Berlin, May 30
There was a friendly scientist on the train from Vienna to Krakow. Or was it from Prague to Berlin? A mop of coarse dark hair ran ragged across his round face, from which he sipped his coffee innocently. He had glasses, and a flattering stare. My attention was framed by his rotating expression, which varied from warm nervousness to thoughtful deliberation. We shared the world from that tiny compartment, eyeful of the landscape racing forward and backward, as we sat opposite each other. Frequently he returned to his work which, as far as I could tell, involved wildly jotting down scribbles on graph paper. He was watching me with care; such a warm stare it made me uneasy. Whenever travelling alone with foreign faces, for any distance in any place, you form and unfold imaginary stories that fill the void of communication. I briefly imagined him as my real father, having left me for adoption years ago to help me escape a brutal Soviet life. Upon realisation that his long and forgotten son was actually here with him, he struggled to keep the smile from stretching across his long, thin lips. He kept glancing back to make sure, with smug furtive looks that hinted a secret known only to him. I should add he was feeling quite pleased with himself for having wasted no time whatsoever in a futile search for his lost son, to finally encounter him as a fully-grown child, travelling confidently without the use of his paternal wisdom. Now he opens his mouth, ready to snap me away from my daydream, unable to use him like every other listless plaything.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Dialogue/Friedensreich Hundertwasser/The spinning boy
Strasbourg – May 21
Words seen on the walls and floors of the tram station underground:
Vous pensez à l’histoire. Vous pensez à ceux qui ont vécu et à ceux qui sont morts. Vous pensez aux objets et images qui racontent comment c’était. Vous essayez d’avoir les idées larges. Vous essayez de comprendre les autres. Vous essayez d’être gentil et généreux. Vous êtes très seul. Vous avez tout votre temps. Vous n’êtes pas pressé. Vous marchez dans la rue et le soleil vous réchauffe. Vous êtes heureux.
Far now, far away, but far too many one-sided conversations with you in my head.
But who are you? Are you anyone?
You know those conversations, the ones where you make up the rules, when you know what the other will say, but you still want to hear the words, because the repetition is something you trust, familiar, numbing.
Sometimes I lack the will to resolve my thoughts. I let them twist like open endings.
Do these words give you hope?
Watching the world around you as it dissolves into a second scene, where the faces melt, indistinguishable from one to the next. I like open senses. Not moving, just receiving. Noises are muffled by the panasonic surround that absorbs everyone into everything. You either focus on one instant, pinpoint its most subtle quality, trying to notice all the rotating vibrating actions that give the moment life – or, you focus on everything at once, and you hear nothing.
Does any of that make sense?
A whirring blur of choppy dialogue, French and German, it hovers around this bopping space, becomes the same. People watching people watching people. I cannot talk about myself now, only the slices of peoples’ lives that encircle me. I am only the lens, the only lens I got. My senses are not my own, they belong to the world. I study faces, invent the lives behind them, because it is better to guess a life than to know the real, pathetic truth.
Do you see your face changing?
I cannot trust the faces I believed in, because I was a character in their stories, and I am guilty of losing my identity, implicated in my own game…
Late at night, falling into wide open barren spaces, falling in love with stranger faces.
In between the curbs, scraping the stones lit up by streetlamps. I am a sensualist, and maybe I will never change.
I live and breathe all the little vibrations. I don’t like being interrupted. But I must finish the thoughts I begin, so you’ve told me a million times. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere, just round and round in circles.
Vienna – May 24
What a wonky one that was. The architect of the creative spirit, Oh Hundertwasser, I have a crush on you! What was it he said? “Our greatest illiteracy is our inability to create.” The lines, they go spinning round, and you bent the ruler until it was destroyed. Straight lines are an abomination in our world of nature. It is our crude, scientific attempt at perfection. Oh Hundertwasser! You even had a spiral on a flag. How could I not fall for that, or your clever Palesraeli design. You were a peaceful hermit who came down from the trees, and built your identity into your constructions, for all to enjoy.
It’s not just that, or your psychedelic graphics, or your beard I could get lost in for ages. No, there is something immediately connective and convincing about your words. We are stepping outside of the places we belong, constantly pushing nature back and beyond our reach. We build high buildings, walls everywhere, we blot out the sky. We build these towers where we spend all the hours of our days, and we run out of spaces for parks.
I am sitting in a tree-lined café, just behind his colourful, bumpy building. A wild child is hopping in hysterical footsteps, running from his father, tugging at everything, clinging to the foliage like a monkey on acid.
He has blue and white striped pants, so baggy that his knees are invisible, and all you see is this waddling harmless menace. Again, another animal comes to mind… a penguin. He scurries frantically in circles, twirling in freedom. He keeps running from his parents, escaping the adult ways of sitting and staying still in slow motion. Run little one! Free from the (illegible – “chair of polite restraint?”) I take a picture. He is my favourite child in the world. For the twentieth time his legal guardian leads him back to their table, holding his hand.
I have spent the last hour or so walking to the Wurstelprater amusement park, several miles away from downtown. There is an open field on the way in, where people relax in the grass. Napping couples curled up, Turks playing chess, young and old rolling dice, telling stories in canes and suits, everyone seems to be downing beer and lighting smokes. I look up and ahead to my destination, the Riesenrad, an enormous ferris wheel that spokes the sky red.
No tickets needed, so I’m walking through the funhouse, past the zero gravity seats and bumper cars and the carousels, not taking any rides but watching the attractions, and it is a surreal feeling. There is a chill, so the park is not very crowded, and this strange haunting breath comes over me. Those eerie carnival sounds, those lifeless faces behind concession stands, I did not want to write about it.
Went into a bar, completely lost on my way to cross the Danube. I was looking for the metro station to get me back to the hostel. Opened the door to old scarred Austrian faces, completely at a loss as to why someone who could never belong to this place or this moment would step into their scene. They seemed frozen in there. A deep low voice struggled with me to find a way out. I ordered a beer and tried to look as tired as them.
Words seen on the walls and floors of the tram station underground:
Vous pensez à l’histoire. Vous pensez à ceux qui ont vécu et à ceux qui sont morts. Vous pensez aux objets et images qui racontent comment c’était. Vous essayez d’avoir les idées larges. Vous essayez de comprendre les autres. Vous essayez d’être gentil et généreux. Vous êtes très seul. Vous avez tout votre temps. Vous n’êtes pas pressé. Vous marchez dans la rue et le soleil vous réchauffe. Vous êtes heureux.
Far now, far away, but far too many one-sided conversations with you in my head.
But who are you? Are you anyone?
You know those conversations, the ones where you make up the rules, when you know what the other will say, but you still want to hear the words, because the repetition is something you trust, familiar, numbing.
Sometimes I lack the will to resolve my thoughts. I let them twist like open endings.
Do these words give you hope?
Watching the world around you as it dissolves into a second scene, where the faces melt, indistinguishable from one to the next. I like open senses. Not moving, just receiving. Noises are muffled by the panasonic surround that absorbs everyone into everything. You either focus on one instant, pinpoint its most subtle quality, trying to notice all the rotating vibrating actions that give the moment life – or, you focus on everything at once, and you hear nothing.
Does any of that make sense?
A whirring blur of choppy dialogue, French and German, it hovers around this bopping space, becomes the same. People watching people watching people. I cannot talk about myself now, only the slices of peoples’ lives that encircle me. I am only the lens, the only lens I got. My senses are not my own, they belong to the world. I study faces, invent the lives behind them, because it is better to guess a life than to know the real, pathetic truth.
Do you see your face changing?
I cannot trust the faces I believed in, because I was a character in their stories, and I am guilty of losing my identity, implicated in my own game…
Late at night, falling into wide open barren spaces, falling in love with stranger faces.
In between the curbs, scraping the stones lit up by streetlamps. I am a sensualist, and maybe I will never change.
I live and breathe all the little vibrations. I don’t like being interrupted. But I must finish the thoughts I begin, so you’ve told me a million times. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere, just round and round in circles.
Vienna – May 24
What a wonky one that was. The architect of the creative spirit, Oh Hundertwasser, I have a crush on you! What was it he said? “Our greatest illiteracy is our inability to create.” The lines, they go spinning round, and you bent the ruler until it was destroyed. Straight lines are an abomination in our world of nature. It is our crude, scientific attempt at perfection. Oh Hundertwasser! You even had a spiral on a flag. How could I not fall for that, or your clever Palesraeli design. You were a peaceful hermit who came down from the trees, and built your identity into your constructions, for all to enjoy.
It’s not just that, or your psychedelic graphics, or your beard I could get lost in for ages. No, there is something immediately connective and convincing about your words. We are stepping outside of the places we belong, constantly pushing nature back and beyond our reach. We build high buildings, walls everywhere, we blot out the sky. We build these towers where we spend all the hours of our days, and we run out of spaces for parks.
I am sitting in a tree-lined café, just behind his colourful, bumpy building. A wild child is hopping in hysterical footsteps, running from his father, tugging at everything, clinging to the foliage like a monkey on acid.
He has blue and white striped pants, so baggy that his knees are invisible, and all you see is this waddling harmless menace. Again, another animal comes to mind… a penguin. He scurries frantically in circles, twirling in freedom. He keeps running from his parents, escaping the adult ways of sitting and staying still in slow motion. Run little one! Free from the (illegible – “chair of polite restraint?”) I take a picture. He is my favourite child in the world. For the twentieth time his legal guardian leads him back to their table, holding his hand.
I have spent the last hour or so walking to the Wurstelprater amusement park, several miles away from downtown. There is an open field on the way in, where people relax in the grass. Napping couples curled up, Turks playing chess, young and old rolling dice, telling stories in canes and suits, everyone seems to be downing beer and lighting smokes. I look up and ahead to my destination, the Riesenrad, an enormous ferris wheel that spokes the sky red.
No tickets needed, so I’m walking through the funhouse, past the zero gravity seats and bumper cars and the carousels, not taking any rides but watching the attractions, and it is a surreal feeling. There is a chill, so the park is not very crowded, and this strange haunting breath comes over me. Those eerie carnival sounds, those lifeless faces behind concession stands, I did not want to write about it.
Went into a bar, completely lost on my way to cross the Danube. I was looking for the metro station to get me back to the hostel. Opened the door to old scarred Austrian faces, completely at a loss as to why someone who could never belong to this place or this moment would step into their scene. They seemed frozen in there. A deep low voice struggled with me to find a way out. I ordered a beer and tried to look as tired as them.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Train
May 19
I write this on the topmost bunk in a room (7x7x10ft?) with six beds. Sleeping up here gives you control over light and darkness. I am the Sun god. Left that cramped mobile dorm, treading lightly on to the john to write on the toilet. Having finished my business I stumble and shuffle down the narrow corridor into a coach of seats instead of bunks. I realise I have not written very much. The mind has been too busy absorbing - this must come before any sort of release. The moments I wish to record are witnessed by my senses. It is in the sandy courtyard, hearing eerie churchbells of Almería, children howling with laughter and in another language at dusk. People-watching is a timeless activity, just like pegging and plugging made up stories into faces, and you can watch a whole dialogue unfurl between two people walking past. You create a story, invent an inner monologue.
I have noticed as much as possible. Awareness has led me to my senses which are piqued by the world that surrounds. It is necessary to connect the mind and body this way, spiritually.
We have stretched ourselves through a melting pot of scattered alleys and sunlit strolls, through markets bursting with flavour and people groping for a view, gasping for a breath, in a place that caters to your every delight. In Madrid there was a chain of miniature bookstore kiosks, all lined up in a row, dozens of them parading thousands of books (from the rare to the kitsch) to the passerby. Here you are as an eternal pedestrian, swept up by the moment of something new and unheard of. You focus your sights on everything at once, but it is impossible to notice everything at once. All the minutia, all the common and uncommon elements of life working at once. So instead you watch and experience a chain of events unravel naturally, the progression from action to reaction to rejuvenation all through your unsteady eyes. I am drunk off my senses!
It is a challenge to be a faithful and honest witness to the world around us felt by our eyes and ears, internal pleasures and fears, fixations neuroses etc. In short, everything that gives off a perpetual motion that reminds us we are caught in constant motion. Ex-stasis?
Whipping through a green French countryside, everything is polite and nothing is obtrusive. Plaster white homes with rusted iron roofs scattered like salt. There are wires of course, and the odd industrial warehouse. But nothing obscures the view; something is missing. Gone are the corrosive elements getting stale in our consumerist age- I see no advertising, shopping malls, no giant wastelands of parking fields and outlet stores and so on. Simply farmland mixed with forests and sometimes the rare relic of nobility- a castle perched on a hill, a beautiful shadow on the land overlooking the peasants of old.
I write this on the topmost bunk in a room (7x7x10ft?) with six beds. Sleeping up here gives you control over light and darkness. I am the Sun god. Left that cramped mobile dorm, treading lightly on to the john to write on the toilet. Having finished my business I stumble and shuffle down the narrow corridor into a coach of seats instead of bunks. I realise I have not written very much. The mind has been too busy absorbing - this must come before any sort of release. The moments I wish to record are witnessed by my senses. It is in the sandy courtyard, hearing eerie churchbells of Almería, children howling with laughter and in another language at dusk. People-watching is a timeless activity, just like pegging and plugging made up stories into faces, and you can watch a whole dialogue unfurl between two people walking past. You create a story, invent an inner monologue.
I have noticed as much as possible. Awareness has led me to my senses which are piqued by the world that surrounds. It is necessary to connect the mind and body this way, spiritually.
We have stretched ourselves through a melting pot of scattered alleys and sunlit strolls, through markets bursting with flavour and people groping for a view, gasping for a breath, in a place that caters to your every delight. In Madrid there was a chain of miniature bookstore kiosks, all lined up in a row, dozens of them parading thousands of books (from the rare to the kitsch) to the passerby. Here you are as an eternal pedestrian, swept up by the moment of something new and unheard of. You focus your sights on everything at once, but it is impossible to notice everything at once. All the minutia, all the common and uncommon elements of life working at once. So instead you watch and experience a chain of events unravel naturally, the progression from action to reaction to rejuvenation all through your unsteady eyes. I am drunk off my senses!
It is a challenge to be a faithful and honest witness to the world around us felt by our eyes and ears, internal pleasures and fears, fixations neuroses etc. In short, everything that gives off a perpetual motion that reminds us we are caught in constant motion. Ex-stasis?
Whipping through a green French countryside, everything is polite and nothing is obtrusive. Plaster white homes with rusted iron roofs scattered like salt. There are wires of course, and the odd industrial warehouse. But nothing obscures the view; something is missing. Gone are the corrosive elements getting stale in our consumerist age- I see no advertising, shopping malls, no giant wastelands of parking fields and outlet stores and so on. Simply farmland mixed with forests and sometimes the rare relic of nobility- a castle perched on a hill, a beautiful shadow on the land overlooking the peasants of old.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Almería
I decided to slowly transcribe some things I wrote in Europe.
May 14-16
Almería, Spain -
A sandy haven from the overcrowded cities of culture, no teeming tourists down here. We are south, near the sun, and I lounge on the beach surrouned by Spanish, Catalan, French and Arabic. Morocco is a ferry away. I need a moment's peace. Here the beer is cheap and dry, one litre for one euro. A flawless blue cathedral of sky, tanned exotic buildings and bodies dot the landscape. It is a quiet wonderland of sand and smiles. Countries of the sun cannot be blamed for basking in a lazy harmony. I squint and frown through the glare. The sun and sea swallows up the hours. An old wrinkly woman stares ahead, and someone loves this sun-dried tomato. I am crushed under the power of things that wrap the mind in a comfy slow-motion collapse. Infinite distraction is surrendering my senses now.
Climbing the Alcazaba fortress. Cactus, sand-swept hills, tiny lizards and starving bushes living off the land. Where am I in this deserted myth? The city is a random mess of plaster, I don't look at it. A million glittering shards of glass twinkle and sharpen my eyes to the rocky desert around me. Up above, a swarming mass of black birds circle and dive and rise fanatically like mosquitoes. The sun melts the ancient walls of a time so far gone and forgotten. I am parched and perched, feeling accomplished for being high up above it all with JC, a grandiose white statue who welcomes every visitor with hands and arms outstretched. The minutes linger. I stay firmly planted on this ghost fortress that looms out over the world.
On the train to Madrid, tracing and carving our way through a twisted path that cuts the dry rocky hills. I see the backs of heads in front of me. Beside me a scenery collapses and rises endlessly against the window. Tiny green bushes and cactus are fastened to the ground like stubble on an old man's face. My cheek edges closer to the window, trying not to hit it when the world bumps up and down. Not quite mountains, but bigger than hills. The graceful motion of the ground races by. What is passing? An old stony wall. Deserted sandy houses. A small ranch, a few cows or bulls. A white home with blue doors and windows. Mossy cliffs, shadows clipped by the outcroppings. I see my face in the mirror in dark tunnels and try not to recognise it. I am tired. My body and mind exhausted from travel. My eyes flutter open occasionally, comforted by the glimpse of a repeating scene.
May 14-16
Almería, Spain -
A sandy haven from the overcrowded cities of culture, no teeming tourists down here. We are south, near the sun, and I lounge on the beach surrouned by Spanish, Catalan, French and Arabic. Morocco is a ferry away. I need a moment's peace. Here the beer is cheap and dry, one litre for one euro. A flawless blue cathedral of sky, tanned exotic buildings and bodies dot the landscape. It is a quiet wonderland of sand and smiles. Countries of the sun cannot be blamed for basking in a lazy harmony. I squint and frown through the glare. The sun and sea swallows up the hours. An old wrinkly woman stares ahead, and someone loves this sun-dried tomato. I am crushed under the power of things that wrap the mind in a comfy slow-motion collapse. Infinite distraction is surrendering my senses now.
Climbing the Alcazaba fortress. Cactus, sand-swept hills, tiny lizards and starving bushes living off the land. Where am I in this deserted myth? The city is a random mess of plaster, I don't look at it. A million glittering shards of glass twinkle and sharpen my eyes to the rocky desert around me. Up above, a swarming mass of black birds circle and dive and rise fanatically like mosquitoes. The sun melts the ancient walls of a time so far gone and forgotten. I am parched and perched, feeling accomplished for being high up above it all with JC, a grandiose white statue who welcomes every visitor with hands and arms outstretched. The minutes linger. I stay firmly planted on this ghost fortress that looms out over the world.
On the train to Madrid, tracing and carving our way through a twisted path that cuts the dry rocky hills. I see the backs of heads in front of me. Beside me a scenery collapses and rises endlessly against the window. Tiny green bushes and cactus are fastened to the ground like stubble on an old man's face. My cheek edges closer to the window, trying not to hit it when the world bumps up and down. Not quite mountains, but bigger than hills. The graceful motion of the ground races by. What is passing? An old stony wall. Deserted sandy houses. A small ranch, a few cows or bulls. A white home with blue doors and windows. Mossy cliffs, shadows clipped by the outcroppings. I see my face in the mirror in dark tunnels and try not to recognise it. I am tired. My body and mind exhausted from travel. My eyes flutter open occasionally, comforted by the glimpse of a repeating scene.
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