I’ve just decided, after reading this talk between Bhanu Kapil and Lisa Birman, to admit that indeed a whole day sometimes passes without me really thinking or writing. For example, today I didn’t really think much until I decided to write to you here. Or, what were my thoughts? Were they larvae?
At some point midday, I decided to track what I had done thus far since waking. I started with the moment of realizing that I wasn’t alone. Sherpa, my dear 8-year-old cat, was sleeping on my back. We have wondered together from Austin, through 3 years in Boulder, 1 year in Chicago, 1 year in Prague, and are approaching our first full year in Berlin. We cannot hope to arrive for many years.
After reading Bhanu and Lisa’s discussion, I fear I may never arrive. Bhanu, who I took a class with at Naropa and who changed my relationship with yellow, is an expert on arrival. She knows its challenges.
I have lived in 7 cities. Have I ever arrived? Sometimes I feel like I am developing a serious relationship with Berlin, but like with any new relationship, I wonder if it will work out. Will we be able to always see the good in one another, always know that in rough times, we will make it through? Is she worthy of my complete love or should I hold on a bit in fear of deportation?
I wonder if I will be an immigrant. I’ve never considered it. I recently heard someone describe expats who go to Prague for a year or two and then return as “living on the package.” The description hurt a little. Where was my package? I’m bigger than a package and every year is bigger than me. If there was something of me that was supposed to arrive in a package, it was certainly dispersed, and I hope some part of it is a toy boat about the size of a duck floating down the Vltava or on the Elbe near Ústí nad Labem.
At the same as this talk came to me via Merete Mueller, I received recommendation via fellow goon, Kevin Kilroy, to check out this: More architecture! Where is my border? I am a spectrum. I owe myself a map. Where will I find my door, my envelope?
Here is a poem, which I wrote in January, in thick goo of my non-arrival:
Transit: a traveler’s poem
Dry cyclone mocked its way
in a somnambulist forest
of strangers
crusty still from travel
figures good into a ditty
but what will she sing tonight
and old Aphrodite seasick
again on lamb’s muck
folding delicately up to my border
keeping vestiges clear of scares
_______________________________
Was ist fremd:
Some have sharp teeth
Some carry subways in their pockets
To keep it short because it is 2:00am, (I knew I would always want to write here in the middle of the night, hence the title), I have decided not to continue with the heterosexual lifestyle that I have been living the past 6 years of my life. I have decided to return to my former lifestyle as a righteous lesbian and make every effort to live a lifestyle that makes me feel good about myself. I am also attempting to return to my former vegan diet (only 48 hours in now). I wish I had a picture of my younger lesbian vegan self to post here, but these pictures are somewhere in a desk draw in Chicago since they were from my “film smells good; I don’t need no stinkin’ digital camera" days.
Anyhow, there’s plenty of yummy vegan curry wurst, vegan vöners, and other tasty opportunities around the corner, so I just hope not to be tempted by the buttery pastries next door.
Alright now I can sleep.
Here are a few pictures I took in the neighborhood this weekend:
First of all, a little background about where I’m at:
I live in a little ground floor apartment in a backyard building in the neighborhood of Friedrichshain in Berlin. Here is my view right now:
My neighbors are also beautiful, and I will post pictures of them soon.
I’m currently working to revive Hot Whiskey Press, which for sometime was sick with pneumonia and then a bout of post traumatic stress disorder, but recovering nicely and should be out at a park near you this summer.
Books which are within reach of my couch at the moment are David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde, Alice Notley’s Alma, or the Dead Women and Disobedience, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, Slavoj Žižek’s Violence and Andrew K. Peterson’s Museum of Thrown Objects. Here are some things which I have underlined in pencil from these books:
Lehman: “….by T.S. Eliot, who had argued that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion” and that “only those who have personality and emotions will know what it means to want to escape from these things.” (82)
Notley: “not if in the states they have states only states. In the states not souls? The only solution is my own birth, old, a daughter no longer old. Born with the double diamond, the snake the squash blossom marks” (Alma 63)
“what do you say, Justice? I am covered in scabs she says, I have headlice I live on the street. Drink bad wine do you? Looking for an abandoned house, for I am unwelcome the tender cries of vermin and maggots in the trash I hear omens in their growing populations, I went to convert change to small bills and gave up all my ancient coinage the loved words for when the poor are granted shelter the grieving are cared for in their anguish the children are guarded and no remote village in a desert suffers the bombs of a superior power.” (Alma 89)
Butler: “I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion.” … “What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization.” …”The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral.” (33-34)
Žižek: "And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism worth in comparison with the invention of the internet?"(17)
Andy’s book will never get underlines because it is too dear to me. I recieved it in the mail only moments ago and with an intial flipping through the book am reminded of the smell of spruce trees and sitting on a lawn in Boulder assembling organs. A medical textbook for dissection appears in the middle of the book, and I can see through the copy where I forced holes to turn it into a journal, held together with binder rings, which I had spray painted brown. I can see my dearest friends and lovers in this book. I find Jared Hayes throughout it, and I can hear Joseph’s Cooper’s strong voice ready to fucking kill us because that’s how much he loves us, and I see Michael Koshkin in his Berrigan days, and Elizabeth Guthrie, who I’m so lucky to have here on my continent and nearly the same time zone.
