Scribblings with Green Chalk

Doro let me have the last piece of her fabulous cherry pie. You are what you eat. I’m cherry pie.

You can think many contradictory things about Charlotte Perkins Gilman (I do), but the title of her autobiography is a proof of sheer brilliance in at least one respect. She knew that when you noun it, you put a pin through it. Remember Baudelaire’s dusty love letters tucked in drawers? Butterfly collections under dust. Gilman didn’t want it, so she didn’t say “life” — an object, able to be caught, caught, lying there — she said “the living of.”

It’s the verbing, that’s how you get up and run. Gilman knew it, Whitman knew it, Stevens knew it. I wanna verb me.

Florida.

I got here at the end of one of the longest days in my life. After a string of trains and planes, beads of heterotopias.

It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Which always means your world, that is, mine.

*from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Florida.”

Walking madness has set in again, as soon as it stopped being dark and cloudy all the time. I climbed up on the Philosophenweg on my first night in Heidelberg and I went up there several times between my finals to inaugurate the spring. There’s more to it than these pictures from walks with friends (waving to Denise). And it’s all about getting off the path anyway.

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So apparently Karl Lagerfeld is amazed by Chan Marshall and wants to make her the next fashion icon. I not only despise Karl *** Pretentious Lagerfeld but hate all those attempts at Madonna’ing every possible female musician. I remember seeing pictures of Tori Amos playing background piano at a Viktor and Rolf show, thinking, oh my god, not only did they dress her in an old lampshade but they put her in piano bar hell and made her smile at it! And while American Doll Posse was not a bad album, the rawness of the first records died in silk and fumes of Chanel No.5. So now they’re after poor Cat Power. Death by fashion. This is how the world ends.

(Image found here)

My mild obsession with fruits I was always too slow and clumsy to pick brings me to interesting places. Like this town. Along winding roads of association and curiosity. Which, as they tell us, kills cats notoriously.

Something as banal as a night at the movies would seem almost not worth mentioning. Almost. Maybe I liked My Blueberry Nights for wrong reasons. Because of restlessness, blueberries, silly compassion for detail, that Cat Power song, Matejko colors (will you know what I mean when I call them that?). Or something else.

Because the movie has quite a bit of walking around in the night? And that reminds me of something… Encounters and disconnections. And letting go when you know you have to let go. Or a simple love story, if you want. But why cut it down to that?

Or it was being there with someone kind enough to accompany me? (I’m never up to going alone.) Someone kind enough to face German dubbing, where the voices are always wrong and English words are raisins in the pie but never enough to hold on. I thought the woman in front of us would eat me alive because I was trying to interpret the dialog for Kim, so that she wouldn’t lose too much. I’d never have guessed it would work better than the experiment I participated in during my second or third year at university. They said they were trying to establish whether interpreting between two foreign languages works through the filter of the native language. I’m not sure about the findings but it sure went slowly. Unlike this time. Necessity is the mother of all sorts of things. And I had ice cream and the movie theater was so small and the night when we went outside felt so cold…

Soon it will have been a year since I first came across these lines. It was in a copy room at Cornell, some two days before I was leaving. It was snowing outside, the end of February. A gray day. The photocopier hummed as a friend of mine made it spit out new pages. I read.

Lying there always is the you
and the you is acting
contrary to what is wise.

The events then were revolving, it was a carousel I couldn’t stop because I couldn’t speak, and if I could have spoken, it wouldn’t have meant anything, I knew. In the spinning, those lines were a faint comfort. I smiled then, I remember. It was one of those smiles that don’t work and yet you try to pull it off. As if you were standing there, next to yourself, trying to be there for yourself. Trying not make it a movie scene in which you are a heap of marbles that scatter on the floor.

When I met Mary Jo Bang a couple months later, I wasn’t able to tell her what those closing words of “The Magic Lantern” meant to me. I didn’t want to say them, so I showed them to her on the page. Later, I got a signed copy of that book of poems which has been moving with me ever since.

I still don’t know how to write about the discovery of my own stupidity as a necessity. I cannot help thinking, even now, that things would have been better if only I could wind back the tape of decisions and actions, held back curiosity, have known that there was a pitfall that meant stepping into a story which would swallow me. Is the advice, do not talk to strangers? Or something more demanding, something that requires rigid control, an obsessive scrutiny of movie scripts to avoid patterns, a calculating approach to your own emotions, forever asking yourself how much am I allowed to feel?, and, of course, the gift of running fast?… Is there perhaps an instinct some of us might have lost? One that needs to be recreated with artificial means, using string and wire. (more…)

It’s between neither and nor, absolutes excluded, overbearing sentiment excluded, the call of belonging excluded. I’ve never had that sense of place that would grab me by the throat and fill my eyes with tears at being “home.” I’ve never dreamed of that. But then, I’ve never envied travel writers and National Geographic reporters. Certainly not after reading an account of an expedition to the Amazon where a reporter almost had his ass bitten off by wild pigs. But even earlier, the romanticism failed. I don’t want to return “home” one day, Ulysses-like, with that conviction that all the tiny quests and major errands were a mistake, that Pascal was right about sitting in your own room. And I don’t want to be waking up in unrecognizable beds till the day I die. Could it be that I’m not entirely wrong and that there are places able to keep me for longer but not forever? (Because there’s terror in forever.) A somewhere that feels warm and yet somehow separate, that doesn’t swallow me but isn’t perched to spit me out either.

I can’t pretend that I’m an inveterate traveler and moving expert. There’s a fight going on between my moving every few months and the home that tries to grow over the stuff of everyday life, stuff that accumulates itself unintentionally, from tea strainers to books.

It will be at least two more months before I know where I’m going to be next fall. I’m not enjoying that blankness. And it’s not that I’d like to know everything at once. I would just like to feel that it doesn’t need to be a struggle, that there is a somewhere I can stay, at least temporarily. Maybe there’s nowhere. Still, I’d like to search through nooks and crannies before determining that, buy some time.

Please don’t ask me for an explanation. I got the airplane tickets yesterday. I’m going to Florida at the end of February. We’ll see what questions that brings.