Scribblings with Green Chalk

Thanks for the blueberry muffin on a lingering bad morning. Not as small a gift as it may appear–in a time when everything goes wrong in a domino fashion.

I found this video with my one good eye. There’s nothing as romantic as folk stories about murder. Please watch it for me while I curl up and fall asleep.

Yesterday’s quite high up in the ongoing “worst day of my life” competition. I spent half the day pushing away the specter of a close person’s body lying in a ditch. The other half I spent pushing away the desire to strangle that very same person. There is no humorous punchline. My home phone died in the middle of an important conversation whose aim was to clarify what had happened. I ran out of money on my cell phone and the cashier at the supermarket was giggling amused that the till at which you can put money on your phone was closed and it was already 9 pm anyway. The phonecard machine at B-platz was out of order. I drifted towards the movie theater where I saw Juno with friends; not feeling better, but the movie was great and subtitled on that one and only chosen night and the ticket cheaper than a sea of vodka. Meanwhile, the eye infection I sensed I was getting was steadily getting worse. Reading hurts, writing hurts. Lying down with a chamomile compress doesn’t. If I don’t go blind, I will post something later.

Long, long ago, before the ministry of education was taken over by lunatics who wanted to censor everything, high school kids were allowed to read some meaningful Polish prose. It is a well known fact that when you’ve got acne and a self-perpetuationg existential crisis, nothing cheers you up as much as books on the vacuity of being spiced up with more than a touch of camp. Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) blew our minds. Even putting them in one sentence makes a paragraph sizzle.

While Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke reassured us that, indeed, all people were fakes, Witkacy showed us how to put feathered hats on party with that idea. On his search for what he called “the pure form,” he shot fountains of brain-twisting puns and neologisms, knitted vulgarisms out of newspaper clips and old wives’ tales. “Eyes a divine blue like buttons on a pair of underpants,” “son-of-a-shriveling-gut”: you can’t help wishing you could cuss like that, with nonchalance and neon glare. Certainly something to twist the censor’s scissors with.

Just like his biography. Witkacy was a child prodigy who was educated by private tutors. An artist’s only son, Witkacy clung to the bohemian enfant terrible act long after he’d grown out of his shorts. In his snazzy villa in Zakopane, he wrote letters announcing to unsuspecting souls that he’d “unfriended” them. And he painted. On vodka, on absynth, on whatever drugs he could find. Knowing that creating under the influence was not a great feat in itself, he turned it into a business. He set up a portrait company with prices differing according to the degree and kind of intoxication. Since not that many were interested in boring “clean” paintings (which were also the cheapest), Witkacy experienced many trips during which he encountered happily disjointed female heads among oranges, artistic vortexes bending space, and his own grimacing face. And this he shared on canvas.

“A woman need not be beautiful,” biographers scribbled down. “She must, however, be interesting.” Troubled as he was–the painting above is the famous “Fałsz kobiety” [A Woman's Falsehood] and not to forget those ambiguous disjointed heads–his female portraits are entrancing. Burning eyes, wild hair, surprising poses, no dolls with empty faces.

It’s not that as a troubled teenager I dreamed of being one of Witkacy’s women. Glossing over the tragic ending, I wanted to be him: hanging out with my genious friend Bronisław Malinowski, making art like a demon, and then ending up in a Swedish novel.

With idiots wanting to butcher up his beautiful crazy fiction, I can only say that the sons-of-a-shriveled-gut can poke their hollow blue-as-underwear-buttons eyes out. Until things improve in Po(e)land, I unfriend the lot.

What do these terms mean to you? How do you define the difference? Which one do you choose?

While on a theoretical level I do know sources I could quote here, I would like to learn more about the choice of term from those who make the choice. I will be very grateful for contributions.

via Shakesville and that door behind you. I actually hope you are an imaginary friend.

Only silly things come to my mind like that I began to miss the earthy taste of soymilk last night around midnight. To spare the reader my adventures in the Őkoladen, I will divert their attention with a poem. I hope I don’t get shot for this, but I have a double excuse: it’s National Poetry Month in the US and this is an earthy poem.
 
 

In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor–
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.

Jane Hirshfield, “November, Remembering Voltaire”

Rebooting doesn’t help much nor did re-installing the system. I cannot afford not to eat for a year and by a new computer. I might go to the Flohmarkt on Saturday and get a typewriter. Then no one will stop me from maniacally hitting the keys and practicing my sinister laugh. I shall drown in coffee, too.

My computer’s dying on me. In a bout of desperation I confided in a specialist: Ich glaube, ich weiß worum es geht: Speicher. Er (ja, er ist ein Mann und nach der heutigen Reanimation heißt jetzt CHEESECAKE - lange Geschichte) möchte eine nette, fette RAM Roulade essen, aber Mama hat kein Geld und dazu denkt sie - ganz gemein - es wäre vielleicht Zeit für einen neuen Kuchen. Was soll Mama machen? Immer häufiger denkt sie an Macs, da sie sehr gute Akkus haben und das System ist bei ihnen sehr ästhetisch (als Kind wollte sie Buch Illustratorin werden).

The attachment to my laptop is deep and, from a specialist’s pov, absolutely exaggerated on the emotional plane. Well, I can’t help it, he (see German* text above) reminds me of Baudelaire’s cupboard**: he’s got all my crucial trivia. Could it be a compensation for being an only child, striking later in life?

S., with whom I share the newly-discovered terrors of only-childness, got a new printer. The big letters on its top say “Brother.” I saw him patting it with affection. If only our parents transferred some of their attention and demands to electronic devices…

 
Notes

*I never said my writing in German was good and correct.

**see appropriate “Spleen.” Cupboard, old love letters, perfume, and the Sphinx snuck in there too, I believe.

The project isn’t gone, but I had a lot of doubts about posting and halted that part. I’ve thought about the pros and cons of putting up posts and questions vs. just writing the thesis on found and idiosyncratically compiled blog entries. I haven’t resolved it yet.

Meanwhile, in blogland, a post appeared mentioning Sara Baartman. I recommend Janell Hobson’s Venus in the Dark if you’re interested in the making (and unmaking) of the Hottentot Venus. You will want to sink under ground, reading about the brainlessness of European “science” in the 19th century. The anti-logic of racism never ceases to surprise: while “theorizing” the black female body shape as illness (steatopygia–because it sounds smart if you invent a word), Europeans found it a titillating fashion inspiration. The bustle, a scaffolding-like device inserted underneath ladies’ dresses, compensated for the flatness of the–supposedly ideal–European derriere. The pornographic interest showed by visitors to the exhibitions where Bartman was displayed (much like an inanimate object) is quite terrifying even to read about. Interestingly, the perception of how acceptable this kind of interest was did differ: a sketch reprinted in Hobson’s book shows that some of the contemporaries considered it outright morbid that “gentlemen” and “ladies” alike would scrutinize the details of someone’s anatomy under the pretence of scientific interest.

Patricia Hill Collins’ thoughts on the easiness of objectifying others (Others) shed some light on what happened then and what keeps happening to Baartman. Even today, despite of best endeavors, many academics researching Baartman end up presenting her as a non-person, Collins observes. Pretty slideshows begging for the use of pictures and pointers can turn an informed discussion of the body into a freak show in which again we watch it as a curious object, as if it didn’t belong to a human being. Read more in the sections of Black Feminist Thought devoted to Baartman and pornography.

More arguments for my developing conflict with the idea of the Muse.

This is by no means a new obsession. It dates back to when I was perhaps three and wanted to live solely on twaróg* and tomatoes. When my mom lifted the ban on sweets, I tasted the divine incarnation of twaróg as a pastry. Now I’m carrying a silly childhood imprint in my–yeah, where? Tastebuds: can’t be, mine are almost defunct, stomach sounds improbable, so we’re left with the fleshy Dickinsonian Brain…

Could be the phases of the moon (if it’s indeed made of cheese) that made me go all werewolf about CHEESECAKE. Somewhere around Kim’s birthday I started dreaming about it: taste and all. It was after we decided the cake needs to be written entirely in upper case letters (like Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE only with more substance to it thanks to cheese)–if German nouns deserve to begin with a capital, CHEESECAKE deserves them all the way through.

Real SERNIK, the dreamed variety, is slightly tart, juicy, has very little sugar. No crazy stuff. Eat your fruit later, unless it’s a few raisins you accidently dropped into the mix. That shall be forgiven.

It took me a long time to hunt down in Heidelberger cafes a KÄSEKUCHEN** that could approach that lusciousness. Finally, today, I risked it in a place where I had once gotten a Mojito that was just straight vodka with a few peppermint leaves floating about, unable to bite through the alcohol. I decided not to lose my faith in the friendly service in spite of that incident (eh, the drink was relatively cheap as HD goes) and with a Milchkaffee and a tinfoil package of mystery KÄSEKUCHEN I made my way down to the Neckar.

Was OK. One-third of it is waiting for me in the fridge. or for S. whom I got hooked on it by my constant fantasizing out loud.

Notes

* twaróg is sort of like Quark but very different

** probably the cutest word in the German language

Addendum

KÄSEKUCHEN in a cup? No!
Doch!

S: Ich muss ein Geburtstagsgeschenk für meinen Opa kaufen.
ich: Oh, Ich habe keinen Opa mehr.
S: Du glückliche…

Fog outside, I’m sitting at home perfecting my procrastination skills: reading a novel, an article, and a blog at the same time. Washing up as an additional distraction.

There are two streets in Heidelberg with ‘lazybones’ in their name: Oberer and Unterer Fauler Pelz. I live near neither.

The writing guide-cum-self-help book recommended to me by friends says that most people would rather mop the floor than sit down to write an academic text.

Please look at the pretty tree postcards I got yesterday while I wash the floor and clean the bathroom.

(www.kunstundbild.de)

Forgive me, I’ve been away with my head. Unaware of the intricacies of blog etiquette, I didn’t leave a hiatus post.

While I was gone, my absent blog persona was tagged by the lovely Wildly Parenthetical. Since we don’t have that much of a personality split, I reply–though outrageously late.

Here it comes:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Having put aside the Polish edition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and the German edition of Szczypiorski’s Początek (do read that novel!), I reach for the book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It’s on my bedside table most of the time and we’re outwaiting each other. I have not gotten to page 123 yet, so it’ll be a surprise:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, “for my country,” since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus “to kill and die”–or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, “to hurt” (to hurt within one’s own body) or to “alter body tissue”–are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing “interior” that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of “dying” or “killing” can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent. (Scarry 123-124)

Earlier, Scarry writes about the image of war in Homer and gets Homeric with her syntax, so I might have lost count.

This passage encapsulates what drew me to the book in the first place. Scarry’s thesis is that pain is mostly uncommunicable, transcending language. Transcending our ability to relate. What does it mean to empathize, when oftentimes we can’t even see that the person next to us is in pain? Even when we notice, we never feel their pain… Is our mental image of their pain anything close to what they could be feeling? Is pain just an “element of blank” to the one who isn’t experiencing it, like one of Dickinson’s poems tells us? And the person in pain… a body, distant in its suffering? If so, how easy is war?

My on and off reading of the book does not allow me to offer a full-blown meditation on these questions. I’ve got reader’s block. Don’t pick on me.

I tag the following charming people, who hopefully cannot empathize with me in my predicament: Denise of Wohnen in Wien, Bowleserised, Aulelia of Charcoal Ink, Anthony, and BD (do I have the right link?).

 
Berlin: I fell in love with it when I was maybe six and angry that the people were speaking a language I didn’t understand. I came back several times, always just to rush through, touristically (not in a Run, Lola, Run! fashion). Why oh why didn’t I spend more time here when I lived a mere four hours of train ride away? To be able to torture myself with the question as I was ambling down Unter den Linden as a damn tourist, probably.

The picture: My grand return to the Zoologischer Garten after many years. I got lost there with my mother when I was little. My mother wasn’t little then, but a great companion for getting lost, nonetheless.

If I were smart I’d have a bunch of them sitting in my drawer–a cunning plan of local patriotism from afar. But I hardly have any pictures of home and no postcards. Somewhere, in the neverland of postal theft, there are some postcards and fridge magnets I had sent to friends who never got them. Here’s a googled pic of what Poznań doesn’t really look like any longer.

 
I was home in March, got back. No postcards.

Originally, I was going to post here a quasi review of my airplane reading from March. Half way through the third paragraph, I yawned. If I was bored writing it, I wouldn’t want to imagine what reading it would have felt like. Similar to a glass of milk with honey on a sleepless night… only painful?… Eh… I’d rather go with ’short and sweet.’ (If only I could use it as a motto and excuse in my thesis.)

My review of the National Geographic piece on animal intelligence, fast forwarded:

Pretty photographs but the pop-science explanation of the research methods made me cringe. Since the intended reader is apparently one that could not grasp the real thing, the writer gives them parrot-teaching magic tricks. And pretty pictures to look at. The intended reader will wait for some real articles on the subject. Without pictures.

My main reservation–a bitter cry to heavens: Why didn’t that brilliant dog cross my path when I lived in Vienna!?

Speaking of heavens and dogs: I’m all for iconoclasm. Love the word. It sounds defiant and has a great story to it. But I also love pretty pictures.

So, away with the bearded man, welcome my vision of God:

I don’t attach too much importance to the English anagram/pun but it’s nicely and prophetically fitting here. God (see picture above) is a lady and her name is Sunka. Which means ‘dog’ in the Lakota language, I’m told. Behold and admire.

Cały czas pada i myśli mi zmokły.

(For the curious: Translation available either via various internet gadgets or by request. Bowing humbly.)