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.

trains

Yesterday I went to take a train to the woods in the west of the city, but for some reason there were no trains. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read in the book I had taken with me to read on the train about a woman on a train who said that she would like to look longer at the small, abandoned train stations but the train stopped there for only one or at most two minutes. Actually, there were trains, but not to where I wanted to go and despite the schedule as well as the fact that I had taken these trains many times before at the same time. The passage in the book following the one about the woman on the train was about sheep, but I was too distressed about the missing trains to pay attention. In the end, I ended up taking a train back home, wondering if the cellist would be playing at the station near me. He wasn't.

Ich habe schon

A man came into the Vietnamese restaurant on Adalbertstrasse the other evening and went from table to table asking for money. When he got to the table next to mine, the young German man sitting there said, "Ich habe heute schon gespendent" ("I already donated today").

Sing me a song

I recently reread Franny from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. The first time I read it must have been at least a decade ago. I remember being surprisingly moved by it, but now I'm mostly surprised by how little I actually remembered of it. For example, I didn't remember that Franny went to visit her boyfriend at his college; I thought they were both in New York. I didn't remember that they were eating at a restaurant fancy enough to serve snails and frog legs; I thought they were at a diner. I didn't remember that the occasion for the date was "the Yale game." I didn't remember Franny's love letter, and certainly not the spelling mistakes in them, or that she fainted, or that, as she was lying in the backroom of the restaurant, recovering, the boyfriend basically said to her, "I hope we can still have sex later, it's been so long."

What I do remember was Franny's despair at the smallness and meaninglessness of everything and everyone including, most immediately, the boyfriend she was talking to and the false modesty with which he was telling her about his paper on Flaubert. I also remember being reminded by this scene of my relationship with one of my best friends from boarding school. Unfortunately, the boyfriend reminded me of myself. I had never thought that I could be so male.

Yesterday I wondered where all the people who made Salinger so famous by so closely relating to Franny and Zooey and The Catcher In the Rye were. Then it occurred to me that they're everywhere but closeted. Some part of everyone believes, like Franny or Zooey or Holden Caulfield, that everything is small and meaningless and that everyone is "phony," but it's covered, layer by layer, with the thickening resignation to being phony in order to cope with the mounting evidence that smallness and meaninglessness are inevitable. Those who refuse to cope are either gone from this world or hiding in some dim, dusty corner of it. Even if they found each other, what would there be to communicate but bitter howls and screeches? Better to stay in the world and sing. At least it sounds nice.

"I have nothing to say."

Once, my grandparents visited me at boarding school during "grandparents' weekend." My grandparents only just happened to be visiting from Japan, and at a reception the headmaster, an unshakably cheerful Quaker who always told us students to get "high ON LIFE," noted that there were grandparents visiting "from as far away as Japan!" The grandparents were given a thorough tour of the campus, pictured above, and then gathered at a reception at the headmaster's home. When we were greeted by the headmaster at his front door, my grandfather took his hand and said, slowly and carefully, "I have nothing to say."

It goes on.

I used to admire Wittgenstein's famous quote, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." But now I'm beginning to believe just the opposite. What's important is not content or style but constancy. What's so fascinating about the writing of Genazino, for example, is how, without a story, the narrative must dance with the problem of what to say when, in the end, there is really nothing to say at all. At least this has always been a problem for me. One lonely winter in St. Petersburg, I fantasized about lying on the floor next to a friend lying in bed in a tiny room a few hours before dawn, talking. It was dark except for a little moonlight coming in from the tall window at our heads. We were exhausted but in no hurry to sleep. Over the years, I've had that fantasy several times, but it never developed so far as to contain any conversation beyond "Anna?" "Yes?" What we said didn't matter. My fantasy was saying and listening to what's said precisely when there is nothing to say. It seems to me only then there's real communication, the essence of which is that, like life, it goes on.

I'm sorry for my German.

Two winters ago, I read an article about Haruki Murakami's routine of sitting down to write every morning for several hours, even if he had nothing to write and indeed wrote nothing at all. I was inspired to do the same and started a story called "I'm sorry for my German," which began with the mistaken reading of a sign on the other side of the river I used to run along that said "Anlegestelle." For weeks I had thought it said, "Angelnstelle," which I thought to mean a place for fishing, and wondered why I never saw anyone fishing there. Somehow the story developed into Otto wandering aimlessly in Vienna and then abruptly ended when, being driven nearly mad by the noise from the neighbors above me, I fled to New York to stay at my grandmother's empty house, where I discovered the terrifying loudness of solitude.

I don't remember what I meant by the title, "I'm sorry for my German," but I liked the sound of it, and that's approximately how I felt at the time, or maybe more accurately sorry about my German, and sorry about many other things as well.

But now I remember. I thought that my writing would inevitably contain some German words and phrases for which I couldn't find appropriate English translations and, knowing that this might be annoying and even come off as pretentious, I wanted to apologize from the get go. At the same time, it is true that here in Germany I often did feel sorry for those who had to endure my imperfect German and wanted sometimes to tell them, "I'm sorry for my German."

Today, while walking home from the U-Bahn station where I had sat for a while listening to the cellist, I thought that the inclusion of German words and phrases in my posts could be a theme for my blog. Thinking of the cellist, whom I gave 10 Euros, I thought of writing that maybe "das war ein bißchen übertrieben," although I actually don't think so at all. This time he didn't play any Bach, but what I once paid $10 for at The Stone, I thought, wasn't at all necessarily better.

Look he said. Why don't you go and get some for me. That's the thing. He didn't say we wouldn't. He went himself that day and got it himself that day. So what. We didn't care we asked. He said why we should be so underwhelming. Since that's under my own stance. I don't know. Just be sure. We didn't ask for it he said it himself why. Why. You look always anyway. So that you know. He told me we weren't going. How am I supposed to know.

Just like that

Otto wasn't sure he wanted to do anything at all that day or today or any day to come for that matter except he still said he would. But of course he did it anyway as he always did because what was the alternative. Why not read a sonnet and reread it and reread only one or two lines or each of all the lines. Outside was cold and windy like fall. The leaves in the trees were hissing. Yes they were hissing that's exactly what they were doing. Maybe it wasn't so bad. He always thought it was when it couldn't have been or didn't have to be and then everything changed all of a sudden just like that. Just like the time he was sitting on a bench in the park and everything looked clear all the spaces between the leaves and the branches the light flatly beaming through them. The squirrels were terrible nibbling and nibbling whiskers quivering greedily cowardly and utterly uncivilized. The couples were terrible sitting sprawled fat on the bench clouded in the thick oily black newspaper. Today this happened and he said no. Yesterday that went this way. The day before and the day after and the day ever after was stupendous. Stupendous stupendous stupendous. Once a Japanese man stuck a knife in his belly. It wasn't a knife it was a sword. It wasn't his belly it was his side just at the edge slipped under a muscle and twisted and dug. Maybe he felt like it was good. The baseball players they were cracking. The children were screeching. Their yells were yelps of joy and of angst. I hate this all of this so much it's so. The wind was frosty and smelled like coffee. The wind smelled like craving coffee. What if the wind never went away dug and twisted into the bone. What get up and go. Where. Get up and go. Anywhere. You'll see.

A Trip to the Bookstore

Ever since finishing the Janet Malcolm book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas a few days ago, I'd thought about going to the English language bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg to find something new to read. I decided to go on Tuesday, when the weather was nice, but only made it to Friedrichshain, where I had a quarter liter of red wine which caused a drowsiness that couldn't imagine being anywhere but home in bed. After waking up, I dragged myself to the chair from where I managed to pick up from the coffee table Buddenbrooks, open it, and put it back down again, just as Janet Malcolm had written she repeatedly picked up Making of Americans, opened it, and put it back down again, until she finally went to the kitchen and chopped it up with a knife into six or seven managable pieces, which I had done incidentally with my case books in order to carry to and from law school everyday. After putting down Buddenbrooks, I realized that it wasn't so much that I wanted just to read but that I wanted to read in English and something that was well-written. Reading good writing effects in me a special calm that I associate with the Logos which was in the beginning and was with God and which was God.

Online I googled "Janet Malcolm" and found an article she had written on J.D. Salinger which made me want to reread Franny and Zooey, a copy of which I found at the bookstore yesterday, as well as Nine Stories, high on a shelf that I had to climb a ladder to reach. Up on the ladder I unexpectedly experienced vertigo and then, holding the two books in my right hand and onto the side of the ladder with my left, suddenly had to sneeze. Afraid that a sneeze would propel me off the ladder, I confidently tried to sniff it away, but it came and with even more gusto than usual, as if in rebellion. My great-grandmother once supposedly said, hearing me sneeze as a small toddler, that I would be a great person one day.

Fortunately, the woman tending the bookstore was being distracted by an energetic customer who was not only asking about certain books but expressing her disbelief that they were not more readily accessible and then went so far as to describe her dissertation. She had an accent I originally thought was Slavic but then realized was only just Italian, and she was no longer young. The woman tending the bookstore responded to each of the Italian woman's statements with an "AH ha," which expressed professionally insincere interest but resulted in encouraging further details anyway. The Italian woman reminded me of a Russian language instructor at college who was brilliant and enchanting but whose large restless eyes made me wonder whether she was actually a witch. Her long black hair always looked as if she had just come in from a long walk on the windy Irish coast.

By the time I was back on the ground, an English woman walked in. The woman tending the bookstore asked, "how are you," and the English woman said "unemployed." She had the kind of solid core and legs that allowed her to walk briskly but with unfortunately short steps. Thus she walked back and forth along the length of the small front room of the bookstore, picking up books, glancing at them, and putting them down again, like a stout Chinese mother of five shopping for vegetables at the local market. All the while, she was chatting with the woman tending the bookstore, making short, quick pronouncements that were not obviously bitter but undeniably damp. I imagined being in conversation with her and having every single remark deflated with a sharp retort. J.D. Salinger, I imagined her saying, what else would you expect from an American. Then I imagined myself thinking, with Janet Malcolm standing behind me, small but steady, that she was ignorant. My irritation slipped into a denouncement of the entire English people, and the complicity of the woman tending the bookstore made me increasingly suspicious of her as well. Eventually, however, by the time I noticed a copy of Malcolm's Two Lives, the book whose wake rocked me toward the store in the first place, I was ok. The English woman was sitting outside in the sun reading.

Home

After three weeks in New York, I returned to Berlin today. Because I had spent the entire flight reading Janet Malcolm's book on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, I was tired and slept through most of the sunny, warm afternoon. When I got up, I had a coffee and decided to go have a soup at Kottbusser Tor.

In the entrance to the U-Bahn station at Schlesisches Tor, a young man dressed like a squatter, in thick grey cargo pants and a canvas military cap, was playing the prelude of Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. He was not bad, and the sound filling the entrance way, usually full of people who are drunk or scalping used Fahrscheine (U-Bahn tickets), was full and sweet, as if he were rehearsing in an old, stone chapel in the French countryside. I wanted to put money in the open cello case in front of him but the smallest denomination I had was a 5 euro bill which seemed too much although really it isn't.

While waiting for the train on the platform upstairs, I noticed a young, blond German man talking with a young, fat man with dark hair. The blond man was neatly dressed and carrying a full backpack. The fat man was wearing thin, white cotton pants and a red t-shirt, both of which were too large even for him. What I first noticed about them was that the fat man was speaking heavy slang, but the blond man was answering him in crisp and clear Hochdeutsch, in a very friendly even interested way. I wondered whether they knew each other.

When the train arrived, the fat man and I got in the same car and, as he sat down on the bench across from me, I realized he was inebriated. His right pant leg was ripped on the inside from the crotch to his knee. Underneath, he was wearing black tights. He was carrying a bottle of Moskovskaya vodka, and the man next to him, drinking beer, remarked with a smile, with what I think was a Russian accent, vodka. The fat man said, no, not Vodka, and then read the label, Mos, Mos-kov, Mos-kov-ska, Mos-kov-ska-ya. He put a heavy arm around the Russian and suggested they drink together. He opened the bottle and took a swig, appearing to gather all the strength he had to swallow. There was not yet enough alcohol in the Russian to have purged him of suspicion, and the fat man said, what, it's a new bottle, I just opened it, there isn't any poison in it. The Russian took a sip of his beer. They compromised by knocking the bottom of their bottles against each other. The fat man turned to me and said what sounded like Shingling and something I couldn't understand. I looked at him and looked away. The man spoke to me more, apparently offended that I did not respond, and all I could understand was Shingling. I looked at him again as if to signal fearlessness, thinking to myself, I'm from New York, he doesn't know that, he thinks I would feel unsettled by such a situation, although he almost certainly wasn't thinking anything at all. He turned to the Russian and said, what, his name is Shingling isn't it, don't you know? Getting no response, he turned to the woman on his left, whose face was red and creased. I wasn't sure whether her frown expressed a less jolly shade of inebriation or the despair of intermitten sobriety or that she was just utterly downtrodden. She ignored him, too. I'm not sure she could have done anything else. At Kottbusser Tor, the fat man got off and so did I.

I had planned to walk home after my soup, but because I had to pee, Bierhimmel was too empty for me to inconspicuously use their restroom, and the train was approaching Goerlitzer Bahnhof just as I was, I ran to catch it and rode it home. When I got off at Schlesisches Tor and walked down the stairs, I heard the cellist still playing Bach's cello suites. This time I had a 2 Euro coin and some change. I took it out and held it in my hand even before reaching the bottom of the stairs. As I was approaching the open cello case, I saw a woman standing in front of me with short, silver hair, wearing a black, trench coat and carrying a black bag which she was rummaging through presumably for her wallet. As I walked by, I dropped the 2 euro coin and change in the cello case. I noticed that it was about 10 times as full as before. I imagined that the woman, surprised to hear Bach at that U-Bahn station, of all places, played by such a young man, of all people, would give maybe as much as 5 euros. I wondered then whether the cellist had considered that the few people there who would appreciate Bach would give money out of sheer surprise which would be lacking in more affluent neighborhoods. And yet, there are enough people here in my neighborhood who do appreciate Bach for it to be worth the cellist's while. As I walked toward my apartment, I thought that I was home.