte entschieden ab und sagte, er würde nur ab und zu was trinken und er wäre bestimmt nicht krank. Er wäre ein starker Mann und zur Zeit nur in einer Art Pechsträhne, die vorübergehen würde. Er widersprach sich innerhalb von Sekunden. Er gab vor, alles wäre in bester Ordnung und brach im nächsten Moment weinend zusammen. „Es gibt Dinge, mit denen jeder selbst zurecht kommen muß. Ein Mann soll sich nicht helfen lassen.“ Zwar widersprach ich ihm, doch gab ich irgendwann auf. Da war nichts mehr zu machen und ich fühlte mich schließlich einfach unwohl. Ich täuschte vor, gehen zu müssen und verließ die zwei. Die gute, starke Frau und der kranke Mann, den die Leere völlig unvorbereitet traf.

About Loss

People are different
They open a map of the world
To point at places where their lives unfurled
They work brains on gravel roads
Until knackered and moribund.
They pour poetry through pasta sieves held in the middle of it all
Like suspended on a long arm –
And then turn the revels of unconditional love
Into pulp.

What I cherish is the way
You let me be who I wanted to be.
I have the memory of your arm
- it was so bruised, like jilted charm
And your skin was so thin
And you studied the pathology of concrete,
But yet you glued a dancing couple into the night-sky over wild wheat
And the thought of the best of us made me shiver and shake.

You were my paradigm. I gave you love,
A marmalade jar full of fire-flies,
Made up stories and quirky tales,
An afternoon in the park and the summer breeze,
Idiosyncratic music when I couldn’t speak
And a song for your soul to seek.

Yet people are different
And while they operate on the revels of practical love
They may choose to amputate.

Leaving you coming back again

I am a tree
Trees sleep when they like
They spread their arms
And let the wind do the rest

I’m on a 24 hour bus trip
Each time I wake up, I’m at another place

So when I had been back home for a while,
And a friend asked me: Did you arrive?
Are you present and alive?
I had to say no, for what I had left on the bus.

Just like that day on the airplane,
When it had stopped in mid-air
And my drowsy brain
Took the moon-cratered landscape of the wing
For the country where I was heading.

Dinge, die ich in Lüttich auf der Straße fand

Eine Haarnadel
Eine Haarspange
Zwei kleine braune Kacheln
Zwei Feuerzeuge
Eine „frische Farbe Notiz“
Eine volle Dose Bier
Ein Werkzeug in Schlüsselanhängergröße
Eine Schachkönigin
Einen Bleistift aus China
Einen gebrochener Rückspiegel
Eine rote Rose
Ein Schneckenhaus
Eine „the Doors“ Schallplatte („Who scared you“)
Eine kleine grüne Murmel
Ein Foto eines Judokämpfers
Einen blauen Plastikball.

Wishing Well

I wish I could scream on a fun-fair
I wish I could sleep cat-like
I wish I could paint in a snail shell
I wish I could walk in a clay-pot
I wish I would blossom with my shoes on
I wish I would dream of a shipyard
I wish my spine would crack
Like the back of a book. Open.

The days before flying was discovered

Tonight I dreamt about an archaeologist, who was searching for the reason why, when he was standing on a lookout and couldn’t find anything, a passage in an old book had said, that he would find answers at exactly this place.

So he was standing on the lookout, digging the dirt to find something buried, when the perspective changed and I could see the scene from above.

The mountain facing the lookout with the kneeling archaeologist looked from above like his own face. All he could see was a part of his chin but he couldn’t make sense of it: It was in the days before flying was discovered.

I Jump

From the top of a hill
Back into the wind
There are only two lights
And the way you hold yours
Shuffles my feet
On top of the dune
Hushed sand below

Work

What am I working on this morning,
When cloudlets pass the rising sun
And might make you sneeze
Or meet another one
Who just discovered a favourite place
As you might now?