out on the street

So as not to be alone, Otto went out onto the street where there were many people all the time. Sure enough, the street was full of people now as well. Otto didn't know any of them, at least of the ones he saw. Certainly there were some he didn't see but knew. But they just as well could not have been there at all. In fact, they weren't. Somewhere there were always people unseen but known. That seemed just then to be less troubling than the fact that those he could see he didn't know. The distance separating Otto from those he knew was certainly greater than that separating him from those all around him but didn't know. And maybe it was precisely this relative proximity that led Otto to believe he would be less lonely less alone. Who knows.

Hunger

When I asked her whether she was hungry yet, she said because she had just eaten something sweet. When I asked her what it was, she said it was something with something sweet in it. I looked at her, and she said it was like a bread with something sweet inside that was a kind of bean. She said because her English is not so good, I knew that. When I asked her when she would be hungry again, she said why are you always asking me about food. I said I'm not asking her about food, I'm asking about eating. She said what's the difference. I said one is a noun the other is a verb, one is a thing the other is an action. She looked at me as if my face became funny but in a way one could not laugh about. Actually, I said, I was asking about hunger, which is more different than food than eating is. She looked at me again. I said in Africa people are hungry but have no food and cannot eat. She said we're not in Africa. I said that was just an example. She said where she came from eating and food and hunger were all the same, they were all related. Everything is related but not the same, I said. Are you the same as your sister, I asked. No! That's different, she said. See, I said, it's different. She shook her head and went back to her work. It was then that my hunger began to frighten me.

tabula rasa

The best things that happened to Otto were the ones that he had never expected because he had not imagined them. Whether he could have imagined them he wasn't sure. On the one hand, it seemed he indeed could have, since after they happened, he imagined them. On the other hand, just because things are imagined after they happen doesn't mean they were imaginable beforehand.

It was not coincidence. It was Otto. As soon as something entered into his imagination, he picked at it obsessively like an itchy scab until it became a dull scar consisting of layers upon layers of imagining. When the thing he imagined ultimately happened, it touched not him but the scar, and he could hardly feel it.

The only defense mechanism Otto had was to imagine as little as possible what might happen. Thus, except for what was absolutely necessary, he made no plans, followed no schedule, committed himself to nothing. Often he loved waking up with the day before him as a tabula rasa. Sometimes he despaired.

Otto

Otto Malik came to me the other day, as I was sitting at my desk by the window pretending to be working but actually looking out at the windows across the street, or the trees across the field, depending on whether I was at the apartment in the city or the home in the countryside, and said, you know it doesn't really matter where you are, what matters is that I'm here telling you, telling you that it looks as if it's about to rain. Annoyed that he was interrupting me as I was working just to tell me it was about to rain, and not feeling that I had enough patience just then to find out why that would be important, to either him or me, I didn't even look up. I paid him no attention. I paid him too much attention, but I didn't show him that I was paying any attention at all. Of course he knew, though, that I had heard, and even listened, and probably that I was in wonder. Oh to do all that with the most trivialist of statements. But I persisted, and so did he. Finally, I said, are you going anywhere, and he left. That's not what I had meant, but maybe it's not what he had meant either.

Every day is a new day

minimalism

"At its essence, minimalism is about repetition." But an example of extreme minimalism in music would be a single tone, where there is no repetition, and in art a canvas of a single color, where there is no repetition either. Indeed repetition is precisely not minimalistic in that it is almost by nature superfluous, although precisely in nature it is not superfluous; in nature nothing is really superfluous. Repetition may serve as a means of bringing out a work's fundamental features, but that does not make it one of minimalism's fundamental features. Indeed, to the extent that a piece must employ abundant repetition to express its fundamental features, it is not necessarily any less complex than a piece that coats its fundamental features in a rich narrative. In this sense, Steve Reich's music is no more "minimalistic" than Mahler's; it only sounds that way. A better example of minimalism is the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose aesthetic quality is contained and revealed in the skeletal structure itself, i.e., the work's fundamental features. Perfect unity of aesthetics and structure is found only and everywhere in nature, which is full of patterns making up a thing's structure and also consisting of its beauty. It is not repetition that is the essence of minimalism but patterns, which is essential to any structure. The paintings of Agnes Martin, for example, are repetitive only if we start with a single rectangle, but seen as a whole they rather present a pattern. Interestingly, the beauty there is not in the pattern itself or its repetitiveness but in the tonal gradations the pattern reveals, or indeed create. I guess we humans, too, when seen as parts of human kind also simply make up a pattern whose beauty is in the gradations only the pattern itself reveals.

Solidarität

Last night I went to a "soli" party at a squatted housing complex. "Soli" is short for "Solidarität" and means that the proceeds from the party go to some political cause. "Solidarity" means "unity (as of a group or class) that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards." Indeed, the party was like a herd of sheep, except that one couldn't just piss wherever. While manouvering myself toward the bathroom, or anywere else, I was pushed and shoved the same way I used to be while getting on a crowded bus in Russia, except there the point wasn't to have fun and solidarity was not a cause but a mandatory fact of life. In both places, however, each little push and shove contained the potential to blow up the basis of civilization, I felt. After about an hour, I asked myself, "why am I here," and left. Solidarity is a nice concept but uncomfortable in the flesh.